On her book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace
Cover Interview of February 06, 2019
A close-up
I would like readers to look closely at UNESCO’s high-profile
Nubian Monuments Campaign, coming as it did right after the disastrous Suez
crisis. In the twilight of empire, during just over a week in late 1956,
Britain and France followed Israel in invading Egypt. The three nations
colluded to wrest the Suez Canal from Egyptian control and remove Gamal Abdel
Nasser from power. With the major powers again poised on the brink of war and
set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Arab nationalism, and Arab–Israeli
tensions, UNESCO attempted its most monumental project of global cooperation.
The Rescue of the Nubian Monuments and Sites (1959-1980) fully realized
UNESCO’s central message of world citizenship from its very bedrock. It paired
the ideals of the liberal imperialist past and its cultural particularism
embodied in ancient Egypt with UNESCO’s own inherently Western promise of a new
scientific, technocratic, postnational future.
So much has been written about UNESCO’s Nubian Monuments
Campaign over the years: from the heroism and humanism promoted by the agency’s
own vast propaganda machine to the competing narratives of national saviors,
whether French or American; from Nubia as a theater for the Cold War right down
to individual accounts by technocrats, bureaucrats, and archaeologists.
Therefore, it would seem that there is little new to say. Yet if one recenters
UNESCO’s foundational utopian promise, couples it with its technocratic
counterpart, international assistance, then adds the challenge of a one-world
archaeology focused on the greatest civilization of the ancient world, we might
produce a new slant on a future in ruins.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I would like readers to look closely at UNESCO’s high-profile Nubian Monuments Campaign, coming as it did right after the disastrous Suez crisis. In the twilight of empire, during just over a week in late 1956, Britain and France followed Israel in invading Egypt. The three nations colluded to wrest the Suez Canal from Egyptian control and remove Gamal Abdel Nasser from power. With the major powers again poised on the brink of war and set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Arab nationalism, and Arab–Israeli tensions, UNESCO attempted its most monumental project of global cooperation. The Rescue of the Nubian Monuments and Sites (1959-1980) fully realized UNESCO’s central message of world citizenship from its very bedrock. It paired the ideals of the liberal imperialist past and its cultural particularism embodied in ancient Egypt with UNESCO’s own inherently Western promise of a new scientific, technocratic, postnational future.
So much has been written about UNESCO’s Nubian Monuments Campaign over the years: from the heroism and humanism promoted by the agency’s own vast propaganda machine to the competing narratives of national saviors, whether French or American; from Nubia as a theater for the Cold War right down to individual accounts by technocrats, bureaucrats, and archaeologists. Therefore, it would seem that there is little new to say. Yet if one recenters UNESCO’s foundational utopian promise, couples it with its technocratic counterpart, international assistance, then adds the challenge of a one-world archaeology focused on the greatest civilization of the ancient world, we might produce a new slant on a future in ruins.