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 “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...
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