Prohibiting Plunder How Norms Change

by Sandholtz, Wayne

• ISBN13: 9780195337235
• ISBN10: 0195337239
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-31
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

For much of history, the rules of war decreed that "to the victor go the spoils." The winners in warfare routinely seized for themselves the artistic and cultural treasures of the defeated; plunder constituted a marker of triumph. By the twentieth century, international norms declared theopposite, that cultural monuments should be shielded from destruction or seizure. Prohibiting Plunder traces and explains the emergence of international rules against wartime looting of cultural treasures, and explores how anti-plunder norms have developed over the past 200 years. The book covershighly topical events including the looting of thousands of antiquities from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, and the return of "Holocaust Art" by prominent museums, including the highly publicized return of five Klimt paintings from the Austrian Gallery to a Holocaust survivor. The historical narrative includes first-hand reports, official documents, and archival records. Equally important, the book uncovers the debates and negotiations that produced increasingly clear and well-defined anti-plunder norms. The historical accounts in Prohibiting Plunder serve as confirmingexamples of an important dynamic of international norm change. Rules evolve in cycles; in each cycle, specific actions trigger arguments about the meaning and application of rules, and those arguments in turn modify the rules. International norms evolve through a succession of such cycles, each onedrawing on previous developments and each one reshaping the normative context for subsequent actions and disputes. Prohibiting Plunder shows how historical episodes interlinked to produce modern, treaty-based rules against wartime plunder of cultural treasures.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. VII
List of Figures	p. XI
International Norm Change	p. 1
Plunder and the Spoils of Victory	p. 31
Napoleonic Plunder and the Emergence of Norms	p. 47
The International Law Activists: Elaborating Norms in the Nineteenth Century	p. 71
The Great War and the Protection of Art	p. 101
Nazi Plunder: Strengthening the Rules	p. 127
Codifying Norms: Nuremberg and the Hague	p. 167
War in the 1990s: Crimes against Cultural Heritage	p. 191
Repercussions of Nazi Plunder: Internalizing International Norms	p. 211
Baghdad and Beyond	p. 241
Dynamics of International Norm Change	p. 261
References	p. 273
Index	p. 327
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