By Prof. Oğuzhan Bilgin
“The Nobel Prize is an ideological tool that presents Western bourgeois values as universal… My struggle is to remain outside the world that the Nobel Prize represents.”
Sartre said this when he refused the Nobel Prize in 1964…
The Nobel Prizes, awarded every year, have once again sparked heated debate this year. It is impossible to think that the Nobel Prizes awarded in science, literature, or peace are independent of hegemonic relations and power relations. So, who gets the Nobel Prize, and who doesn’t?
First of all, it must be said that the Nobel Prize is a soft power tool used to legitimize Western hegemony in the world and to produce consent for this hegemony. Through this consent relationship, which universalizes Western hegemony by instrumentalizing Western norms and values such as science, freedom, humanism, and democracy, the consent of non-Western societies is obtained, and Western hegemony becomes dominant throughout the world.
The Nobel Prize plays a major role in a process of consolidating hegemony in which the epistemic, discursive, moral, cultural, and ideological superiority of the West is imposed on the entire world. It can also be said that the prizes are largely awarded to those who reproduce Western hegemony. In other words, the Nobel Prize is mostly awarded to names that are useful for Western hegemony. In fact, while approximately 90% of the award winners are European or North American, we see that the rest are made up of “native” elements that produce Western hegemony even in non-Western societies. This creates a situation where the West continuously constructs its definitional superiority, while elements, ideas, and values that oppose Western hegemony or conflict with its interests are marginalized.
Nobel plays an important role in a process where Western knowledge, norms, values, and superiority are universalized. Who is rewarded and approved through the Nobel Prize, who is recognized, and who is ignored constitutes an important part of this cultural hegemony as a reward-punishment and control mechanism.
For this reason, in Venezuela, the country of the anti-imperialist Maduro, which is targeted by the West, a so-called opposition politician who advocates for the occupation of his own country by the US and Israel, a collaborator, can be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
A similar situation can be seen in the case of a writer who previously received the Nobel Prize for openly expressing hostility toward Turkey. It is important to remember that the Nobel Literature and Peace Prizes are directly used as operational tools of Western hegemony.
So, the question is: If the Nobel Prize is one of the most important tools of Western hegemony… Then why isn’t it given to Trump, the president of the most powerful state in the West?
Here, it is necessary to emphasize that the cultural, ideological, academic, economic, and media elites who hold Western cultural hegemony have long been the globalist-liberal elites of the West. They do not hesitate to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama, whose hands are stained with blood, even though they do nothing to exclude and marginalize nationalist-chauvinist circles opposed to them, even if it is the US President in question.
Ultimately, it must be said that such major awards, particularly the Nobel Prize, are the supporting pillars and operational apparatus of the globalist Western cultural hegemony.
Source: https://www.aksam.com.tr/yazarlar/oguzhan-bilgin/nobel-ve-kulturel-hegemonya/haber-1609831
