Amid Tightening of Cultural Protections Worldwide, Austria Proposes New Restitution Laws

The Austrian government has announced plans to propose a new law requiring museums to return objects acquired in a colonial context by March 2024, the culture secretary, Andrea Mayer, said at a press conference Tuesday.

According to Mayer, the proposed law intends to establish an “orderly, consistent and comprehensive” protocol for restitution claims. “The rulers of European countries long viewed large parts of the world as places where they could help themselves; they simply took artifacts and saw that as their natural right,” she said. “Calling out this injustice and following it up with serious debate and concrete actions is Austria’s responsibility too.”

Jonathan Fine, the scientific director of the Weltmuseum in Vienna and head of a government-appointed advisory committee, has called for a “intellectually and culturally diverse” evaluation board dedicated to restitution claims. The Austrian government would base its ruling on the findings of the committee, per a report released today by the committee. Each return, the report stressed, would be assessed on a  “state-to-state basis”. 

Over the past decade, Austria has tightened its cultural protection legislation in the aim to thwart the trafficking of looted artifacts and provide a more efficient means of returning objects taken under suspect circumstances to their rightful owners. The effort has been met with a mixed reception: In 2016, a draft supplement to Austrian cultural patrimony legislation was criticized for failing to revise a paragraph which promised buyers “the undisturbed right to possess an object and to offer it on the international art market without later being confronted with claims for restitution.” 

At that time, each member of the European Union was—to varying degrees of public resistance—updating its cultural protections to meet new European Union directives on illegally seized heritage; the 1993 Monument Protection Act was tightened in 2014, followed by the 2015 ratification of the UNESCO convention of 1970.

Austria’s advisory committee broadly defines objects eligible for restitution as those whose owners “did not wish to part with them at the time they were collected”, which covers contexts such as “violence, looting, theft, coercion”. According to Fine, “very many” of the 200,000 objects in the Weltmuseum’s holdings likely meet those conditions. 

In the 1800s, while under the Habsburg Monarchy, Austria attempted to establish colonies in Africa and South East and East Asia. Austria could never rival the imperial might of its neighboring countries, however, its rulers were prodigious collectors of artifacts taken during colonial conflicts, and invested heavily in Christian missionary work.

“Colonial propaganda was reinforced, research into ‘race science’ intensified, and colonialist thinking and attitudes dominated public opinion,” the advisory committee wrote in its report. “As one of the successors to the Habsburg monarchy, the Republic of Austria has paid comparatively little attention to its predecessor’s colonial history.”