Lester Pearson – and Other Peace Prize Winners

Crowd gathered to watch a Peace Prize being awarded - does anything look out of the ordinary here?

I may well be in the minority on this one, but let me lay my cards on the table. I think the committee that awarded one of the 2009 Peace Prizes made a decision that was not merely justifiable, but bold and genuinely inspired. True, they didn’t give the prize to someone who can already claim to have resolved a major conflict, or brokered some critical international agreement. Nor will their choice be free of controversy. Sometimes, however, it’s important to invest in hope, to recognise future potential as well as past achievement. And that’s why you won’t find me sneering at the honour awarded to Stephan Bolliger and some colleagues of his at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

I’m referring, of course, to the Peace Prize handed out this year at the Ig Nobel awards, a kind of annual parody of the Nobels. The Ig Nobels often recognise scientific research on unusual topics, such as whether cows that have names produce more milk (winner of this year’s Veterinary Medicine Prize – the roster of fields in which prizes are available changes somewhat from year to year). Bolliger and his colleagues received their Peace Prize for a scientific study entitled “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?”, published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. Their answers to these questions were respectively “empty” and “yes”, the latter justifying their conclusion that beer bottles are dangerous weapons. This new scientific demonstration of an ancient insight may not have saved a huge number of human lives as yet – but give it time, give it time.

2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health. Elena Bodnar, pictured front and centre, and her co-winners invented a bra that can be converted into two face masks in an emergency. (From Ig Nobel website; photo by Alexey Eliseev)

No Canadian has ever been given an Ig Nobel Peace Prize. However, Lester B. Pearson received the other version of this award in 1957, for his outstanding role in defusing the Suez Crisis of the previous year. Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt, had precipitated the crisis by seizing control of the Suez Canal from the crumbling British Empire. The United Kingdom got together with France and Israel, who had their own reasons for disliking Nasser, and concocted a simple enough plan: Israel would attack Egypt, and British and French troops would then move in as ostensible peacekeepers, seizing the canal in the process.

From a Franco-British perspective, the military side of their “Operation Musketeer” developed brilliantly, the diplomatic side rather less so. With America preparing to undermine the British pound, Saudi Arabia cutting off oil supplies, and Russia threatening missile attacks, the Musketeers had to simply stop fighting. Pearson, in the meantime, had been working frantically in his role as Louis St. Laurent’s Minister of External Affairs to find a diplomatic solution to the whole conflict. The solution that emerged was the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the world’s first armed UN peacekeeping mission. UNEF, which included Canadian soldiers, moved into Egyptian territory as the Musketeers withdrew, staying until 1967.

Pearson obviously did not create UNEF single-handedly, with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld also playing a particularly important role. Nevertheless, Pearson’s diplomacy was the driving force, and his efforts put Canada at the centre of international events in a way that’s perhaps difficult to imagine today. In retrospect, it looks like a very ambiguous achievement, at least to me. Britain was spared the very real possibility of economic collapse, but our two Motherlands were still forced into humiliating retreat. I have a lot of visceral sympathy for the position of the Conservative opposition at the time, who thought Canada should have displayed greater loyalty to Britain. Peacekeeping rapidly became something of a Canadian specialty, which has sometimes been useful in bolstering our global influence and sometimes seemed to be little more than a thankless, expensive, almost quixotic distraction. And the Middle East, of course, remains a mess. Nevertheless, Pearson was at least a man who accomplished something of historic significance – something perhaps even more important than clarifying the hazards of being hit with a beer bottle.

Before I forget, some guy called Barack Obama won a Peace Prize too. Canadian reaction has ranged from scorn to qualified approval, but nobody seems to believe that Obama has accomplished anything that would put him in Lester Pearson’s league. Instead, we’re told, the Nobel committee gave him the prize because he’s inspiring, and because they want to encourage his good intentions. There are different ways that one could look at this, but it strikes me as a case of Norwegian idealists grandstanding more or less at Obama’s expense. The prize they’ve foisted on him is so patently undeserved that it only accelerates the poor man’s descent, clearly apparent since that ridiculous beer session with Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates, into a kind of empty caricature of the transformational figure his wildest supporters expected him to become.

Corwin