Nefertiti, a big pawn in antiquities chess game.

AP / Markus Schreiber

BERLIN — As thousands lined up to catch a glimpse of Nefertiti at the newly reopened Neues Museum here, another skirmish erupted in the culture wars. Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, announced that his country wanted its queen handed back forthwith, unless Germany could prove that the 3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten’s wife wasn’t spirited illegally out of Egypt nearly a century ago.

“We’re not treasure hunters,” Hawass told Spiegel Online. “If it’s proven clearly that the work was not stolen,” he said, “there shouldn’t be any problem.”

Then he said he was sure the work had been stolen.

Globalization, it turns out, has only intensified, not diminished, cultural differences among nations. The forces of nationalism love to exploit culture because it’s symbolic, economically potent and couches identity politics in a legal context that tends to pit David against Goliath.

Hawass also recently fired a shot at France, demanding the Louvre return five fresco fragments it purchased in 2000 and 2003 from a gallery and at auction. They belonged to a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor and had been in storage at the museum. Egypt had made the demand before, but this time suspended the Louvre’s long-term excavation at Saqqara, near Cairo, and said it would stop collaborating on Louvre exhibitions.

France got the message. It promised to send the fragments back tout de suite.

Over the years Egypt has occasionally made a bid for Nefertiti, when the political climate is ripe. Germans point out that Ludwig Borchardt, who discovered Nefertiti at Tel el Amarna in 1912, had Egyptian approval to take it to Berlin. Just the other day, Iraq repeated its demand that Germany return the Gate of Ishtar from the ancient city of Babylon, shipped to Berlin before World War I.

In Iraq’s case, the government seems to be wagering that German ambivalence about the current war may help swing popular opinion here about giving back the gate, just as Saddam Hussein’s regime played the repatriation card in 2002 as a tactic in negotiating with the United Nations over letting weapons inspectors into the country.

For the Egyptian public, repatriation of antiquities plays to popular sentiment and national pride. While the art world likes to ponder the merits or misfortunes of seeing art from one place in another place or the inequities that have resulted from centuries of imperialist collecting, the real issue behind the Egyptian claims, as with so many others, is nationalism.

Laws are laws, of course, and looting can’t be tolerated, although when decades or centuries have passed, laws have changed, populations shifted, empires come and gone, legal arguments can be dubious. But the larger truth is that all patrimony arguments ultimately live or die in the morally murky realm of global relations, meaning that modern governments like Egypt’s and Iraq’s may win sympathy today by counting on Western guilt about colonialism. At the same time there’s no international clamor for Russia to return storerooms of treasures it stole from Germany at the end of the war, or, for that matter, for Sweden to fork over the spoils of a war 350 years ago with Denmark. It’s about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy.

The vagaries of realpolitik, and a shifting sense of justice, determine these things.