Thorbjørn Jagland, who was ousted this week as chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, has not been an unqualified success. On his watch in 2009, the five-person panel awarded the Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama before he’d even had a chance to order a drone strike. In 2012 the gong went to the European Union as it was deep into a slump from which it has never emerged. Even 2013’s worthy winner, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, is too facelessly bureaucratic to raise a flicker of excitement.
At its best, this baffling grab-bag of pseudo-peaceful miscellany suggests an eccentricity that could only be produced through the ferocious strain of independence. Unfortunately Jagland’s removal as chairman – to be replaced by his deputy, the former Conservative party leader, Kaci Kullmann Five – now brings the impartiality of the committee into sharp focus.
Though appointed by parliament and usually made up of retired Norwegian party politicians, the committee enjoys a reputation for fierce autonomy. This was reinforced in 2010 when the peace prize went to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo, so enraging Beijing that it scrapped talks on a free trade agreement with Norway, stepped up restrictions on imports of Norwegian salmon and left Norway off a list of European countries offered visa-free travel to China.
Despite time and again protesting the independence of the prize-giving committee, the Nordic country of just 5 million inhabitants continues to be pushed around by the biggest bully in the international playground. China refuses to disentangle the peace prize from Norwegian foreign policy and has kept relations frozen.
When Norway’s Labour party lost the 2013 election, the new Conservative-led coalition made repairing diplomatic relations with China a foreign policy priority. So when the Dalai Lama, who won the 1984 Nobel peace prize partly for his campaign for Tibetan autonomy from China, came to Norway in 2014, his visit was ignored by government officials. Norway calculated that affording him a state visit would only worsen relations with Beijing. That might have been true, but the snub looked grubby and Norway earned no discernible rewards from China.
By tradition the Nobel panel reflects the prevailing power structure in Norwegian politics. Government appointees now outnumber those from Jagland’s Labour party, giving them the deciding vote on who chairs the committee.
Five, the new chairman, has denied that there was any pressure, real or imagined, from her party to remove Jagland (she, like Jagland, had supported the 2010 prize to Liu, she said). But given Norway’s refusal to welcome the Dalai Lama last year, it is no wonder that people ask the question.
Despite Jagland’s background in high office – he is a former prime minister and foreign minister – his reputation for independence made him more valuable as a chairman than the simple voting member he now becomes. Whatever his shortcomings, this was the time to rally round.
Unsurprisingly, Beijing has already said Jagland’s removal changes nothing. But maybe it changes this: after years of missteps and no-marks, the 2014 Nobel peace prize to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi was a beautifully judged and heart-warming award. Whoever the recipient is in 2015, the removal of Jagland as chairman injects an unwelcome shot of cynicism into a prize that was regaining its significance.
