In January 2022 theAustrian government established an expert committee to study the colonial heritage in its federal museums. Although Austria is a country not considered to have an extensive colonial past, Austrian museums hold large collections of ethnographic objects and human remains that they acquired during the heydays of colonialism. This country report introduces the current restitution debate in Austria through a legal lens. It discusses the legal situation of cultural objects from colonial contexts and the instruments available to museums and the federal government to organize restitutions and formulate rules. From a comparative law perspective, the specific history of Austria might turn the currently-evolving Austrian approach into an interesting example for other countries with public holdings of cultural objects from colonial contexts but without a history of direct colonialism.

This book analyses the development of the norms of protecting cultural heritage from a postcolonial perspective. In contrast to the traditional historiography of ‘culture’ in international law, it reveals how the highly problematic and Eurocentric ‘standard of civilisation’ in the 19th and 20th centuries served as a driving force for the formation of cultural heritage protection norms. Various actors used the law in different ways to take part in this discourse on ‘civilisation’. The aim of this book is to lay down a new narrative on the history of the protection of world cultural heritage. It endeavours to replace the inherent politics of the dominant narrative on progress with a critical genealogy which reveals the long-lasting hegemonic structures of today’s international law. Sebastian M. Spitra is a research fellow at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna and a Grotius fellow at the University of Michigan Law School.

This article provides a new narrative for the history of cultural heritage law and seeks to contribute to current legal debates about the restitution of cultural objects. The modern protection laws for cultural objects in domestic and international law evolved in the 19th and 20th century. The article makes three new arguments regarding the emergence of this legal regime. First, ‘civilisation’ was a main concept and colonialism an integral part of the international legal system during the evolution of the regime. The Eurocentric concept of civilisation has so far been an ignored catalyst for the international development of cultural heritage norms. Second, different states and actors used cultural heritage laws and their inherent connection to the concept of civilisation for different purposes. Third, the international legal system of cultural heritage partly still reflects its colonial roots. The current restitution discussions are an outcome of this ongoing problematic legal constellation.

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