Global citizenship as a national project: the evolution of segye shimin in South Korean public discourse

Abstract

The idea of global citizenship in contemporary South Korean public discourse has revolved mainly around a national endeavor to boost the county's stature and competitiveness amid economic globalization. Based on a review of two decades of published media references to segye shimin (‘global citizen’ in the Korean language), this article shows that the specific usages of segye shimin – mainly by elites from government, academia, and journalism – underscore how the ‘developmental citizenship’ that marked South Korea's past authoritarian military regimes has carried on since the transition to civilian-led democracy. In contrast with the burgeoning academic discourse on cosmopolitanism that focuses heavily on moral responsibilities to humanity and the planet, South Korea's discourse of global citizenship has been closely aligned with neoliberalism and filled with exhortations to the domestic population to overcome numerous perceived liabilities seen as impeding the country's advancement. While global citizenship discourse in South Korea has emphasized top-down national strategic imperatives, a bottom-up approach to cosmopolitanism is also emerging as the country gains confidence and the notion of segye shimin gradually gains traction across the wider society.

Keywords::

• South Korea
• global citizenship
• cosmopolitanism
• nationalism
• democracy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to several student research assistants who have assisted me throughout this project, particularly the students who translated the segye shimin media references from Korean to English: Sun Woo Byun, YeEun Ha, Ahyoung Han, Destiny Hong, Boyun Kim, Hayoung Kim, Sona Lee and Youlee Park. Thanks also to Boram Kim, Mina Kwon and Jaein Lee for administrative assistance, and to Yul Min Park for translation assistance and fact-checking in the final stages of the manuscript preparation. I also wish to thank three anonymous reviewers of Citizenship Studies for their helpful comments, Chang Kyung-sup and the participants at the Contested Citizenship in East Asia conference held in May 2009 at Seoul National University, Matthias Maass and the participants at the 2013 annual meeting of the Korea International Studies Association, and the participants at the Consensus, Difference and Pluralism in Global Order panel at the 2012 annual meeting of the International Studies Association, particularly Amy Eckert, Luis Cabrera and Daniele Archibugi. The shortcomings that remain in this article are entirely my responsibility.

Funding

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant [NRF-2009-327-B00048] funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea.

Notes

^1. The song Chal sara bose was written in 1962 by Woon-sa Han (lyrics) and Hee-jo Kim (music). Translation provided by Yul Min Park.

^2. Articles were obtained by conducting keyword searches on the Korean Integrated News Database system (http://www.kinds.or.kr), which is comparable to global digital news archival sources such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis. Two major South Korean newspapers, the Chosun Ilbo and the JoongAngIlbo, are not included in this database, and articles from these publications were obtained directly from the respective newspapers. All the media references cited in this article are English translations of the original Korean publications.

^3. The economic aspects of the segyehwa initiative hit a major setback with the 1997 Asian financial crisis and South Korea's reliance during this period on intervention from the International Monetary Fund. Scholars have disagreed as to whether segyehwa came up short mainly because (1) it leaned too heavily on neoliberalism or (2) did not shift the country close enough to neoliberalism (Lynn 2007, pp. 64–65).