Picking the Most Visible of 205 Names - NYTimes.com

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By WALTER GIBBS

OSLO — The Norwegian Nobel Committee spent seven months winnowing the résumés of dissident monks, human rights advocates, field surgeons and other nominees — 205 names in all, most of them obscure — before deciding to give the Nobel Peace Prize to the most famous man on the planet, Barack Obama.

“The question we have to ask,” Thorbjorn Jagland, the committee’s new chairman, said after the prize was announced on Friday, “is, ‘Who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world?’ And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

While in recent decades the selection process has produced many winners better known for their suffering or their environmental zeal than for peacemaking, Mr. Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister, said he intended to incorporate a more practical approach.

“It’s important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic,” Mr. Jagland said in an interview, “but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.”

Mr. Jagland, 58, leaned back in his chair in the committee room, surrounded by photographs of Peace Prize winners dating to 1901. Three previous American presidents look out from the wall: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. But the 2009 award to Mr. Obama, in his freshman year as president and still directing two wars, could be the biggest of them all.

While some leaders and commentators around the world lauded the selection, others said Mr. Obama had not yet earned it. Should his presidency descend into a military quagmire, as Lyndon B. Johnson’s did during the Vietnam War, the 2009 award could prove an embarrassment.

Several prominent Nobel observers in Oslo said the Nobel committee had put the integrity of the award at stake. But Mr. Jagland seemed to savor the risk. He said no one could deny that “the international climate” had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason.

Of the president’s future, he said: “There is great potential. But it depends on how the other political leaders respond. If they respond negatively, one might have to say he failed. But at least we want to embrace the message that he stands for.”

He likened this year’s award to the one in 1971, which recognized Willy Brandt, then the chancellor of West Germany, and his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with Communist Eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Mr. Jagland said. “The same thing is true of the prize to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, for launching perestroika. One can say that Barack Obama is trying to change the world, just as those two personalities changed Europe.”

Mr. Jagland, who was elected Sept. 29 to be secretary general of the Council of Europe, represents the Labor Party, but the five-member Nobel committee is more than the collection of Scandinavian socialists that its critics in the United States sometimes imagine. Its members are chosen by the Norwegian Parliament to roughly reflect the party makeup of that body. The current committee includes two members from the Labor Party, one from the Socialist Left Party, one from the Conservatives and one from the far-right Progress Party. Mr. Jagland said all five members backed this year’s choice.

Geir Lundestad, who as executive director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute has handled the committee’s administrative affairs since 1990, said the committee met six or seven times this year, starting several weeks after the nomination deadline of Feb. 1. It did not pick a winner until Monday. He said Oslo faced a major challenge to get ready for what will likely be among the largest civic events in Norwegian history: the award ceremony Dec. 10 at which Mr. Obama will be expected to deliver a speech.

Responding to the analysts who expressed concern for the authority of the prize, given Obama’s lack of accomplishment so far, Dr. Lundestad said, “We are very optimistic that this will turn out to be a success and a highlight in our history.”

Mr. Jagland was asked if the committee feared being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician’s promises at face value. He shrugged and said, “Well, so?”