Alfred Nobel’s last will

by Dieter Deiseroth**

On the second Friday in October the day has come again: The committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament will officially announce the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The highly renowned prize out of the Endowment Fund of the Swedish “dynamite manufacturer” Alfred Nobel has been awarded to 121 personalities since 1901.

Norwegian author and lawyer Fredrik S. Heffermehl, born in 1938, caused a sensation with his book “The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted”* (title of the Norwegian edition of 2008: “Nobels vilje”). In the meantime the book has been translated into several languages and was expanded several times.

His central messages are the following: The Norwegian Nobel Committee consists of hardly competent politicians and it is continuously disregarding the award criteria predetermined by Alfred Nobel in his testament of the year 1895.

The Committee has assumed self-created selection criteria which contradict the last will of the prize founder; it works in a non-professional manner, decides in non-transparent secret proceedings and evades any serious discursive criticism. Heffermehl’s theses are based on a careful examination of the testament’s content. He is practicing a two-step procedure here. In a first step, he applies the method of interpretation applicable to the testaments of the Norwegian and Swedish hereditary law (which is also valid for German law):

What does the testator mean by his own words in this situation in this context and what did he express? In a second step Heffermehl asks, how Nobel’s determined subjective intention of the year 1895 is to be understood at the present time, when year after year the testament is to be implemented by selecting the prize winners. In Paris on 27.11.1895 Alfred Nobel had effectively enacted in manuscript form in the presence of two witnesses according to Swedish law: After deduction of 1.6 million Swedish crowns legacies to relatives, employees and friends the estate’s lion’s share of 31.6 million was to be used to finance the newly created award. From the revenues of the heritage, according to Nobel’s testament five annual awards were to be distributed to personalities who had significantly contributed to the well-being of mankind. In fact there should be an award for the most important discovery and invention in each of the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, another one in the field of literature for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. And precisely the Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded to the “peace advocate” who had achieved “the most” for (1) “fraternization of peoples”, (2) for the reduction or abolition of “standing armies” and (3) “for the promotion of peace conferences”. With the award of the first four prizes Nobel entrusted various Swedish institutions, with that of the fifth one a committee to be chosen by the Norwegian Parliament (“Stortinget”). As Heffermehl discovered, Nobel engaged with deliberation the Norwegian, but not the Swedish Parliament as a trustee and an authoritative body of the award process. In the then existing state union of Sweden and Norway, this parliament that was dominated by the then Liberal Party (“Venstre”) appeared more suitable to him than the Swedish parliament.

Because, as one of the first in the world, it had provided substantial amounts of money to the “International Peace Bureau”, had co-founded by Bertha von Suttner, and otherwise worked with notable initiatives against the dangers of war, for disarmament and for an international arbitration.

Heffermehl accuses the “Nobel committee” of converting the three specific objectives defined by Nobel in his will into a diffuse “peace criterion” and thereby falsifying them. When awarding the prize the committee aimed at winners that had committed themselves to “arms control” – not the same as “disarmament” – or to democracy, humanitarianism, environmental protection, resource conservation and human rights. Indeed, he was the last one, says Heffermehl, to deny that a diverse concept of peace work was necessary. But the Nobel Prize had just not been initiated for “peace in general” or objectives associated with this, but as a price for individuals or organizations who had provided outstanding performances on specific fields with specific means aiming at putting an end to the waging of wars. The criterion of “fraternization” (of the peoples) had been transformed by the committee into a non-specific “brotherhood of nations” (“brotherhood”). The aim of reducing the “standing army” had completely been forgotten. The relevance of “peace conferences” was totally negated by the committee putting up the counterfactual assertion that such things did no longer exist or that they were meaningless. In addition, Heffermehl writes, the committee failed to recognize that Nobel’s criteria are organically connected to one another (“fraternization between peoples” and “disarmament” plus “promotion of peace conferences”) and therefore should not be considered separately.

Through such interpretations to its own choice the Nobel Peace Prize committee favors the military-based international system rather than its overcoming and abolition – as Nobel had wished it. Measured against the testamentary provisions Heffermehl therefore considers at least 51 of the 121 previously awarded Nobel Peace Prizes to be unjustified.

Committee staffed according to proportional party representation

The author sees the reasons for the negative development of recent decades primarily in the failure of the Norwegian Parliament. Since 1948 it has divided the five seats of the Nobel Committee according to proportional party representation. The special qualification, skill and experience, which are relevant for the assessment of the allocation criteria, did virtually not play any role for the selection of committee members. Only the basic consensus on Norwegian security policy that had evolved since the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s had to be observed. For the members of the committee compliance with Norwegian foreign policy – and consequently concepts of military strength and an almost blind loyalty to NATO – were more important than respect for Alfred Nobel’s testament. But even before 1948, Nobel’s testament had often been ignored. Then as now, this was not done accidentally:

In this respect Heffermehl’s analysis also bases on diary entries of longtime committee members, which are now available in the archives and which have been partially documented by Heffermehl himself.

The reactions of the Nobel committee to Heffermehl’s study were very sparse. Members who expressed themselves publicly tried to present Heffermehl’s view as a marginal “single opinion”. It was this accusation that challenged Heffermehl all the more: In the English-language edition, which has recently been published (simultaneously in Swedish, Finnish and Russian), he worked out in detail, that his criticism is basically supported by numerous previous studies. Heffermehl demands that the Nobel Foundation carries out a general review of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prizes in the last 110 years and, above all, that it aligns the current practice with the testamentary provisions of the founder. The current committee members should leave the Parliament in Oslo and give it “free rein” to choose a “venerable committee.” The procedure for selecting the winners must also be transparent. The prestige of the prize, which he expects to be the “greatest gift to mankind” must no longer be damaged.

In addition to his journalistic efforts, Heffermehl has also requested government agencies to ensure that Alfred Nobel’s last will, which is protected by hereditary law, is given genuine attention. And he is right: The foundation supervision has to ensure that the donor’s will is strictly observed. Apart from that it can already be stated that Heffermehl’s groundbreaking study provides rich material for better understanding and assessing the complex structures of the Nobel Peace Prize awarding procedure – those structures which usually shield from the view of a critical public. It would be very exciting, if studies of this kind considering the awarding practice of the other four Nobel Prizes were developed and published.     •

^{* Fredrik S. Heffermehl: The Nobel Peace Prize. What Nobel Really Wanted. Praeger 2010
Source: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, October 2011}

^{** Judge at the German Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. Member of the academic advisory board of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA)}