Abstract
On the margins of Lynn Meskell’s history of UNESCO’s world heritage efforts is an intriguing thought experiment: how might UNESCO’s world heritage efforts have fared differently had archaeology (Meskell’s own discipline) remained at the core of the organization? For, as Meskell argues in her fascinating account, archaeology once animated UNESCO’s early ethos. What happened? This was the question that sparked Meskell’s curiosity and research, resulting in an elegant study of how an earlier vision of UNESCO—one characterized by the idealism of intellectuals—fell prey to technocracy, bureaucracy, and intergovernmental politicking.
A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace lays out a history of the modern world heritage movement in eight chapters, moving chronologically from the 1940s to the present. The chapters bookending the work, respectively titled ‘Utopia’ and ‘Dystopia’, suggest a rise and fall story, and yet Meskell tells no simple tale. She is as attentive to the skewed worldview of the European intellectuals whose ideals spurred the world heritage movement as she is to the intervening political, bureaucratic, and cultural developments that twisted those ideals into new forms. Throughout, Meskell proves a trustworthy guide through the thicket of committees, conventions, and campaigns that have defined World Heritage at the international level. At once insider and sceptic, her final verdict—that UNESCO would do well to remember its origins, even if the dream of peace is elusive—convinces precisely due to her questioning stance.
Meskell builds an exemplary work of international history of World Heritage by weaving together case studies from around the world—from the Nile River to Venice’s canals and from Panama City’s old town to the plains of Anatolia—yet equally anchors the story in the corridors (and, in one memorable passage, in the basement) of UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The framing allows for a wide-ranging assessment of World Heritage’s many characters and components over the years. Chapter 1 introduces the idealistic but fleeting first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, who formulated a pair of twin precepts for the fledgling organization: world peace and scientific humanism. Himself fascinated by the deep past, Huxley sought leading archaeologists—Leonard Woolley, Mortimer Wheeler, and Kathleen Kenyon—to collaborate with UNESCO. The goal was nothing short of the bid to ‘build peace in the minds of men’ through study of the ancient past and proof of humanity’s ‘one-worldism’ (p. 11).
The intellectual (and Eurocentric) internationalism that undergirded Huxley’s vision was not to last. As Meskell charts in Chapter 2, UNESCO’s global campaign in the early 1960s to save ancient Nubian monuments from flooding revealed a trend toward technocracy. Archaeologists now played only a peripheral role in salvage work along the Nile River, while civil engineers took the lead on the (spectacular) removal of entire temples. This shift to technicalism, which grows more pronounced in Meskell’s subsequent Chapters 3 and 4, was codified in UNESCO’s landmark World Heritage Convention of 1972 and concretized in the World Heritage Center opened at headquarters in 1992. Those same milestones also revealed the organization’s full embrace of bureaucracy, a development that Meskell links both to a technocratic effort to legitimate modern monuments preservation work and the manoeuvring among UNESCO Member States to inscribe sites on the World Heritage List (and support or undermine each other’s nominations).
It is perhaps this latter element of World Heritage at UNESCO that comes through as most dispiriting in Meskell’s account (though also perhaps hardly surprising, given similar revelations in other historical treatments of world organizations such as the WHO and ILO). In Chapter 5, ‘Inscription’, Meskell takes us into the rooms where voluminous nomination dossiers are considered by the World Heritage Committee. Here we get a clear-eyed view of which multi-country voting blocs support each other, how votes are wheeled and dealt to get sites on the World Heritage List, and why Member States strive for ‘World Heritage branding’. In analyzing the nominating dossier to inscribe France’s Causses and Cévennes Cultural Landscape on the List, Meskell finds an alliance at work of national government, business interests, and nature conservancies to brand this ‘bijou tourist destination’ with the validity of World Heritage status (p. 129). Ultimately, she asserts, such status offers an ‘incredibly pliant mechanism’ that is lucrative and powerful (p. 123).
World Heritage is powerful, but the status has also proved Janus-faced, a point Meskell makes in her final three chapters. She describes in Chapter 6 how World Heritage has increasingly come to serve as a cultural weapon of erasure by some governments, an untoward development that Meskell examines in her sensitive account of Turkey’s nomination of the medieval site of Ani—a former Armenian town once known for its ‘1,001 churches’. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on Syria and Mali, respectively, and offer a perceptive critique of the perils that can come with being UNESCO branded, as well as the Eurocentric worldview that pervades the popular, political, and legal response when that heritage comes under attack. This present nature of World Heritage is bitterly ironic given its utopian origins, a fact that imbues this fine book and commends it especially to readers interested in the twentieth-century history of intellectuals, heritage, internationalism, intergovernmental organizations, and cultural diplomacy and soft power.