TOWARD OVERCOMING KOREA'S DIVISION SYSTEM THROUGH CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Abstract

In this essay—an earlier version of which was delivered as a lecture at a session cosponsored by Critical Asian Studies and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK) at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, on 23 March 2013—the author argues the need to go beyond the current state of perilous confrontation and volatility on the Korean Peninsula and examine how and why the current division of the peninsula into North and South has evolved into a “division system.” The author contends that “civic participation” (broadly defined to include business entrepreneurs, corporations, NGOs, and private citizens) is necessary to deal with the durable enormity of the division system. He calls this body of nonstate actors the “third party” (the first two parties being those of North and South Korea). Going beyond strictly Korean affairs, this third party, the author concludes, can play a crucial role in creating a larger framework of East Asian cooperation and solidary.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kuang-Hsing Chen, Bruce Cumings, and Youngjoo Ryu were invited respondents to the author's lecture at the AAS conference in San Diego and provided valuable comments that the author found helpful in revising the text. He wishes to express gratitude to them as well as to the organizers and sponsors of the session.

Notes

^1. Paik 2011 (Division), xvii. An earlier presentation in English of the notion may be found in Paik 1993, esp. 76–78.

^2. That this historic change was painful to South Korea as well as being fatal to the long-term prospects of North Korea's isolationist economy, with the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 “creat[ing] a watershed in contemporary history,” (43) is powerfully presented in Cumings 1998.

^3. Suh and Nam 2013.

^4. As a social scientist with undergraduate training in physics, Suh himself contributed to the work and its dissemination. See for example Lee and Suh 2010. The scientists' work is nicely complemented by that of the former naval officer and shipbuilding expert Sin Sangch'ol, whose recent book Ch'onanham un jwach'o imnida [Running aground was what happened to the Cheonan] marshals an impressive array of direct and circumstantial evidence in support of his hypothesis that the Cheonan's sinking was a “double accident” of a running aground followed by a collision. (Sin 2012).

^5. My most recent discussion in English of that interconnection appears in Paik 2012 (South Korean).

^6. See Paik 2013, chap. 13, “Reflections on Korea in 2010,” esp. 188–90.

^7. How close to a new summit meeting the two sides had come has recently been revealed in an interview in the South Korean monthly Shindonga (February 2013) given by Im T'aehi, chief of presidential staff under Lee Myung-bak, and his minister of labor when in October 2009 he met secretly. but in an official capacity with a high-ranking North Korean envoy in Singapore. Im strongly disputes the allegation that the summit plans fell through because Pyongyang demanded lavish payment in return and was rebuffed. (See Im 2013.) In any case, as late as 28 January 2010, the president himself was saying to the foreign press (to the BBC, on his visit to the UK) that he anticipated a summit meeting within the year (Paek 2012, 100n).

^8. Paik 2012 (Conundrum). See also Paik 2011 (Division), chap. 11, “Korean-style Reunification and Civic Participation: South Korea's Civil Society as the ‘Third Party’ on the Korean Peninsula.” Note: “Third party” used hereafter without quotation marks.

^9. One of the issues raised by Youngjoo Ryu at the AAS session.

^10. Paik 2012 (Conundrum). Note: “Seventh party” used hereafter without quotation marks.

^11. For a brief elucidation of the idea, see Paik 2012 (South Korean), 1, 9. The project was more fully expounded in Paek 2012. The above-mentioned essay in its Korean original constitutes chap. 7 of this book.

^12. Gray 2013, 101.

^13. Ch'oe 2005.

^14. Gray 2013, 89, quoting Ch'oe 2005.

^15. In many ways Gray's tentative projection for the Park Geun-hye administration resembles this second best scenario. But in my view it provides an instance of how analysis of Korean reality suffers in trenchancy and relevance when it operates without the conceptual tool of the “division system.” One finds insufficient awareness of the interactions between the inter-Korean and domestic agendas and little or no strategy for civic participation in the different contingencies of Park Geun-hye's limited success or near-total failure.

^16. Cumings 2010, 207. “Americans assume,” Cumings goes on, “that the Vietnam War is far more important, and it is, in that it created within the massive baby boom generation decades-long anxieties and a neuralgic war of movement regarding such a host of issues … that most of them remain alive in recent presidential elections…. If the Vietnam War seared an entire generation, beyond that it had little effect on American foreign policy or intervention abroad…. Korea, however, had an enormous refractory effect back upon the United States. It didn't brand a generation, and it may be forgotten or unknown to the general public, but it was the occasion for transforming the U.S. into a country that the founding fathers would barely recognize.” (idem.)