Roh Tae-Woo and “Nordpolitik”

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.

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Minjok

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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The Korean Odyssey

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