The European Union has won the Nobel Peace Prize, despite a year marked by riots on streets of many capitals and the looming prospect of an acrimonious break up amid an economic crisis caused by the euro.

The EU has been nominated many times for the prize in the past but has never won it because the Union is politically controversial, not least in Norway, the home of the Nobel peace prize, a country which rejected membership twice, in two referendums.

"The union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe," said the Nobel prize committee.

In its citation the Nobel committee acknowledged that the EU was today facing turmoil as the economic defects of the euro have laid waste to many Southern European countries and have plunged all Europe into the worst recession for 80 years...

The award has been welcomed by many European leaders as an encouragement for greater unity as the eurozone crisis threatens to tear the EU apart, and as southern Europe is hit by an economic crash and growing social conflict largely caused by flaws in the European single currency...

But behind the celebrations, a typical EU turf war broke out between Mr Barroso, Mr Van Rompuy and Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, over which EU president should collect the prize.

In a bid to settle the squabble, Cecilia Malmstrom, Sweden's European Commisisoner, suggested on Twitter that "sending 27 children" from each of the EU countries to Oslo would be the solution.

The prize, which is worth a million euros will do little to help the EU's debt and banking crisis which has so far cost over Euro6 trillion and will only be worth Euro0.002 for each of the Union's 500 million citizens.

Living standards in Greece have crashed as the economy has contracted 20 per cent in the last three years, with youth unemployment yesterday hitting 54 per cent and the country's social fabric has come under intense strain, including the rise of an explicitly neo-Nazi party.

In Spain, which is expected to ask for an EU bailout in the coming days after its government bonds were given junk status yesterday, the state is on the brink of fracturing under the pressure of the worst recession since the 1930s.

In recent weeks, senior military figures and veteran right-wing politicians have warned that the army might step in after Catalonia threatened to declare independence in a bid to extricate itself from a Spanish economy that has been destroyed by an asset bubble created by the euro's economic imbalances.

The prize comes as opinion polls show that trust in the EU has sunk to all time low of 31 per cent across Europe as many voters blame its bureaucratic targets and austerity measures for record levels of joblessness.

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Editor's Note: It has become abundantly clear -- through the continued awarding of the prize to people and entities who exist as champions in a fictional world, i.e. Barack Obama before he achieved a single thing, Al Gore for advancing a enviro-scare campaign, Yassir Arafat -- that the credibility of the Nobel committee is equal to that of the United Nations...they don't have any.