Rutland’s Op-Ed Focuses on E.U.’s Nobel Peace Prize

On Oct. 17, Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, professor of government, professor of Russian and Eastern European studies, had an op-ed published in The Moscow Times exploring whether the European Union deserves the recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

“Europe is certainly a more peaceful place today than at any time in its past, but does the E.U. deserve all the credit for this? Defenders of the committee’s decision argue that the E.U. has ended the centuries-old proclivity of European states to invade each other. It’s true that most of Europe has enjoyed six decades without war. But it was the Cold War, not the Brussels bureaucracy, that created and maintained the peace in Europe,” Rutland writes.

He goes on to argue that positive achievements in the E.U. must be balanced against the union’s failures in dealing with the bloody conflict in Yugoslavia during the late 1990s, and secessionist conflicts in Moldova, Azerbaijan and Georgia. He concludes, “The granting of the prize to the EU may be good politics, but it is bad history.”