Nobel Peace Prize 2009: Barack Obama and the 2009 Peace Prize

This note covers the Nobel Peace Prize 2009: who won it, what the Norwegian Nobel Committee said about diplomacy, nuclear weapons and climate change, the background situation the award responded to, how the committee explained its choice, why the award was debated, and quick facts for exams.

What was the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 awarded for?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 to Barack H. Obama with the citation: "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". This is the official citation, the short sentence the committee uses to explain its reason for an award.

In plain words, the committee was praising Obama's approach to foreign policy in his first months as 44th President of the United States of America: using talks and shared institutions rather than confrontation, and trying to bring countries together on shared problems instead of pursuing American interests alone.

The committee gave special importance to his support for a world without nuclear weapons.

The formal name of the award is the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the original prizes set out in Alfred Nobel's will and the only one awarded in Oslo, Norway, rather than in Stockholm, Sweden.

It is decided and presented by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a body appointed by the Norwegian parliament.

Who is the laureate?

Barack H. Obama

Barack Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. At the time of the award his residence was the USA, and his role was given as the 44th President of the United States of America.

He received the whole prize, a share of 1/1, and the prize amount that year was 10,000,000 Swedish kronor.

According to the Nobel Prize's own summary of his achievements, Obama had been in power for less than eight months when the prize was announced.

Even before his election he had argued for dialogue across national, ethnic, religious and political lines. As president, he called for a fresh start in relations between the Muslim world and the West, based on shared interests and mutual respect.

He also set in motion a plan to withdraw United States forces from Iraq, a promise he had made during his election campaign.

In his first year, the sources describe him as a strong advocate for human rights and democracy, and as someone who supported practical steps against the climate crisis. The committee linked all of this to its central citation about diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.

What situation did the award respond to?

The presentation speech by Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, placed the 2009 award against a difficult backdrop.

A world of tension and danger

He described the period as one marked by serious tension, many wars, unresolved disputes and clashes on several fronts around the world. He also pointed to the danger of nuclear weapons spreading further, and to worsening environmental problems and global warming.

The speech noted that Time Magazine had recently described the decade then ending as "the worst since the end of World War II". Against this setting, the committee said Obama had, from the very start of his presidency, tried to build a more cooperative international climate that could help reverse the trend.

Jagland quoted former Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, saying Obama had already "lowered the temperature in the world", a short phrase the speech used to sum up the change in mood it was describing.

Nobel's will and the committee's test

The speech also explained how the committee reads Alfred Nobel's will: the prize goes to whoever, in the preceding year since the previous December's award, did the most or the best work "for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". Measured against that test, the committee said the answer was "relatively easy to find": it had to be Obama. In the committee's own words, "only rarely does one person dominate international politics to the same extent as Obama, or in such a short space of time initiate so many and such major changes as Obama has done."

The committee's own history mattered here too. For 108 years up to 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it had tried to encourage exactly the kind of international policy that Obama's diplomacy represented: stronger institutions, reduced reliance on weapons, and negotiation over confrontation.

As a point of general knowledge, Obama was one of only a small number of sitting United States presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize while still in office.

This background explains why the committee felt the moment called for recognising a shift in tone and direction in a major power's foreign policy, even though many of the problems it listed, from nuclear arms control to climate change, remained unresolved.

What had Obama done in his first months as president?

The committee credited Obama with bringing multilateral diplomacy back to a central place in world affairs, meaning that the United Nations and other international bodies were again treated as important forums for solving problems, rather than being sidelined.

The press release said Obama had "created a new climate in international politics".

Rejoining international institutions

Specific steps mentioned in the presentation speech include the United States again paying its dues to the United Nations, joining various UN committees, and signing on to important international conventions. Jagland quoted former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who had said the United Nations "was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell", and argued that Obama's renewed engagement with the institution fitted that purpose.

The speech said torture had been forbidden and that the president was working to close the Guantanamo detention facility. It described human rights and international law as guiding principles of the new administration, and said this record had earned Obama praise from leaders of international institutions, creating what the speech called new opportunities.

Iraq, the Muslim world and Iran

On Iraq, Obama had, in line with a campaign promise, begun the process of withdrawing American occupying forces. On relations with the Muslim world, he had called for dialogue based on shared interests rather than suspicion.

The speech also quoted Obama's own inaugural address from January 2009, in which he told adversaries of the United States that "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist". Jagland used this line to describe the administration's approach to the hardest disputes, including the question of Iran's nuclear programme, adding that negotiation does not always succeed but that the United States was, in Obama's view, obliged to try.

Taken together, these actions were the practical evidence the committee pointed to when it said diplomacy and negotiation were now the "preferred" tools of American foreign policy, a phrase used in the press release.

What did the committee highlight about diplomacy, nuclear weapons and climate?

The committee organised its reasoning around several linked themes. The table below summarises what it highlighted in the press release and the presentation speech.

Nuclear arms control, Afghanistan and China

On nuclear weapons specifically, the presentation speech noted that under Obama's leadership the United Nations Security Council gave its unanimous support to the idea of a world without nuclear weapons.

It also mentioned that Washington had reconsidered planned anti-missile defences in Eastern Europe, and that this had improved the atmosphere for strategic arms talks between the USA and Russia, with an agreement hoped for soon.

On Afghanistan, the speech said the struggle there rested on broad international support but could, in the long run, be resolved only by Afghans themselves.

On China, the speech observed that many global challenges, pollution among them, could only be managed through cooperation between the USA and the People's Republic of China, and that the Obama administration's engagement reduced the risk of the rivalry between a rising and an established power turning into conflict.

Why was the award debated?

The committee itself acknowledged that the award would raise questions. In the press release it quoted Obama's own appeal that "now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges", treating this as the spirit the prize was meant to encourage.

Ideals weighed against actions

In the presentation speech, Jagland said the committee knew that many people would judge Obama's ideals against what he actually achieved, and said this scrutiny "should be welcomed".

He argued that political leaders must be able to think beyond narrow short-term calculation, which he called realpolitik, if the world was to move in a better direction.

The speech also directly addressed the timing of the award, noting that Obama had been president for only a short period when the prize was announced.

Comparisons with earlier laureates

It compared this to earlier Peace Prize laureates whose results were still unclear at the time of the award, including Woodrow Wilson, who received the prize while politically weakened after creating the League of Nations, which the United States itself did not join, and Cordell Hull, honoured soon after the United Nations was established but before its significance was proven.

Other laureates named as having unclear or modest results at the time of their award included Carl von Ossietzky, Andrej Sakharov, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama, honoured mainly for courage, as well as Albert Lutuli and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose struggles had not yet reached their full results.

The committee's defence was that it could not wait for final outcomes before recognising principles it judged vital, saying that to do so "would make the Prize a rather belated stamp of approval and not an instrument for peace in the world".

How did the work develop?

This timeline shows that the committee's reasoning rested on actions and statements from a very short period, roughly the eight months between Obama taking office in January 2009 and the announcement in October 2009, together with a handful of earlier statements such as the 2008 Berlin speech that the committee treated as evidence of a consistent approach.

Why does it matter?

The committee framed the 2009 award as a "call to action", a phrase it said President Obama himself had used when commenting on the prize, treating it as encouragement to keep working rather than only a reward for results already achieved.

It wanted to give momentum to goals it judged urgent: reducing nuclear weapons, strengthening the United Nations and other institutions, and tackling climate change through cooperation rather than unilateral action.

The speech itself raised an open question that the committee did not try to hide: whether a prize given so early in a presidency, based on intentions and early steps rather than finished achievements, could be justified. Jagland said directly that "many have argued that the prize comes too early".

His answer was that history shows waiting for certainty can mean lost opportunities, and that the committee had, at other times, honoured people such as Wilson and Hull whose full impact only became clear later, as well as laureates honoured mainly for courage, such as Carl von Ossietzky, Andrej Sakharov, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama, whose results also seemed modest for a long time.

He gave the example of Albert Lutuli, who received the prize when the struggle against apartheid was still in its infancy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who received it while his dream that his children would be "judged by the content of their character" rather than their skin colour was still far from reality.

The award also matters as a marker of how the Nobel Peace Prize is sometimes used, not simply to mark a completed achievement in the manner of a scientific discovery, but to support and encourage an approach to international affairs that the committee judged to be moving in the right direction at a critical moment, according to its own stated reasoning. The speech closed by congratulating Obama on what he had "already achieved" while wishing him success in his "continuing efforts for a more peaceful world".

What historical comparisons did the committee draw on?

The presentation speech spent considerable time setting Obama's award inside the longer history of American presidents and of the Peace Prize itself, to explain why the committee felt able to honour someone so early in a term of office.

Jagland recalled that in both the First and the Second World War, the United States had, in his words, come to Europe's rescue. After the First World War, Woodrow Wilson tried to build a world resting on international cooperation and democracy through the League of Nations, though the speech said his success was limited because the United States itself never joined the League he had created.

During and after the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman took the initiatives that created the United Nations and other global institutions, which the speech said still exist today. The lesson Jagland drew was that the power of individual nation states could not be unlimited, and that the world had moved from unrestrained nation states towards greater internationalism.

The speech placed Obama in a line of American leaders whom the world, not only the United States, had treated as world leaders: Wilson, Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. It quoted Reagan's description of American ideals living "not only in the hearts and minds of our countrymen but in the hearts and minds of millions of the world's people in both free and oppressed societies who look to us for leadership".

Jagland also quoted a line from a speech Obama gave in Berlin in July 2008, before his election, in which Obama said "the walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand", along with the walls "between the countries with the most and those with the least", and those "between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christians and Muslims and Jews". Obama had called these "the walls we must tear down", and Jagland described this as matching Nobel's own phrase about "fraternity between nations".

This history, the speech argued, showed that the Nobel Committee had often rewarded people who were trying to change the direction of international politics, before the final results of that change were known.

Quick facts for exams

The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was awarded to Barack H. Obama, the 44th President of the United States, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

The award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on 9 October 2009 and presented at a ceremony in Oslo on 10 December 2009. Obama received the whole prize, a share of 1/1, worth 10,000,000 Swedish kronor at the time.

The committee gave special weight to his support for a world free of nuclear weapons, his restoration of multilateral diplomacy through the United Nations, and his early steps on human rights, democracy and climate change, even though he had been in office for less than eight months when the prize was announced.

Note: Source. The prize facts in this note are from the Nobel Prize's official site, nobelprize.org.

Glossary

• Nobel Peace Prize — one of the original Nobel Prizes, awarded in Oslo by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for work benefiting peace between nations.
• Norwegian Nobel Committee — the body, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, that selects the Peace Prize laureate each year.
• Citation — the official short sentence explaining why a laureate was chosen for the prize.
• Laureate — the person or organisation awarded a Nobel Prize.
• Multilateral diplomacy — foreign policy conducted through cooperation among many countries, often via shared institutions, rather than acting alone.
• Disarmament — the reduction or removal of weapons, especially nuclear weapons, from a country's military forces.
• Non-Proliferation Treaty — an international agreement aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries.
• United Nations Security Council — the UN body responsible for maintaining international peace and security.
• Realpolitik — a practical, interest-based approach to politics that sets aside ideals in favour of immediate advantage.
• Apartheid — the system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa until the early 1990s, mentioned in connection with earlier laureate Albert Lutuli.
• Inaugural address — the speech a newly sworn-in president gives at the start of their term.
• Call to action — a phrase used by Obama, as reported in the presentation speech, describing the prize as encouragement to pursue its stated goals rather than a reward for finished work.
• Prize share — the fraction of a Nobel Prize, and its monetary award, that a laureate receives when it is divided among more than one person.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was given for ending any war or conflict. Correct: The citation credits Obama's efforts to strengthen diplomacy and cooperation, not the resolution of any specific conflict.
• Misconception: Obama had completed major policy achievements before the award. Correct: He had been in office less than eight months, and the committee itself acknowledged that his achievements could not yet be judged complete.
• Misconception: The committee claimed the prize was uncontroversial. Correct: The presentation speech openly acknowledged that many argued the timing was too early and said this scrutiny should be welcomed.
• Misconception: The award was only about nuclear weapons. Correct: The citation covers diplomacy and cooperation broadly, with nuclear disarmament given special but not sole importance.
• Misconception: All Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm. Correct: The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.
• Misconception: The prize amount is the same every year. Correct: In 2009 the prize amount was 10,000,000 Swedish kronor, and amounts can change from year to year.
• Misconception: The committee compared Obama only to recent leaders. Correct: The presentation speech compared him to earlier presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. In which year was the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 announced? [1 mark]

1. It was announced on 9 October 2009 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Q2. State the official citation for the Nobel Peace Prize 2009. [2 marks]

1. Barack H. Obama was awarded the prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

Q3. What role did Barack H. Obama hold at the time of the award, and what share of the prize did he receive? [3 marks]

1. He was the 44th President of the United States of America, resident in the USA.
2. He received the whole prize, a share of 1/1.
3. The prize amount that year was 10,000,000 Swedish kronor.

Q4. Describe four steps the Nobel Committee credited to Obama's early presidency in its reasoning. [4 marks]

1. He restored multilateral diplomacy, giving the United Nations and other institutions a more central role.
2. He began withdrawing United States forces from Iraq, honouring a campaign promise.
3. He worked to end torture and close the Guantanamo detention facility, and supported human rights and international law.
4. He called for dialogue between the United States and the Muslim world based on shared interests.

Q5. Why did the Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasise Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons? [4 marks]

1. The committee said this vision had powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations around the world.
2. Under Obama's leadership, the UN Security Council gave unanimous support to the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
3. Washington reconsidered planned anti-missile defences in Eastern Europe, improving the climate for US-Russia strategic arms talks.
4. The upcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference made the established nuclear powers' willingness to disarm especially urgent at that time.

Q6. "Many have argued that the prize comes too early." Discuss how the Norwegian Nobel Committee responded to this criticism in its presentation speech. [5 marks]

1. The committee's chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, directly acknowledged in the presentation speech that many people thought the award had come too early, since Obama had been president for less than a year.
2. He argued that history shows that waiting for complete certainty about a leader's results can mean losing an important opportunity to support positive change.
3. He compared the situation to past laureates such as Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull, whose achievements were also unclear or incomplete at the time of their own awards.
4. He said the committee welcomed the public weighing Obama's ideals against his actions, rather than demanding either full achievement or no recognition at all.
5. He concluded that refusing to award a prize until outcomes are certain would turn the Peace Prize into a late "stamp of approval" rather than a genuine instrument for encouraging peace.

Q7. Discuss the main themes the Norwegian Nobel Committee highlighted in its reasons for the Nobel Peace Prize 2009. [6 marks]

1. The committee highlighted multilateral diplomacy, praising the restored central role of the United Nations and other international institutions in American foreign policy.
2. It highlighted nuclear disarmament, crediting Obama's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons for stimulating fresh arms control negotiations.
3. It highlighted dialogue over confrontation, noting that negotiation was now the preferred tool for difficult issues such as Iran's nuclear programme.
4. It highlighted climate change, saying the United States was playing a more constructive role and presenting concrete proposals.
5. It highlighted human rights and democracy, pointing to the banning of torture and plans to close Guantanamo.
6. Overall, the committee described the award as a "call to action" meant to encourage these directions further, rather than only a reward for results already completed.

Key takeaways

• The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 went to Barack H. Obama for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.
• Obama received the whole prize, a share of 1/1, worth 10,000,000 Swedish kronor.
• The announcement came on 9 October 2009, less than eight months into his presidency.
• The committee gave special weight to his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.
• It credited his restoration of multilateral diplomacy and support for the United Nations.
• The presentation speech openly acknowledged criticism that the award came too early.
• The committee called the prize a "call to action" rather than only a reward for finished achievements.
• The ceremony took place in Oslo on 10 December 2009, with the speech delivered by chairman Thorbjørn Jagland.

Test yourself

Who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2009?

Barack H. Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America, received the whole prize.

What was the official citation for the award?

He was honoured "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

When was the prize announced and when was it presented?

It was announced on 9 October 2009 and presented at a ceremony in Oslo on 10 December 2009.

What did the committee say about nuclear weapons?

It said Obama's vision of a world without nuclear weapons had powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.

Why was the timing of the award debated?

Obama had been president for less than eight months, so many argued the prize had come too early.

What phrase did Obama use to describe the meaning of the prize?

He called it a "call to action", encouraging further work rather than only rewarding achievements already made.

Which earlier laureates did the presentation speech compare Obama to?

It mentioned Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull, whose results were also unclear when they received the prize.

What steps did Obama take regarding Iraq and Guantanamo?

He began withdrawing United States forces from Iraq and worked to end torture and close the Guantanamo facility.