EU Wins the Nobel Peace Prize
One of the main news headlines this morning was of the EU winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That prize has, of course, become a total joke over the years and the award to Barack Obama in 2009 has only cemented its reputation. I would say that it has as much credibility as some singing TV contest, but that would be utterly unfair to all the singing TV contests: after all, you do have to sing in those. So as a rule of thumb I pay as much of attention to the announcements of the Nobel Peace Prize as I do to the latest harvest reports from Burundi. Nonetheless, this morning’s announcement has made me pay attention, not because it was again a total joke, but because as far as I am concerned it adds an insult to an injury.
This year marks the twentieth year that my family and I had been forced to flee our home in Sarajevo. We were caught up in one of the most vicious episodes of the wars of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Even though we managed to escape largely unscathed, that war and its brutality have permanently left a huge scar on all of us who had been affected by it. It has also left a huge scar on the conscience of Europe, of which the EU is the unofficial current representation. As we had seen our country torn apart by the blood-drunk Serbian nationalism and all of its consequences, we were certain, almost dead certain, that “Europe” will not allow something like that to be happening. We knew that sooner or later, that Europe will send in their troops and stand by those of us who had been longing for all that it stood for, and were eagerly hoping to rejoin it.
That help never came. After years and years of anemic responses, insincere promises, and just plain old political dishonesty, all culminating with the inept inaction of the EU “peace keeping” forces in Srebrenica, it finally took a muscular and decisive action by the United States to bring the war to an end.
To anyone who is even remotely familiar with history this will not come as a surprise. Every war in Europe over the course of the last century has been brought to an end because of the decisive US intervention. Had it not been for the US, Nazism and Communism would still be strong political forces on the old continent, or perhaps everyone would still be stuck in the trenches somewhere between France and Germany. The unprecedented 65+ years of peace that the Western Europe has enjoyed since the end of WWII has very little to do with the EU or its predecessor the European Community, and everything to do with the existence of NATO and the strong leadership of the United States within that military organization.
So yes, Europeans may be congratulating themselves on their brilliant achievement in creating a peaceful continent all they want, but to those of us who have been scarred by the complete inability of the EU to either prevent war or achieve peace right in their back yard, this year’s announcement by the Nobel Committee will mark a new low in the annals of the human delusional thinking.