Dangerous Prize

This is not true of all the Nobel Peace Prizes. Of the aspirational awards handed out between 1971 and 2008, five honored contributions to general peace and disarmament, nine aimed to advance incipient peace processes in specific intrastate and interstate conflicts, and nine sought to promote domestic change in favor of human rights and democracy. In the first two categories, there is little evidence of perverse consequences.

The third category, which is growing ever more prominent, is more troubling. The Nobel committee has sought, through its awards, to highlight political repression and human rights violations in the hope that the brighter media light will lead authoritarian governments to behave better and even take painful steps toward democracy. The assumption has been that regimes from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union to apartheid-era South Africa to Deng Xiaoping's China to junta-controlled Burma are sensitive to their international reputations as "good" or "responsible" states.

Please. In fact, though prizewinners themselves are often spared, regimes have clamped down hard on local dissidents to demonstrate resolve and prevent local and international activists from taking heart. To the extent that the Nobel Peace Prize has been successful in drawing worldwide attention to their plight -- or to the extent that the regime believes it will -- it has rendered insecure regimes even more anxious and thus more brutal and dangerous. After the Dalai Lama was honored in 1989, the Chinese government undertook a vicious crackdown in Tibet. Political imprisonments skyrocketed, and even traditional, nonviolent forms of celebration, such as burning incense and throwing tsampa (flour) into the air, were forbidden. Government cadres charged with countering Tibetan "splittism" in monasteries and nunneries were expressly ordered "to condemn and campaign against the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama." Similarly, the Burmese regime interpreted Aung San Suu Kyi's prize as the international community's "bullying our country, threatening our country." In response, it rounded up student leaders, shuttered colleges and universities, harassed opposition and ethnic party officials, and launched an all-out military assault against pro-democracy rebels and ethnic insurgents.

Moreover, insofar as local activists think that the Nobel Peace Prize confers moral authority and that the international community has signaled that it will protect them, they have ramped up their demands and their protest activities, intensifying the regime's fears of encirclement and provoking greater repression. Ironically, were the Nobel committee's loftiest aspirations fulfilled -- were the prize to embolden local actors, boost global media coverage, and pressure authoritarian regimes -- it would produce effects precisely the opposite of those it intends, with moral victories substituting for actual ones.

More ironically still, even though the Nobel committee's aspirations have not been fulfilled, these effects have followed anyway because state leaders have taken the prize all too seriously. Whether the prize actually sets the international agenda, authoritarian leaders often act as if it does, and they have consequently sought to undermine dissidents' candidacies. When the Soviet government learned in 1973 that physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov had been nominated, it ordered the KGB to launch a futile action to prevent him from being named. From communist China to war-stricken Guatemala, authoritarian regimes have feared the prize, even when they should not. And recipients and their causes have paid the price. Winners have become the victims of campaigns of character assassination, as Sakharov and his wife Yelena Bonner learned. They have become targets of government harassment and repression: Once Aung San Suu Kyi won the peace prize, boosting "her name and her aura" as one Western diplomat put it, the Burmese junta could no longer ignore her. And their supporters, lacking the prestige that the prizewinners enjoy, have suffered even more.

In short, in these cases, the Nobel committee's noble intentions have set off a tragic chain of events. When awarded to promote domestic change, the Nobel Peace Prize has in fact mobilized the forces opposed to liberalization. At the same time, it has raised the spirits of liberal reformers, leaving them exposed precisely when state leaders are feeling most vulnerable and are thus most likely to apply the state's power to repressive ends.

When the Nobel Peace Prize rewards past accomplishments, it is to be welcomed -- not because it changes the world, but because it celebrates and reaffirms liberal ideals. But in the increasingly frequent cases in which it is bestowed for actors' aspirations and in which it seeks to promote democratic political change, winners beware.

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