Globalization and Cultural Property

Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times has an interesting article on globalization, diplomacy and cultural artifacts. As countries continue to develop and recognize the importance of their history and cultural property, we are witnessing more diplomatic issues and contested situation in connection with previously acquired artifacts.  These disputes are typically arising between  the "developed" countries with some form of ownership or possession of the artifacts and those developing, emerging and third world countries claiming rightful ownership. Some of the disputed artifacts may have been legally obtained or perhaps illegally obtained and stolen over a century ago. The million dollar question is what is the fair and equitable thing to do. Recently Nazi art has been the main area of dispute, but international ownership disputes of cultural property are expanding and are being noticed by the press more, more activity in courts, in diplomatic state rooms and in politics.

Egypt is now demanding the rightful ownership of a 3500 year old bust of Queen Nefertiti. Egypt claims the bust was stolen.

Kimmelman states in his article

Globalization, it turns out, has only intensified, not diminished, cultural differences among nations. The forces of nationalism love to exploit culture because it’s symbolic, economically potent and couches identity politics in a legal context that tends to pit David against Goliath.

Mr. Hawass also recently fired a shot at France, demanding the Louvre return five fresco fragments it purchased in 2000 and 2003 from a gallery and at auction. They belonged to a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor and had been in storage at the museum. Egypt had made the demand before, but this time suspended the Louvre’s long-term excavation at Saqqara, near Cairo, and said it would stop collaborating on Louvre exhibitions.

France got the message. It promised to send the fragments back tout de suite.

It didn’t go unnoticed in Paris, Berlin or Cairo that Mr. Hawass pressed his case about Nefertiti and suspended the excavations by the Louvre just after his country’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, bitterly lost a bid to become director general of the United Nations’ cultural agency, Unesco. The post went late last month to a Bulgarian diplomat instead. Mr. Hosny would have been the first Arab to land the job, and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had banked a not insignificant amount of his own prestige on the minister’s getting it.

But Jewish groups and prominent French and German intellectuals (not the Israeli government, though) campaigned against Mr. Hosny. When asked in Egypt’s Parliament last year about the presence of Israeli books in Alexandria’s library, Mr. Hosny said: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you.” That prompted Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy in Le Monde to urge that he not be selected, also quoting Mr. Hosny as saying in 2001, “Israeli culture is an inhuman culture” based on theft.

Kimmelman continues

Laws are laws, of course, and looting can’t be tolerated, although when decades or centuries have passed, laws have changed, populations shifted, empires come and gone, legal arguments can be dubious. But the larger truth is that all patrimony arguments ultimately live or die in the morally murky realm of global relations, meaning that modern governments like Egypt’s and Iraq’s may win sympathy today by counting on Western guilt about colonialism when asking for the return of art from ancient sites within their current borders. At the same time there’s no international clamor for Russia to return storerooms of treasures it stole from Germany at the end of the war, or, for that matter, for Sweden to fork over the spoils of a war 350 years ago with Denmark. It’s about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy.

To read the NY Times article, click HERE.