Politics & Power Quote by Alfred Nobel

Nobel is trying to future-proof a prize against the oldest poison in European public life: the reflex to turn merit into a flag. In one sentence, he drafts an ethics policy and a public-relations shield. The “express wish” lands like a legal stamp, a reminder that he’s not offering a gentle suggestion but an instruction meant to outlive him, committees, and the political weather.

The line works because it names the bias he expects without dignifying it. He doesn’t say “don’t be chauvinists”; he narrows the temptation to something specific and immediate: Scandinavia. That detail is doing heavy lifting. Nobel was Swedish, and he knew the Nobel institutions would be anchored in Swedish and Norwegian elite networks. By singling out the home region, he anticipates the easiest scandal - a prize that looks like a Nordic self-congratulation machine - and tries to disarm it preemptively.

There’s also a colder subtext: “most worthy” sounds lofty, but it’s a strategic abstraction. Nobel can’t define worth in perpetuity, so he defines what must not define it. Nationality becomes the forbidden shortcut. In the late 19th century, when nationalism was hardening into ideology and international rivalries were intensifying, this is a deliberate attempt to build an island of cosmopolitan legitimacy.

Coming from an inventor-entrepreneur whose fortune was tied to explosives, the sentence reads as moral architecture: if the money came from a world of borders and armies, the prestige must be engineered to travel across them.