János György Szilágyi
The Real Question
Cultural Property—Who Owns What?
The shock produced by the Second World War, primarily in those countries
which suffered most, drew attention in the transitional phase of relative
peace and tranquillity not only to the losses caused by the hostilities, but to the
threats which war posed to the objective heritage of science and culture. This
recognition, in which guilt feelings played a far from small part, led to the
foundation of UNESCO within the United Nations in November 1945, only a few
months after the cessation of hostilities, with the aim of protecting and caring
for the values created by the human spirit.
But it was not years of peace and reconciliation that followed.
Protecting cultural artefacts did not disappear from the agenda altogether
but the body’s efforts increasingly became the blunt pretext for the pursuit of
other interests. One after another, institutions came forward with agreements
and declarations signalling their determination to enforce their interests at all
cost. Getting the relevant laws drafted met with only partial success. In 1954,
the Hague “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of
Armed Conflict” was penned, but its second draft, which came into effect in
2004, has not been ratified by the United States or Britain to this day.
The Hague Convention regulated protection in the event of war, but other
problems surfaced in the decades which followed. New and ever more comprehensive
agreements were drawn up for their remedy. One thing which united
them was their often irrational aims and wording which gave rise to multiple
interpretations, sometimes in direct opposition to the original aims for which those
agreements had been forged. A constant flurry of draft agreements urged ever
tighter regulation. The UNESCO agreement of 1970 obliges its signatories to
prevent the illegal export or possession of cultural property, concentrating
particularly on artefacts originating in Classical Antiquity. The UNIDROIT
agreement of 1995 went one step further, making it mandatory for possessors to
return objects which had been exported illegally beyond state borders, including
all kinds of artefacts from various periods, from the beginnings to the present day.
Two years later the UN’s Human Rights Council drew up a proposal to protect the
heritage of aboriginal peoples, defining heritage as everything and anything that
an ethnic group believed to possess or to be characteristic of their identity—leaving
the drafting of a final definition entirely up to the community in question.
Meanwhile more and more states signed up to the various agreements.
Economic and other (largely media-driven) motives led to greater attention
being channelled towards the objects that were subject to those agreements,
especially objects which in one way or another could be classified as objets
d’art. Rising demand for such objects brought an unforeseen proliferation of
definitions for what an art object might be. Abstruse scientific questions
suddenly came into the limelight, while, at the other end of the scale, broad
debate emerged over familiar moral dilemmas of ownership. Alongside legal
ways for obtaining highly desirable and marketable objects, there were illegal
ones, too. These were diverse and growing in number. Objects attributed to
Antiquity were highly sought after on the market from the very beginning. Their
illegal trade promised fat profits, so the most widely known way of acquiring
them, through illegal excavation, began to spread. Obviously there are no exact
data, but it is safe to say that since the adoption of the UNESCO Convention of
1970, trade in objects which surfaced via illegal excavations has grown.
[...]
János György Szilágyi
has been associated with the Department of Classical Antiquities of the Museum of
Fine Arts in Budapest since 1947. Head of the Department between 1951–1992;
since his retirement he has continued as a Senior Researcher.
An internationally acknowledged authority on Etruscan vases, he has published widely
on many aspects of his field, his major work being
Ceramica etrusco-corinzia figurata, 2 vols., Florence, 1992, 1998.
