Peace prize goes to EU; PU, cry critics

LONDON - While some Europeans swelled with pride when the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, howls of derision erupted from the continent's large band of skeptics.

To many in the 27-nation bloc, the EU is an unwieldy and unloved agglomeration overseen by a top-heavy bureaucracy devoted to creating arcane regulations about everything from cheese to fishing quotas. Set up with noble goals after the devastation of World War II, the EU now appears to critics to be impotent amid a debt crisis that has widened north-south divisions, threatened the euro currency and plunged several members, from Greece to Ireland to Spain, into economic turmoil.

"First Al Gore, then Obama, now this. Parody is redundant," tweeted Daniel Hannan, a euroskeptic European lawmaker from Britain's Conservative Party. Barack Obama won the peace prize in 2009, less than a year after he was elected president, and former vice president Gore was the 2007 recipient for his campaign to fight climate change.

Nigel Farage, head of the U.K. Independence Party - which wants Britain to withdraw from the union - called Friday's peace prize "an absolute disgrace."

"Haven't they had their eyes open?" he asked rhetorically, arguing that Europe was facing "increasing violence and division," with mass protests from Madrid to Athens over tax hikes and job cuts and growing resentment of Germany, the union's rich and powerful economic anchor.

Dutch populist lawmaker Geert Wilders scoffed: "Nobel prize for the EU. At a time [when] Brussels and all of Europe is collapsing in misery. What next?"

In France, euroskeptics assailed the prize from the far left - where critics see the euro and the EU as capitalist tools - to the anti-immigrant far right.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, said the Nobel committee has to "come down from their ivory tower and see what is going on on the ground. They should measure the suffering of the people and see the growing revolt."

In hard-hit countries such as Greece and Spain, where the European debt crisis has sparked severe hardship, unemployment and violent protests, the prize was met with disbelief.

"The peace prize? The way things are going . . . peace is the one thing we might not have," said Giorgos Dertilis, an insurance-company worker in Athens.

Conservative lawmaker and former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind, whose party is deeply divided on Britain's role in the EU, probably spoke for many Britons when he called the decision slightly eccentric.

"If they want to give the prize for preserving the peace in Europe, they should divide it between NATO and the EU," he said. "Until the end of the Cold War, it was NATO more than anyone else that kept the peace."