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South Korea and the US, 60 years on
By Charles K Armstrong
September 8 marks the 60th anniversary of
the arrival of US soldiers on the Korean peninsula
to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. There
will likely be little fanfare accompanying this
event. At the end of World War II, Koreans viewed
the Soviets and the Americans equally as
liberators, and neither occupation force was
expected to stay long on Korean soil. The special
relationship between South Korea and the United
States was forged by later events: the formation
of South Korea under American auspices in August
1948, the Korean War of 1950-53, and the Mutual
Defense Treaty of 1954.
The US-South
Korean alliance was, as the North Koreans and
Chinese like to say of their own relationship, a
"friendship cemented in blood", marked by memories
of shared sacrifice. It also involved the
stationing of tens of thousands of American troops
in South Korea. For more than 40 years, the
purpose of this alliance was seen by both sides as
clear and unambiguous: defending South Korea as
part of the "free world" against the threat of
North Korea, backed by China and the Soviet Union.
The loosening of Cold War alignments and
the Soviet collapse in the late 1980s and early
1990s problematized but did not fundamentally
alter this sense of shared purpose. But in the
last 10 years, and especially the last five, the
US and South Korea have drifted increasingly
farther apart in their views of the North Korean
threat and the nature of US-South Korean relations
more generally. While new, critical attitudes
toward the US in South Korea are often portrayed
in the Western media rather simplistically as
"anti-Americanism", in fact they reflect a
changing and increasingly complex relationship
between the US and Korea, between South and North
Korea, and between Korea and its regional
neighbors. The Cold War is, in fact, finally and
belatedly ending in and around the Korean
peninsula, and with it, so is the structure of
international relationships it created.
Unlike many other countries, Korea does
not commemorate August 15, 1945, as the end of a
war so much as the onset of liberation from
colonial rule. While "8-15" is a watershed event
in historical memory, other dates loom equally
large, if not larger: August 1948 (the founding of
the Republic of Korea, also known as South Korea);
June 1950 (the outbreak of the Korean War); and
July 1953 (the Korean War armistice). The 50th
anniversary of each of these, recently passed, has
been fraught with significance. In 1998, the 50th
anniversary of the founding of the republic, South
Korea was in the midst of the Asian financial
crisis and under the leadership of president Kim
Dae-jung, elected the previous December. South
Korea overcame this crisis, dubbed "Korea's worst
moment since the Korean War", but the sacrifices
demanded by the controversial International
Monetary Fund-bailout called into question South
Korea's "miracle economy" and the benevolence of
the US in assisting its Korean ally.
The
50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean
War, on June 25, 2000, was preceded 10 days
earlier by an unprecedented summit meeting in
Pyongyang between the leaders of the two Koreas,
Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung. Subsequently, for
the first time the June 25 celebrations in South
Korea were not marked by pageantry and parades but
by a more subdued acknowledgement of the war's
costs and consequences and hopeful messages about
ending the division that led to the war's
outbreak. The Kim-Kim summit was trumpeted as
"first steps toward unification"; the point, it
seemed, was no longer to win the war, but to end
it. Significantly, the inter-Korean summit marked
the first major step the two Korean governments
had taken toward improving their mutual
relationship at their own initiative, and served
not as a response to the actions of their allies.
For its part, the US, although officially
supporting inter-Korean dialogue, was relatively
cool toward Seoul's overtures to North Korea. Kim
Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with
the North would be strongly criticized in the
George W Bush administration that came into power
in 2001; at this point, the rift between South
Korea and the US became impossible to miss.
By the time of the anniversary of the end
of the Korean war in 1953, US-South Korea
relations were at their lowest point in history.
The nadir of the US-South Korean relationship came
in the winter of 2002-03, when tens of thousands
of Koreans participated in candlelight vigils
calling for US accountability in the deaths of two
schoolgirls accidentally killed by American
military vehicles. This action was embedded in a
broader sense of unease and ambivalence about
Korea's relationship with the United States, and
especially about the US military presence. The
Bush administration's belligerent rhetoric toward
North Korea played no small part in this, but it
was exacerbated by the war in Iraq, which many saw
as a chilling precedent for an attack on North
Korea, identified by President Bush, along with
Iraq and Iran, as part of an "axis of evil".
In a country that had been almost unique
in its overwhelmingly pro-American popular opinion
a generation earlier, statistics reflected a sharp
change of attitude. For example, a poll by the
Joongang Ilbo newspaper, taken in December 2002,
revealed that 36.4% of South Koreans viewed the US
unfavorably, only 13% favorably, and 50% were
neutral. Within these statistics, there were
striking differences according to age: only among
those in the over-50 age group did the majority
express a favorable opinion. Furthermore, 62% of
South Koreans in their 20s and 72% in their 30s
wanted to restructure the US-South Korean alliance
to make it more equal; only 21% of those in their
60s agreed with this (see Anti-Americanism all the rage in
South Korea , December 20, 2002).
Again, there is more going on here than
simply the general rise of "anti-Americanism".
Several factors have contributed to this changing
Korean attitude toward the US, 60 years after
liberation from Japanese colonialism. First, there
has been a generational change with the rise to
power of the "386" generation (Koreans in their
30s, who entered university in the 1980s and were
born in the 1960s), who came of age in the era of
democratic protest, a time when criticism of the
authoritarian South Korean governments and of the
Americans who had backed them went hand-in-hand.
With the rise of this generation came the decline
in influence of the conservative and reflexively
pro-US political establishment that had dominated
South Korean politics since liberation. While the
current conservative opposition is by no means
insignificant, it seems unlikely that a simplistic
"pro-Americanism" will ever return as the dominant
mode in South Korea.
Second, there has
been the growth of a vocal and critical civil
society, and with it a re-examination of
historical events and memories both by the
government and various non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). Historical investigation
commissions have been formed to examine various
aspects of the Japanese colonial period, as well
as events in which the US played a direct or
indirect role: the Kwangju Massacre of 1980; the
bloody suppression of the Cheju Island uprising in
April 1948; missing persons from the period of
military rule and so on, inspired in part by
similar such commissions formed in the
post-authoritarian states of South Africa,
Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.
Significantly, investigators are probing not only
the role of the US, but also that of the former
South Korean government and citizens. Citizens'
activism and participatory democracy have become
part of the political landscape and the everyday
vocabulary of today's South Korea, with the
explosive growth of NGOs, many quite critical of
US policy. The organization of such groups and
activities has been greatly facilitated by the use
of the Internet, in which South Korea ranks among
the highest in the world, and the concomitant rise
of what Koreans call "netizens", new
citizen-reporters.
Third, with the
relative decline of South Koreans' sense of
affinity with the US, there has been a strong turn
toward Asia, especially China but also, in complex
ways, Japan. China has replaced the US as South
Korea's largest trading partner; more Korean
students now study in China than in America; South
Korean popular culture has become all the rage in
Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, while Japanese
culture - long banned by Seoul - has taken off in
South Korea. On the other hand, the current
dispute over Tokdo/Takeshima islets, as well as
the controversy over the Japanese textbook issue
and war memories more generally, reflect
underlying differences between South Korea and
Japan that need to be resolved before relations
between the two countries can become stable and
friendly over the long term. And yet, despite
these tensions, South Koreans have increasingly
warmed to the idea of an East Asian free-trade
area, and even a European Union-style economic and
political community, although these may be only be
a distant dream at this point.
Finally,
South Korean views of North Korea have changed
markedly in recent years and stand in striking
contrast to the hardline policy of the Bush
administration. While there are many differences
within South Korea about how to deal with the
North, there is a growing consensus that
North-South cooperation is beneficial to both
sides, that gradual reunification is preferable to
sudden collapse and absorption of North Korea by
the South, that the North Korean threat can be
managed, and that it is better to change North
Korea's undesirable behavior by persuasion rather
than coercion. Such views in broad form are shared
across much of the political spectrum in South
Korea, including the conservative Grand National
Party, led by Park Geun-hye, daughter of former
South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee. The Bush
Administration approaches North Korea very
differently, creating a deep unease among many in
South Korea.
One hears that the Korean
peninsula is the last outpost of the Cold War, but
that may be true only for Americans. For a growing
number of South Koreans, their cold war - a
North-South conflict that began in the aftermath
of colonial liberation and destroyed the universal
hope for a peaceful, independent and unified
post-colonial Korea - is already over. Sixty years
marks the end of a life cycle in East Asian
tradition, a time for reflection, re-evaluation,
and recognition that things can never be the same.
Koreans have already begun this process; it
remains for outsiders, Americans in particular, to
recognize that a new cycle is underway.
Charles K Armstrong is associate
professor of history and director of the Center
for Korean Research at Columbia University. His
most recent book is Korea at the Center:
Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia. This
article, prepared for Japan Focus, expands on a
presentation on the 60th anniversary of the end of
World War II at the annual meeting of the
Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, March, 31
to April 2.
(Republished with
permission from Japan Focus) |
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