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 and culture on the Korean peninsula.
While the Wilsonian idea of self-determination would suggest that the two sides of the peninsula are now sufficiently divided in matters of politics, language, and culture to be truly two states, the race-rooted concept of minjok holds firm that the Korean people ought to be united and that facts of cultural and political differences are insubstantial in the face of a deeper and immutable commonality. This concept can be difficult to understand as an American with our own conceptions of race and nationhood, but it is important to understand to grasp one of the underlying compulsions for reunification, regardless of whether one “agrees” with the minjok concept. The concept is also notably used by both North and South and the term appears in reunification related media like South Korea’s “Hanminjok (One Minjok) radio” and North Korea’s “Uriminzokkiri (Just Between Our Minjok)” news site.
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