Nobel award recognizes Europe as "Continent of Peace"

Afrik Update

World News

By Luke Baker and Balazs Koranyi

The European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday, honored by the Norwegian committee which looked beyond Europe's current malaise to recognize its decades of stability and democracy after the horrors of two world wars.

"Sixty years of peace. It's the first time that this has happened in the long history of Europe," Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, told Reuters before the ceremony.

"The facts prove that the European Union is a peacekeeping instrument of the first order," said Van Rompuy, who will collect the prize along with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament.

Europe is suffering feeble economic growth or outright recession, soaring unemployment and a number of its member states are unable to pay their debts. It has been called the worst economic crisis since World War Two.

The economic pain has provoked social unrest in a number of member states, notably near-bankrupt Greece. However, the Nobel committee focused on the EU's role in reconciling the disparate, warring corners of the "old continent" - the overarching success being to turn Germany and France from enemies into allies.

Commission President Barroso, a former prime minister of Portugal who was part of the struggle to turn his country into a democracy in 1974, echoed those sentiments.

"It's a recognition of what has been achieved over the 60 years and at the same time, it's also an encouragement for the future," he told Reuters. "I think the message they give to us is that what you have built is something very precious, something that we should treasure, that we should keep."

Despite the warm words of unity and sense of common purpose, the EU and its major institutions were at odds after the announcement was made because they couldn't decide who should accept the award or who specifically was to be honored.

In the end it was decided that the prize was for all Europeans, to be picked up by the heads of the three main EU institutions. Twenty EU leaders also chose to attend the ceremony, but British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose relationship with Brussels is tense, stayed away.

"(This prize) is not only rewarding past achievements, it is also an encouragement to go further and to work further on deepening the European Union," Van Rompuy said. "The answer is more Europe and more integration."