This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international status-seeking. We advance a two-fold typology of status-seeking that explains why states engage in cultural heritage restoration practices at home and abroad. First, cultural heritage restoration can be an easy way to signal state respect of its multicultural past while providing cover for continuing anti-multicultural policies of the present. States with uncertain, challenged, or liminal international status use cultural heritage projects as a ‘standard of civilization’ of democracy, displaying themselves on the international stage as worthy of status and respect. Cultural heritage here is used as a strategy for international status affirmation. Second, states may engage in cultural heritage restoration beyond their borders, supporting or directly managing renovation of these sites in order to expand their imagined national cultural, political, and economic domain. Cultural heritage restoration projects here serve as a backdrop for powerful international economic alliances that can be used for status substitution—replacing one status-generating benchmark of ‘standard of civilization’ with another—economic prosperity. We illustrate these arguments with two recent cases of cultural heritage restoration that involve Turkey: the ‘Akdamar’ Church in Van, Turkey and the Tomb of Gül Baba in Budapest, Hungary.

本文探讨了文化遗产政治与寻求国际地位之间的关系。我们提出了两种寻求身份的类型，这解释了为什么国家在国内外从事文化遗产的恢复活动。首先，文化遗产的恢复可能是表达国家对其多元文化过去的尊重的一种简便方法，同时为当前的持续反多元文化政策提供掩护。具有不确定，受到挑战或处于边缘地位的国家将文化遗产项目作为民主的“文明标准”，在国际舞台上表现出自己的地位和尊重。这里的文化遗产被用作确认国际地位的策略。其次，各州可能会进行国境之外的文化遗产修复，支持或直接管理这些遗址的翻新，以扩大其想象中的国家文化，政治和经济领域。这里的文化遗产修复项目为强大的国际经济联盟提供了背景，这些联盟可以用来替代地位，即用一种产生地位的“文明标准”基准代替另一种经济繁荣。我们通过两个最近涉及土耳其的文化遗产修复案例来说明这些论点：土耳其范市的“ Akdamar”教堂和匈牙利布达佩斯的古尔巴巴墓。