Congratulations EU - despite all

It is easy to criticise the decision to award the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union.

The timing however is bad. EU is undergoing just now a paralysing crisis where North
stands against South, where top leaders' democratic ideals are in question and poor EU members are protesting in the streets.

At the same time, the Union has bigger problems. Several members - Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary - have shown little respect for EU's ground principles of democracy and human rights.
Political populism, up to pure Nazism wins terrain in many member-countries. Refugee politics is criticised for creating a walled Europe.

A new survey of Europe's barometer shows less surprisingly that sympathies for the Union has collapsed in the most crises-affected areas. In 2001, some 55 percent of voters in Portugal, Irland, Italy, Greece and Spain gave their confidence to EU. Today the figure is 25 percent. To think that a peace prize would change this is naive.

However, outside Oslo's peace prize committee's ill timing, there is good reason to applaud the decision. EU is a peace project - and unquestionably successful as such. It is more significant to give the peace prize to a united Europe than say, to PLO leader Yassir Arafat and warmonger Henry Kissinger.

For EU's history is Europe's peace. The one who saw earliest the need for reconciliation was Winston Churchill. Already in 1946, a year after the end of the war, he said in a speech in Zurich: "The first step in the re-creation of a European family must be a partnership between France and Germany." And so it happened, four years later when France laid to rest its suspicion against Germany and allowed in West Germany, in a cooperation involving coal and steel production.

Earlier, the German postwar economy wavered in a vacuum between the Marshall plans and the victors' benevolence. Today, EU's predecessor coal and steel union, integrated the country with its neighbours. France' fear of being out-competed in the steel area was eliminated, thanks to both countries' joint management.

In this way, the European Union's best moments continued to function. Enemies in the past have atoned and began to cooperate. Economies were woven together and boundary restrictions were abolished which set the conditions for improved welfare. Western Europe, one of the world's most war-ravaged region is now a model for peace and solidarity. Suffice to say, despite all of EU's shortcomings, it is worth a prize.

But the timing to say the least, is questionable. It would have been reasonable to give the union the peace prize in 2004, when it expanded membership to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union's former satellite countries- Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech and Hungary became members. In this moment, EU showed its best side as an example, a united force and umbrella for welfare through a market economy cooperation.

Maybe the Nobel peace prize has a double reminder of what the union was and could become again, a reminder for young Europeans who have not experienced the ravages of war and the Cold War and merely sees EU as a failed political project.# (My own translation and editing from Dagens Nyheter's editorial, Oct. 13, 2012)