That “Audacious” Obama Peace Award
By Dr. Collin Abraham
Chairman Jagland has emphasized it would be difficult “to name a winner of the Peace Prize who is more in line with Alfred Nobel’s will” because the award to Obama in effect “(captures) the spirit of the times, the needs of the era”.
Indeed, judging from the overwhelmingly negative American responses, it would appear that the award in fact is tantamount to “political dynamite” within comparative theoretical frames of references, breaking away from the entrenched conservative class-based overarching “racial” perspectives among those who vehemently reject the award to Obama. According to President Carter, also a Nobel Prize recipient, some opposition to proposed reforms are essentially ‘racist” with Obama himself “pathetically” crying out “but I was Black before I became President!”
The awarding committee must also surely have wanted to give Obama international recognition for his unprecedented spectacular efforts at wanting to create a ‘brave new world’ order, considering that the Americans themselves sidelined the Peace Prize awarded for the founding efforts of President Woodrow Wilson to establish and join the League of Nations.
The award therefore is ‘audacious’ for the main reason that it encapsulates and recognizes issues that are important to those peace loving people to create a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, through Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen national (and international) diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.
The main critique is that Obama “has not done enough”. This must be seen in the context where over the past eight years of (hopeful) preparation for the White House, the scenario he now presents is in fact a testimony to the dynamic recognition of the crucial need for deconstruction and re-construction of the entire world political order and global economy, through the democratization of social institutions from ‘bottom-top’ in a way that arguably has never been perceived, constructed, or implemented before.
Indeed, in this connection, the work of the joint Economics peace prize recipients also clearly reflects these concerns. Elinor Ostrom’s work “greatly enhances our understanding of non-market institutions” while Williamson focused on “business firms (which) served as structures for conflict resolution”.
Historically, Obama inherited a nation that owes its very existence and indeed emergence as a dominant super world power mainly to the annihilation of the indigenous Native Americans and the enslavement of millions of Africans. Subsequently, by sustaining the power of Empire after the collapse of the British and French Empires and the consolidation of its unprecedented military might in more recent history, America has shown itself to be part of the problem in seeking and maintaining world peace.
It is now left to Obama to bring the world to “crossroads where it finds itself exhorting for peace and (the) search for solutions for the survival of the species through persuasion and consensus (and) through multicultural mechanisms instead of the “unfeasible goal of Empire”.
