The Korean War, Colonial Legacies, and Shifting Relations

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Source: The Guardian
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Source: The Japan Times
Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War (태극기 휘날리며) is a South Korean film detailing the experiences of two brothers and their family as they are dragged into the brutal civil war that engulfed the North and South for over 3 years. The film is told from the perspective of Lee Jin-seok, who recounts being drafted into the South Korean army along with his brother Lee Jin-tae, their visceral wartime experiences, and his brother’s eventual death.
 
This piece attempts to connect the events portrayed in the movie to a broader theoretical framework of understanding post-colonial Korea as government and as a collection of citizens, and to use this discussion as a springboard to analyze current U.S. foreign policy moves in East Asia.
 
An Introductory Framework: Individual Agency vs. Outside Influence
 
In the introduction to their reader on contemporary social theory titled Culture/Power/History, Dirks et al. argue that contemporary social theory understands “subjects” by combining analyses of power structures with a willingness to assign a certain level of autonomy/agency to individuals.[2] Essentially, Dirks et al. attempt to combine past social theories to arrive at a method of interpreting and understanding “the indeterminate multiplicity of identity,” focusing on the interactions between individual interests and the power structures (i.e. the state, class-based rights groups, etc.) which influence both the production and expression of said interests.[2]
 
This method of analyzing actors will also serve as the basis for our analysis of South Korea. The primary purpose of this piece is to draw greater attention to the “individual” aspects of South Korea, including past experiences such as colonialism and the Korean War, in order to create a more nuanced view of South Korea as not only a country influenced by great powers such as the U.S. and China, but also as an agent with meaningful individual interests stemming from these sorts of past experiences.
 
Starting from the War – Korean History and Power’s Discursive Legacy
 
In discussions of the Korean War, we see the interactions between power structures and individuals play out mainly in debates over the nature of the war: was it a proxy or civil one?
 
Proponents of the former argument, such as Andrei Lankov, a Russian professor of Korean Studies at Kookmin University in Seoul, point to the recently made public Russian military archive documents, which detail the significant extent to which the Soviet Union shaped the North Korean political system, and argue that the war only happened once Kim Il-Sung was able to confirm the support of both the Soviet Union and China to aid the North.[3]
 
This explanation, while largely accurate, tends to gloss over the experiences and motives of everyday Korean soldiers and civilians. Portraying the war as a clash between communism in the North and capitalism in the South ignores, for example, the fact that a majority of South Korean factory workers and students living in Seoul during its period of occupation by the North actually supported the Korean People's Army (KPA) because of its focus on land reform, equal rights for women, and Korean unification.[4] Painting South Korea as a bastion for capitalism also ignores the fact that the US actively suppressed Peoples’ Committees when it administered the South, the majority of which were communist.[5]
 
The more important question, then, becomes not one of “great power politics or internal conflict?,” but rather, what was the result of the interaction of great power influence and individual motives and experiences in the sphere called Korea? In his discussion of post-colonial Africa and the “native intellectual,” scholar Frantz Fanon argues that one of the ways in which colonialism exerts power over countries even when occupation has ended is in its lingering residence in language and academia.[6] The dilemma of the native intellectual, he argues, is that he grounds his arguments against colonialism and for the ethnic “validity” of his nation in both the language (French, for example) and the academic traditions (i.e. taking the nation-state as given) of the conquering nation.[6] In this vein, one could argue that although there existed a multitude of individuals and interests in Korea, the way in which these interests were channeled and given voice was through the lens of capitalist (South) versus communist (North) competition.
 
We see this intersection in Taegugki, for example, when Lee Jin-tae attempts to execute a childhood friend of his from South Korea who had been captured and forced to fight for the North, because Lee wants to gain rank in the army to free his brother from service.[1] His individual interest in saving his family is channeled into brutality towards a friend in the name of eliminating the communists. Later in the film, Lee Jin-seok is taken prisoner by the South Koreans for defending his brother’s fiancé from accusations of communism, who had unknowingly participated in rallies in exchange for rice. Lee Jin-tae believes that the South murdered his brother, and subsequently joins the North Koreans to take revenge.[1] Through these instances we see how much more nuanced, personal motives are given the room for power and expression only in the context of the North versus South war.
 
Contemporary Issues: Colonial Scars and U.S. Foreign Policy
 
The legacies and scars of the Korean War are not easily forgotten. In the context of current U.S. foreign policy in East Asia, it is becoming increasingly important not to paint South Korea simply as an arena for great power conflict. The U.S.’s lack of acknowledgement of the role the Bretton Woods institutions played in causing the economic crisis of the 90’s, its unwillingness to mitigate the South Korean-Japanese dispute over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands, and its recent push for Japan to remilitarize all seem to, however, reify an interpretation of South Korea that assumes the legacy of colonialism has little impact on the state’s “individual” motives and how it responds to American policy moves abroad.[7]
 
However, South Korea’s recent foreign policy moves have deviated from the U.S.’s expectations of the country. Their entrance into the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) amidst U.S. protests and President Park’s presence at China’s recent Victory Day Parade seem to mark a trend of rebalancing on South Korea’s part towards China. As some scholars have suggested, is South Korea reverting back to a type of neo-sadae (사대) diplomacy, the foreign policy of the Chōson Dynasty that acknowledged the power of and served big brother China, only influenced by their increasing trade with China?[8] To accept this argument would be equally dangerous for American policy makers because it relies on the same fundamental image South Korea as a product and battleground of the interests of larger states (U.S. and China).
 
Incorporating a broader perspective on South Korea, one that more directly recognizes the effects of colonialism on the Korean peoples, and one that recognizes South Korea’s autonomy and desire to prosper as an independent nation, is a vital step in ensuring that U.S. policy moves in East Asia don’t risk alienating one of our closest allies.
 

References
[1] Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War. Directed by Je-gyu Kang. South Korea:                                      
Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2004. Film.
[2] Dirks, Nicholas B. Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
[3] Lankov, Andrei. From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
[4] Armstrong, Charles K. "The Unfinished War." In Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992. Cornell University Press, 2013.
[5] Kang, Jin-Yeon. "Colonial Legacies and the Struggle for Social Membership in a National Community: The 1946 People's Uprisings in Korea." Journal of Historical Sociology, 2015, 321-54.
[6] Fanon, Frantz, and Jean Sartre. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
[7] Ellwood, Wayne. The No-nonsense Guide to Globalization. Oxford, England: New Internationalist ;, 2001.
[8] Lankov, Andrei. If China had to choose, it would be South Korea. Al-Jazeera. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/09/china-choose-south-korea-150902073117753.html 

Nick Reiter is a sophomore at Duke University.