And thanks for bringing up how racial equality is a European tradition. How could we forget historical eurocentric bastions of equality, like the study of Phrenology and Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".
There were many celebrated anti-racist movement leaders across the world and in various time periods. The most well-known of these would be the Prophet Muhammad, who famously in one of his last sermons declared "Surely all of mankind – from the time of Adam until our time – are like the teeth of a comb (all equal to one another) and there is no greatness for an Arab over a non-Arab or a non-Arab over an Arab and no greatness for a red-skinned person over a black-skinned person or a black-skinned person over a red-skinned person, except due to one’s consciousness of God."
However, the US has more per capita prizes than the EU, so not sure that that critisicm is warranted.
Anyways, I also wouldn't draw any conclusions about "the current status of a country" based on number of nobel laureates. Having said that, I do find the statistics interesting, and I'm sure there are some conclusions to be drawn from it.
There probably are papers analyzing this statistic further - if anyone has some reading recomendations, send them my way :-)