Legendary actor Peter O'Toole was nominated for an Oscar eight times before getting one in 2003, for lifetime achievement. O'Toole couldn't mask his disappointment. He would have preferred a real prize, he said. The members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee have adopted Hollywood's trick and have now awarded a peace prize, which looks more like a lifetime achievement prize, to the European Union precisely at a time when the EU is going through a crisis. Perhaps it was specifically because of that reason. The prize this year reflects more on the people awarding it than the people receiving it. In the past, the Nobel Peace Prize was traditionally awarded to distinguished figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa or Nelson Mandela. Today, the prize is awarded for promises and potential, not for results. At this rate, pretty soon a good essay will get the Nobel Prize for literature, and a grandmother who makes a killer porridge will get a prize on behalf of all grandmothers for making peace around the dinner table. But let's get serious for a moment (and that's not easy after the peace prizes awarded to Al Gore in 2007, U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009 and the EU in 2012). Let us keep in mind that the prize was given to the EU this year for making peace on a continent that has known countless wars, including two world wars. The steadfast friendship between former foes Germany and France, which have become the backbone of the EU, has become legendary, and it was this that elicited the prize. Every first year international relations student knows full well that the credit for European peace belongs with NATO more than the EU. But today it has become politically correct to hand out Nobel prizes to those who employ "soft power" like the EU. There is not a single person in the world today, other than, perhaps, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who believes that the EU is capable of exporting peace to the rest of the world. Let's begin with the fact that the term "peace" is a relative term in Europe. We must not forget that nothing was done to prevent the bitter war in the 1990s in the Balkans, in the EU's back yard. And there are still tensions among several EU member states: Romania, Hungary, Belgium, and between Slovenia and Italy, for example. They are obviously not on the brink of war, but these are tensions that the EU is powerless against. And then there is of course the resurgence of all the extreme separatist parties all across Europe the renaissance of the radical Right. To top it all off, there is the economic crisis that is not only threatening Greece's economy but also Spain's, Portugal's and the future of the entire union and its single currency, the euro. German Chancellor Angela Merkel probably saw the Nobel Peace Prize as a vote of confidence in the euro, but in Spain and Greece they saw the prize as a slap in the face of the local laborer. But the Norwegians, who twice declined to join the EU, in 1972 and 1994, are now giving the EU a prize. The real question is where the $1.2 million prize money will go. Will it be divided among the 500 million EU residents? That would mean a quarter of a cent per person. Is that what the prize is worth this year-
