[throwawayknecht]

"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.

Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year in office.

Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the prize would usually be awarding.

(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many recent awards have been tactical - moves in an attempt to bring about better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do really encourage them.)

[vacri]

The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?

I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

[throwawayknecht]

I support the EU, but it's not clear to me that they are the primary entity responsible for peace in Europe between 1945 and 1991. And I think they have acted especially parochial and conservative during 2007-2012, the period prior to getting the Nobel.