The European Union should win the Nobel Peace Prize for helping unite the continent after the Cold War, an ex-Norwegian prime minister has said in a nomination with scant chance of success in EU-sceptical Norway.
"The EU has helped create peace in Europe," Thorbjoern Jagland of the opposition Labour Party told Reuters on Wednesday of his nomination to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
"The EU is taking major steps to end hundreds of years of rivalries between nation states in Europe," he said.
He said the EU deserved the prize in 2004 because of the planned expansion in May to 25 states from 15 with the inclusion of former eastern bloc nations such as Poland and Hungary and the Mediterranean states Cyprus and Malta.
But the proposal by Jagland, prime minister from 1996-97 and now head of parliament's foreign affairs committee, reopened old EU wounds in Norway, which voted "No" to membership in 1972 and 1994.
EU opponents derided Jagland and even the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, cast doubt on the EU's chances. He noted that the five-member Nobel Committee, appointed by Norway's parliament, always strives for consensus.
Two of the members of the Norwegian committee were appointed by political parties bitterly opposed to EU membership, two by parties in favour including Jagland's Labour Party and one by a far-right party that sits on the fence.
"The EU is an issue that divides Norway more than any other," Lundestad told Reuters. "This division among the people is reflected among the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee."
Norway is richer than most EU states thanks to oil, and many fear EU membership would undermine independence, won from Sweden in 1905. The Nobel committee has ignored past EU nominations.
Jagland said the committee should not be blinkered by domestic politics. "It awards an international prize and should have a broader outlook," he said.
The deadline for nominations for the 2004 prize is February 1. The 2003 prize, worth $1.4 million, went to Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to win the prize since it was founded in 1901 under the will of Sweden's Alfred Nobel.
EU opponents in Norway said the EU did not deserve the credit for peace in West Europe since World War Two. They told the daily Aftenposten, where Jagland launched his nomination on Wednesday, that democracy would have won anyway.