The International Normative Framework of Looted Art Restitution

• In Event: The Nexus between Transitional Justice and International Norms

Abstract

Over the past few years, campaigns for restitution of art looted during colonial occupations and now displayed in major world museums, have received much attention. Continuing debates about the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Greece, the Benin Bronzes from Britain, France, Germany, and other countries to Nigeria, the Maqdala treasures from Britain to Ethiopia and so on, have captured much public attention. These restitution campaigns gained further international political momentum with the 2017 announcement by the French president Emmanuel Macron that return of art looted by French colonial administrations in Africa should all be returned. The campaigns for art restitution, however, are not new, and the normative framework on which they stand has developed over time. While there have always been historical debates about the morality of art looting, even in antiquity, and certainly since the 18th century and Napoleon’s campaigns of art seizures throughout Europe and Egypt, I trace the contemporary development of the art restitution norm to the 1980s and the establishment of the so-called Washington Principles on Nazi-looted art. From this set of principles dealing with return of Holocaust looted art, a set of international rules and recommendations developed that now include a much broader set of demands for the return of colonial looted art. In this paper, I provide an account of how this normative framework historically developed, identify key international actors who helped promote, diffuse, and institutionalize it, and discuss the contestation the norm still produces in many states that claim that historically looted art has become their indelible national cultural heritage and is thus excluded from restitution claims.

Author

• Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University