Nobel Peace Prize: Why Obama?

Many were surprised and some even shocked when Barack Obama was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Apart from the wish by the Nobel Committee in Norway to play a role in world politics (it seems often that the prize has been decided by what we HOPE someone meant and not by what he/she actually did ...), there may be a cultural rationale for the choice.

Barack Obama is the first major world leader with a clearly mixed cultural/ethnic background to take the stage. It is not his "blackness" which incites our imagination - rather the mixed signals that his roots and upbringing send. For the first time in modern history an American president underlines, both rhetorically and symbolically, the necessity of intercultural competence. He continues to tread sensitive territory, both when it comes to American self-image and the imagination that other peoples have about the USA.

Giving the Peace Prize to Obama is potentially a kiss of death, archiving him already into the history books simply by his election. Endowing greatness is also a way of marginalizing and disarming a leader. Icons are seldom effective implementors of change.

But one can also see it - as someone expressed it in the evening papers - as a "start package" for peace. Maybe it is a reflection on our growing sensation, throughout at least the Western world, that a combination of mixed background, dialogue skills and sincere curiosity about the Other is far preferable to demonization.

At the root of the debate is a cultural/political question. How do we speak with our opponents? How do we share responsibility for global issues like migration, climate change and human rights? What alternatives are there to military action? An essential change from confrontation to consensus seems to be taking place.

Barack Obama has awakened hope among many - apparently even in the Nobel Committee. The Litterature prize this year also reflects the intercultural question, with Herta Müller's German language against a relief of Romanian communism.

Have we begun to understand that hybridity arising from cross-cultural experience is in fact our future strength and not a reason for introversion and drawing hard and populist lines?