Abstract
This chapter focuses on the contradictions and difficulties in the unification discourse that constitute a major obstacle for the quality of democracy in South Korea. It is built around the following two assumptions. First, the “politics of fear” is an important and characteristic element of South Korea’s debates on the division and unification of the two Korean states. This fear was fostered and instrumentalised by authoritarian regimes and conservative political forces. Second, the political instrumentalisation of fear is an obstacle to rational approaches to unification. Of course, the way questions of division and unification have been dealt with in South Korea has changed over time. Historical developments such as South Korean democratisation in 1987, German unification in 1990, and North Korea’s nuclear tests of more recent years clearly had a strong impact on the manner in which unification is perceived and discussed. Nevertheless, the strongest impact probably is still reserved to the Korean War (1950–1953). The atrocities of this war, which such large numbers of people fell victim to, form an essential part of South Korea’s collective memory, not least because the authoritarian governments drew on them seeking to legitimise their rule. Fear of the North, of Communism, and of these enemies’ supposed aggressiveness came to dominate South Korean public sentiment and political discourse. This culture of fear did not disappear with the democratisation of South Korean society after 1987. It still plays a central role in political discourse and is a serious obstacle to rational discourse on the division and unification of the two countries. This chapter will look into certain aspects of this culture of fear and of its persistence, aiming to provide an analysis that helps to explain the manner in which it inhibits or even hinders democratic quality in Korea.
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Notes
- 1.
The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission became a victim of this new wave. It had been created by the Roh Moo-hyun administration in 2005 and was dissolved under President Lee Myung-bak in 2010.
- 2.
The idea of the nation-state is deep-rooted, yet rather undifferentiated. It can be considered as a sort of “popular proto nationalism” in Eric Hobsbawm’s sense (1990, 46–79).
- 3.
To remove and punish the collaborators with Japan, the Special Committee for Investigation on Anti-national Acts was established in 1948, immediately after the foundation of the Republic of Korea.
- 4.
In 1965 Dajongsang, a special prize for anti-communist movies, was launched. The attractiveness of this prize was enormous because it gave the winner the right to import foreign movies—a very lucrative business. As a result, many such movies were produced during the 1960s and 1970s (Kim 2014, 175–182).
- 5.
Between 1990 and 2015, there were 5866 references to the “costs of German unification” in articles of the major South Korean daily newspapers (www.kinds.or.kr). After German unification, Korean, Japanese, and American economists and political scientists have produced a large number of estimates of the cost of unification in the Korean case (Lee 2007, 28–29).
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Lee, EJ. (2018). Dealing with Unification: The Politics of Fear. In: Mosler, H., Lee, EJ., Kim, HJ. (eds) The Quality of Democracy in Korea. Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63919-2_10
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