Valorization of World Cultural Heritage in Time of Globalization: Bridges Between Nations and Cultural Power

Abstract

The 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention is the most recognized normative tool at the international level in terms of safeguarding and preservation of the cultural and natural heritage. In 2009, the World Heritage List¹ counted 890² cultural and natural goods with “outstanding universal value” distributed in 148 States Parties. This growing List in the course of decades marks a political awareness on behalf of States Parties manifesting a diplomatic will to make heritages of the earth a geopolitical stake in dialogue and in peace between cultures. In 1994, the Committee of the World Heritage launched its “global strategy for a balanced, representative and credible World Heritage List.”³ The fact that Europe and North America had the strongest concentration of registered sites, the representation of the cultural and natural diversity with “universal and exceptional value” was not exactly in compliance with the foundational text of 1972. The List has to be balanced and made consistent with cultural and natural plurality created by the human beings and nature on a world level. Since then, the new orientations and the initiatives coordinated by the World Heritage Center aim this way so that the l east-represented categories⁴ of heritages, as the natural landscapes, the forests, the deserts and the geologic sites, or certain geographical zones can be revalued. This slow progression toward heritage as a factor of development and socioeconomic resources was formed and structured in parallel with the great political changes and the new geopolitical orientations in Europe and in the world.