The Korean Odyssey

* The United Nations members who participated in the Korean War are standing.   @iStock   Il Young Jeong Research Professor_Institute of Social Sciences_Sogang University The Korean War did not end, but rather ‘concluded’ with a mutual cessation of hostilities. Under the armistice agreement, the Cold War endured on the peninsula with the trilateral alliance between the US, South Korea, and Japan on one side and the North Korea-China-Russia trilateral alliance on the other. While the dissolution of the Soviet Union may have ended the Cold War in Europe, the Cold War persisted on the peninsula.  In this chapter, we will look at how South Korea’s policies regarding North Korea have evolved since the end of the Korean War and how the US-ROK alliance has responded to the problems that have arisen in pursuit of these policies.   South Korea’s “Nordpolitik” Policy and the End of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union As the Cold War between the United State...

The “National Community Unification Formula" refers to the South Korean government’s official unification plan put forth by then-President Kim Young-sam on August 15, 1994. The plan is best known for its three-stage formula:  1) reconciliation and cooperation, 2) confederation, and 3) unification.

The Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University and the Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU) both conduct regular surveys on attitudes towards unification. To the best of my knowledge, these reports are only available in Korean. 2022 Surveys:  Seoul University      KINU

Excellent table with these figures and additional analysis in " National Identity and Attitudes Toward North Korean Defectors " by Jiyoon Kim (KEIA)

For readers interested in a full analysis of the history and evolution of the "minjok" concept , this author highly recommends Gi-wook Shin's "Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy." (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

The “minjok” (민족, 民族) is a key concept for all Korea watchers, but can be difficult to slot neatly into Western frameworks of statehood and nationality. The concept of “minjok” arose contemporaneous to Woodrow Wilson’s “self-determination,” the idea that a people sharing an established territory, common language, history, culture, and race have a right to sovereignty and statehood. This last point is perhaps the most controversial since it fails to account for ethnically heterogeneous melting-pot nations, including the United States itself. The early notion of Korean nationhood that arose during the Korean Independence movement focused on these shared characteristics of Korean-ness, especially race (perhaps in direct response to the race-based rhetoric of the Japanese colonizers). The Korean minjok is an ideal of the Korean people, an ethnically homogeneous group that despite a long history of influence under the Chinese and Japanese remained ethnically pure with a distinct language an...

For those who can read Korean, KDI has a comprehensive and detailed breakdown of the North Korean government's overall revenue structure here . For English language writing on the various ways the North Korean government taxes its citizens despite the country having formally abolished taxes, I shamelessly suggest my own article on 38 North .

Inminbanjang, typically middle-aged married women, are the heads of housing unit blocks (called inminban). The inminbanjang is responsible for reporting on the comings and goings of residents, monitoring for improper behavior, and mobilizing households for various social tasks.

Homeless children, generally orphans. The term originated during the Arduous march period, but has since expanded in definition to generally encompass wandering homeless individuals, including adults and the elderly.

  The “Soviet faction” was largely composed of Soviet-Koreans who had entered the Peninsula during the Soviet occupation towards the end of WWII and entered the North Korean Communist Party on the basis of their membership in the Soviet Communist Party. The “Yan’an faction” refers to Koreans who had fought against the Japanese in the Yan’an area of China alongside the Chinese Communist Party.

For the skeptics, I will share a more concrete example. Group chats play a pivotal role in connecting North Korean defectors living in different Chinese rural villages. Many of these women are unable to leave their neighborhoods or even houses, but the digital space fostered in these group chats has created a sense of community for isolated, vulnerable defectors. Moreover, these women live in high-surveillance environments (by their Chinese families and the local police), demonstrating that these digital spaces are possible and constructive even under restrictive conditions. Read one example here .

Some nuclear scholars, such as Kenneth Waltz, argue that nuclear proliferation might actually prevent conflict by drastically heightening the risk of even small conflict. For those interested in the different arguments surrounding nuclear arms reduction and proliferation, I highly recommend "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed" by Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz. (Stanford University Press, 2002)

India (1974) and Pakistan (1998) are also well-established members of the nuclear club but are not party to the NPT since they believe its terms are discriminatory. Israel does not formally acknowledge the existence of its program. Former nuclear nations include South Africa (program dismantled in 1989) and Ukraine (nuclear weapons removed following collapse of the USSR).

The 1994 Agreed Framework came towards the end of North Korea’s nuclear development and is often considered the United States’ last chance to halt the North’s nuclear program. In exchange for freezing its nuclear weapons program and submit to IAEA inspections, the US agreed to help North Korea resolve the “energy problems” ostensibly driving the North’s pursuit of nuclear energy, first by providing oil and later by constructing tamper-proof nuclear reactors. While the North did temporarily freeze plutonium production and the construction of two new reactors, both sides soon fell through on the deal. While it is difficult to know if North Korea ever truly ceased its operations, it did begin secretly enriching uranium shortly after the agreement and was caught out by intelligence officials under the Bush administration, which opted to void the agreement altogether rather than try to negotiate to save the deal.

Roh Tae-woo was president of South Korea from 1988 to 1993 and is generally regarded as the first democratically elected President of South Korea. One of Roh’s best-known policies was his “Nordpolitik” foreign policy strategy in which he worked to establish economic and diplomatic relations with the “Northern” (Communist) nations, including the communist nations of East Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. This policy boosted South Korea’s own position in the world order while North Korea, which failed to successfully make similar overtures to the US and Japan, became further isolated following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The normalization of diplomatic relations with other Communist countries would go on to set the stage for Roh’s successor Kim Dae Jung and his “Sunshine Policy,” which emphasized cooperation over coercion.