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"Cultural property internationalism" is shorthand for the proposition that everyone has an interest in the preservation and enjoyment of cultural property, wherever it is situated, from whatever cultural or geographic source it derives. In the frequently quoted words of the 1954 Hague Convention, cultural property is "the cultural heritage of all mankind." In an earlier article I briefly described and contrasted "cultural internationalism" and "cultural nationalism," as they concern cultural property. Here I return to cultural property internationalism, describing its historical development and its expression in the international law of war, in the work of UNESCO, and in the international trade in cultural objects.
What is "cultural property?" It sometimes seems that any human artifact (matchbook covers? baseball cards? fruit box labels? perfume bottles?) can qualify. Most people, however, will discriminate, reserving the "cultural property" title for a more limited range of objects that are distinguishable from the ordinary run of artifacts by their special cultural significance and/or rarity. Any attempt at a definition will reveal that the cultural property category is heterogeneous. The problems created by including Matisse paintings, archaic Chinese bronzes, and African masks in the same "cultural property" category are not pursued here, although such disparities clearly must, at some level, eventually require distinctive treatment. As cultural property law and policy are currently structured, however, that process has barely begun. The UNESCO instruments described later in this article, for example, typically define "cultural property" to include anything and everything and treat the category as a collective unit. Much source nation legislation is similarly structured. Most recently, a practical distinction between antiquities and other cultural objects seems to have emerged.
The cultural property category is also amorphous and boundless. Thus the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects applies to objects "which, on religious or secular grounds, are of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science [what else is there?] and belong to one of the categories listed in the Annex to this Convention."
Empirically, cultural property centrally includes the sorts of things that dealers deal in, collectors collect, and museums acquire and display: principally works of art, antiquities, and ethnographic objects. These are the foci of a social subsystem we can call "the cultural property world," which...