Protection and Preservation of Cultural Heritage in the Netherlands in the 21st Century

The academic analysis of the protection of cultural heritage is currently experiencing a paradigm shift from a compartmentalised approach focusing on physical protection of tangible cultural objects towards a more integrated approach of dealing with cultural heritage. The protection of cultural property emerged as an academic field of interest only in the 1970s and initially focused on studying existing legal instruments for the protection of cultural property, the geo-political background against which they had emerged, as well as the drafting of new national and international legal instruments. This traditional or classical approach to analysing the protection of cultural property is marked by a strict compartmentalisation employing a number of dichotomies: source nation vs. market nation;1 the protection of cultural property in times of war vs. times of peace; the restitution of cultural objects looted in times of war vs. the return of cultural objects (illegally) removed from a country, the protection of immovable cultural property