Time was when European imperial powers assumed that theft and despoliation of cultural treasures from more fragile countries could be carried out with immunity. This is why, in the 21st century, the issue of looted art from the colonial era refuses to go away. In recent years some governments have begun to resolve this imperial legacy.

At the outset of his premiership Tony Blair tried to kick-start an initiative to send back human remains of the aborigines of Australia which had been removed against their wishes – often for spurious ‘scientific’ purposes with the intention of using brain measurement to prove the superiority of whites over blacks. It proved highly successful and helped stimulate what is now an increasing number of cooperation agreements around the world and has resulted in many looted objects being returned to ‘first peoples’ to whom they are meaningful and precious. Other countries, Italy in particular, have used the full extent of their legal powers to promote arrangements with US museums who are now in the process of returning disputed objects.

Simultaneously a set of official initiatives on Holocaust looted art has produced positive results in returning art to their rightful owners; while international organisations – UNESCO and ICOM (the International Council on Museums) – are making real progress on constructing a global code of conduct over the restitution of disputed cultural objects. But this restitution process has not yet produced sufficient impetus to initiate serious discussions over the future of the Parthenon marbles. For years the British Museum’s line was that the Greeks had nowhere to look after them; with the New Acropolis Museum now about to open in Athens, that line of reasoning has been quietly dropped and a new one has appeared – context.

The fragmented Parthenon frieze is currently split into two collections simply because Lord Elgin only managed to saw off half of the frieze, much of it into fragments.  The British Museum trustees now tell us on their website that maintaining the division and fragmentation of the frieze is justified by a global context in Bloomsbury and local one in Athens.

Neil MacGregor, the British Museum director, recently applied the same contextual ‘logic’ to the Benin Bronzes. These priceless artefacts were looted in 1897, by a punitive military expedition to destroy the city of Benin – purportedly to avenge to death of a British consul but actually to ensure Britain’s control of trade in the area. (Stories of the expedition stimulated Conrad to write The Heart of Darkness). MacGregor’s reasoning in his centenary address in January was that if scholars could prove that the bronzes came from copper which had been traded by the British into Benin, his museum would have the right to keep them. In other words, in ethical terms, phoney legalistic ‘ownership’ always trumps colonial spoliation. In the Museums Journal, Felicity Heywood described MacGregor’s tortured argument as ‘desperate and convoluted’. Others might add that it exudes imperial nostalgia.

Happily, the argument about disputed cultural objects has recently resulted in a spate of books, among which “Loot”, by Sharon Waxman gets closest to the core of the problem. In a nutshell, she insists that the current “politics of possession” should be replaced by a “culture of cooperation”. Although the British Museum trustees are not yet convinced, the British public (to whom the Trustees often say they are responsible) disagree. Polling results from UK citizens consistently indicate a substantial majority for sending them back.

If Neil MacGregor and Demitri Pandermalis, the Acropolis museum director, sat down to negotiate in earnest, in due course a deal could be struck. This could earn respect for both museums and would not be seen as a victory or a defeat for either. Such a deal would need imagination by the negotiators and courage by each of the two governments to make compromises. Pressure of public opinion worldwide could then probably do the rest; and real progress would have been made towards abandoning the relics of cultural colonialism and improving cultural cooperation between museums and governments worldwide.

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