UNESCO is a failure, How About a Market based Appraoch?

UNESCO has failed in many respects. Certainly the efforts to combat the transfer of illicit cultural property have born no fruit based on what everyone is saying. So why continue to support something that hasn't worked and will not work? Nation States are no longer primarily interested in preventing new looting, they are interested in repatriation of cultural heritage, the latter nothing more than cultural nationalism.

The Ambassador of Cyprus, Andreas Kakouris, stated "It may be your hobby, but it's our heritage." when talking about import restrictions. (Seattle Times Dec 2, 2007). This has been well discussed but it's important to remember that Cyprus considers the restricted objects to be theirs.

We also recently had the big kerfuffle about the bronze heads that China wanted repatriated. It didn't matter that the objects were made by Europeans for a oppressive minority government that oppressed the majority. Richard Spencer has written about this here. But the facts are not so important to the Chinese, what matters is the myth of cultural nationalism as told by the current government.

Other governments like Italy and Egypt are also playing the repatriation game, claiming that our heritage really belongs to them. UNESCO has done nothing to curb this neo-nationalism while at the same time it has failed to curb looting. UNESCO fails to protect minority cultures within nation states as well as immovable cultural objects like the statues in Afghanistan. It seems to be that all UNESCO is doing is enabling nations to use artifacts as propaganda to weave whatever nationalistic myths they feel like creating this century.

Luckily there are alternatives. Yesterday I happened across this blog entry. It's referencing a discussion of a Milken report "Financial Innovations for Developing Archaeological Discovery and Conservation" which looks at some potential market based solutions to the problems. The report can be downloaded here. An excerpt from the conclusion "To ensure legal archaeological discovery and conservation, the stakes must change and the players must be given incentives to alter their current perspectives. All market participants, from looters and collectors to archaeologists and museum
curators, must broaden their preconceived notions about right and wrong, and what constitutes preservation."