Contentious Activism and Inter-Korean Relations

Danielle Chubb

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231536325
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In South Korea, the contentious debate over relations with the North transcends traditional considerations of physical and economic security, and political activists play a critical role in shaping the discussion of these issues as they pursue the separate yet connected agendas of democracy, human rights, and unification.

Providing international observers with a better understanding of policymakers' management of inter-Korean relations, Danielle L. Chubb traces the development of various policy disputes and perspectives from the 1970s through South Korea's democratic transition. Focusing on four case studies—the 1980 Kwangju uprising, the June 1987 uprising, the move toward democracy in the 1990s, and the decade of "progressive" government that began with the election of Kim Dae Jung in 1997—she tracks activists' complex views on reunification along with the rise and fall of more radical voices encouraging the adoption of a North Korean–style form of socialism. While these specific arguments have dissipated over the years, their vestiges can still be found in recent discussions over how to engage with North Korea and bring security and peace to the peninsula.

Extending beyond the South Korean example, this examination shows how the historical trajectory of norms and beliefs can have a significant effect on a state's threat perception and security policy. It also reveals how political activists, in their role as discursive agents, play an important part in the creation of the norms and beliefs directing public debate over a state's approach to the ethical and practical demands of its foreign policy.

1

POLITICAL ACTIVISM, DISCURSIVE POWER, AND NORM NEGOTIATION

The pursuit of justice is at the very core of inter-Korean relations. South Koreans have long understood relations with their northern neighbor to involve far more than a simple security stand-off between two warring states. In a very real sense, the political is often the personal in Korea. Debates over inter-Korean relations must be understood in this context: there is a deep sense of responsibility and obligation that permeates the discursive realm, and policy arguments are rarely made in purely pragmatic terms. The goal of unification has for decades existed at the heart of all South Korean debate over how to deal with the often intransigent, unpredictable, and bellicose North Korea. If we step inside the discursive space of South Korean political debate, we need to understand that the process of argumentation over policy, security, identity, and justice is a negotiated one. No matter their political proclivity, all pundits claim to have the greater good of the Korean peninsula as their most cherished goal, to have the well-being of the North Korean people in their hearts, and to be promoting policies that best further the goal of peace for all Korean people, on whatever side of the 38th parallel they happen to dwell.

Despite the voluminous literature on the study of inter-Korean relations, accounts of discursive politics, normative considerations, and the agency of political activists have been largely neglected. Traditional security approaches have directed the majority of scholarship over inter-Korean relations, a phenomenon that is hardly surprising given the embeddedness of the Korean conflict in the parameters of the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, however, IR scholarship has witnessed a proliferation of alternative approaches to security studies. In the discussion that follows, both traditional and critical approaches are canvassed for their usefulness to the study of inter-Korean relations. After outlining the approaches that have informed analysis of inter-Korean relations to date, I develop a conceptual framework that incorporates the normative role played by political activists as they promote their own ideas regarding the pursuit of justice in inter-Korean relations. I finish by outlining the critical junctures that structure the book’s empirical chapters, with the goal of developing a better understanding of the recursive nature of normative policy argument.

TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Traditional security issues are the primary focus of those IR scholars who undertake analysis of the possibilities for peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the broader Northeast Asian region. During the Cold War period, these state-centric approaches were fairly narrowly confined to consideration of material factors. Analysis tended to be policy driven and concentrated on the themes of relations between great powers, the Soviet threat and the role of a US deterrent, arms control, military preparedness, and economic and diplomatic issues. For the most part this scholarship eschewed discussion of domestic political factors, focusing almost entirely on the state—viewed as a cohesive entity—as the sole relevant actor. In the minority of cases where peninsular politics was considered, the authors restricted their discussion to regime legitimacy, economic and political differences between the two Koreas, as well as the question of future energy needs and the impact that these may have on the peninsula’s nuclear future.¹

While classical realist studies of international politics are themselves not antithetical to justice-based arguments, as evidenced in the writings of E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau,² strategic studies approaches to inter-Korean relations have limited themselves to a more narrow, rationalist focus on material factors with little attention given to South Korea’s domestic political sphere. This book addresses these concerns on two levels. First, I place an analytical lens on the social factors that animate inter-Korean relations, an approach that forces consideration of the normative underpinnings of South Korea’s approach toward North Korea. Second, this book takes into account the political environment in which state policy makers operate by placing the focus firmly on South Korean politics, and particularly the discursive role played by political activists in helping shape domestic political debate. This approach explicitly takes into consideration South Korea’s recent political history and seeks to understand the consequences for domestic political debate of the authoritarian and highly restricted space in which it developed.

In the years immediately following the Cold War, IR expanded its purview beyond military factors. In the wake of the crumbling of communist dictatorships around the world, scholars started to examine inter-Korean relations in terms of the political and economic adaptability of the regimes: they argued that the achievement of peace and stability on the Korean peninsula was at least partly tied up with political economy factors. In one study examining the course of inter-Korean diplomacy between 1984 and 1994, the author focuses on the interaction between domestic and international political economies and argues that adaptability in these domains is the key to determining success in regional security relations and the eventual achievement of a unified Korea.³ Most of this literature focuses on South Korea, with a few notable exceptions: Nicholas Eberstadt, for example, in his demographic study of the DPRK, makes predictions in a range of areas such as military build-up, population/sex ratios, and urbanization/mobility to compile a set of policy suggestions for the United States with regard to the eventual peaceful reunification of the peninsula.⁴

While some IR scholars thus started to show an interest in issues beyond the narrowly defined security imperative that was the focus for scholars during the Cold War, this work remained on the margins of academic scholarship and failed to attract much attention within either the mainstream literature or the policy world. This was partly due to the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 and the Agreed Framework negotiated by the Clinton administration around this time, which set up a diplomatic framework for denuclearization of the DPRK. These two factors ensured that much of the analysis of the Korean peninsula remained squarely within a traditional geopolitical, strategic studies paradigm.⁵ Indeed, as Hazel Smith argues, these traditional approaches to North Korea became the commonsense approach in the scholarly, policy-making, and media spheres. This paradigm, according to Smith, not only prioritizes a military approach to the DPRK but also subsumes all other factors (economic, cultural, humanitarian) within the military lens.⁶

Toward the end of the 1990s, a shift in the South Korean approach to inter-Korean relations was accompanied by a concomitant adjustment of focus on behalf of some IR scholars, providing a more nuanced approach to Korean peninsula politics. The election of Kim Dae Jung (Kim Taechung) in 1997, which heralded South Korea’s first peaceful transfer of power, brought with it the birth of the “Sunshine policy,” aimed at both ending the combative approach that usually characterized inter-Korean relations and gaining closer engagement and cooperation between the two Koreas. Now that inter-Korean relations were seen to be rapidly evolving, US strategic studies pundits found it imperative to watch domestic developments more closely, given their potential security implications.⁷ With the election of George W. Bush as president, US policy toward Asia also started to shift (albeit in the opposite direction to the one South Korea was taking). This trend was suddenly accentuated by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Responding to criticisms provided by neoconservative opponents of the Clinton administration, who had long argued that the Agreed Framework was nothing but a policy of appeasement, the Bush administration started to put in place a form of engagement with North Korea that is usually referred to as “hawk diplomacy.” South Korean engagement approaches, which emphasized dialogue and negotiation, now contrasted starkly with US approaches, encouraging a proliferation of academic analyses arguing over the pros and cons of the respective diplomatic choices while exploring alternative options available to practitioners.⁸ Victor Cha, who in 2004 entered the White House as director of Asia affairs for the National Security Council, treated the North-South Korean relationship as a key variable in his examination of US policy options for the region.⁹ The focus of his scholarly work, on the American alliance and the role of China and Japan, is typical of IR analysis generated at this time, which continued to dwell on a range of factors that, while more expansive than previously, remained restricted to the more traditional geostrategic concerns of policy makers operating within a state-centric, rationalist paradigm.

ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNTS OF INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS

Human Security Approaches

Approaches that have sought to expand academic analysis of Korean peninsula–related issues provide the starting point for this book’s analysis. Hazel Smith argues for a reframing of the debate over North Korea. Writing in her capacity as a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Smith contends that the building of an effective security strategy on the Korean peninsula requires an understanding of human security needs inside the DPRK. In formulating her definition of human security, Smith draws on arguments made in the 1994 Human Development report regarding the best approaches to peace and security. The report argues that the “battle for peace” must be achieved on two fronts: the security front, where freedom from fear is the ultimate goal, and the economic and social front, which aims for freedom from want. A holistic approach, concludes Smith, must include both these freedoms as “twin fundamentals of human security.”¹⁰

In this book I draw a number of insights from the human security literature. Most important, I seek to shift the referent object of analysis away from the state to consider the role of a wider range of agencies. The emphasis that scholars of human security place on the role of individual citizens in helping identify where insecurity problems may lie provides a useful departure point for the role of political activism. A human security approach alone, however, does not sufficiently take into account the discursive role that individuals may play in the formation of domestic political debate over security-related issues. For the purposes of the book, a human security approach is limited as it tends to be centrally concerned with providing suggestions for how policy makers could better act to take the individual into account. I deviate from this approach: rather than offering a comprehensive set of suggestions regarding the sorts of priorities that states should adopt, I seek to understand how states and nonstate agents negotiate their priorities.

Critical Approaches

This book also draws from a burgeoning literature that provides alternative, critical approaches to security analysis. The rapidly expanding critical security scholarship offers a plethora of approaches, and in the section to follow I shall engage with the most relevant and discuss the rationale behind the approach I have taken, in view of this voluminous scholarship. I also refer to intersecting Korean studies contributions, elements of which I take up throughout the course of my study—an integrated disciplinary and area studies perspective which, as I explain, has yet to be adopted by IR scholars.

Roland Bleiker approaches his analysis of the problems inherent in the current implementation of security policy on the Korean peninsula from a critical perspective, arguing for a “fundamental rethinking” of security, a challenge taken up in this book in a variety of ways, described throughout the following section.¹¹ The Copenhagen School’s focus on the concept of securitization also takes a critical approach to international security, rejecting as its starting point the idea that security can be conceived as a fixed ontological entity.¹² The securitization approach draws on a growing literature (such as that generated by feminist and peace scholars) that questions the primacy of the military and the state in the conceptualization of security. This scholarship argues that security analyses cannot be limited to one sector and extends its framework to include military, political, economic, environmental, and societal sectors. According to this approach, securitization needs to be understood as an intersubjective process: threat perceptions cannot be objectively measured. Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde contend that in some cases

it does matter how others judge the reasonableness of a securitization, because this influences how other actors in the system will respond to a security claim. What may seem a legitimate securitization within a given political community may appear paranoid to those outside it. . . . Conversely, outsiders may perceive that a political community undersecuritizes a “real” threat and thus endangers itself or free rides.¹³

My analysis adopts a historical approach to the study of inter-Korean relations (explained further below), which allows for an examination of both the intersubjective nature of threat claims as well as the ways in which they may have been securitized, over an extended period of time. During South Korea’s days of authoritarian leadership, the state established the dominant definitions of concepts and actors central to the debate over unification. Communism, North Korea, and political activists were all framed as presenting a threat to the physical and moral security of South Korea; they were securitized. As South Korea moved toward democratization, however, the intersubjective process became more inclusive. Most significantly, perhaps, public opinion came to play a new and more dynamic role: a government in South Korea can no longer impose its own interpretation of security but rather must engage in political debates over policy alternatives, hence complicating the intersubjective process.

Securitization, as it is conceptualized by the Copenhagen School, is thus helpful for understanding how certain things are classified subjectively (and based on shared understandings) as existential threats requiring extraordinary action, while others are not.¹⁴ However, the process-tracing work undertaken by Copenhagen School scholars, who seek to examine who securitizes what and with what purposes, is a somewhat different task from the one under taken in this book, which scrutinizes nonsecuritized norms and beliefs to understand how they have, through processes of argumentation, been brought to bear on the policy-making debates over security-related issues (such as inter-Korean relations). Finally, while the Copenhagen School provides a comprehensive analysis of elite decision-making processes, it tends to neglect the study of nonelite forms of agency, such as political activism, which I contend has played an important role in the evolution of debate over inter-Korean relations.

It is in relation to this last distinction, between the discourses of elite and nonelite agents, that my approach most strongly differs from those taken within the Copenhagen School, as this omission considerably narrows the findings possible within these approaches. In this regard the insights of Klaus Dodds, who approaches security studies from a critical geopolitics perspective, are helpful. Dodds argues that geopolitical imaginings, which present a dichotomized view of the world, have limited the individual creative capacity of citizens to understand their surroundings in more holistic terms, allowing governments to pursue ends that fit their narrowly defined political and/or ideological agendas. At the same time, these imaginings also narrow the range of options available to policy makers, as the preponderance of policy ideas are based on limited, noncritical understandings of geopolitics.¹⁵ The analysis provided in the conclusion draws from these insights, arguing that the historical trajectory of norms can have a real impact on the way a state perceives threats and hence formulates its own security policy.

The final alternative approach to be canvassed in this overview is one that shares many of the conceptual concerns of the securitization school and aims centrally, according to Karin Fierke, to “expose the role of realist language and argument in constituting a realist agenda and marginalizing alternative voices.”¹⁶ Fierke addresses the poststructuralist project to examine how certain state actions become possible (in her case, those actions that brought about the end of the Cold War) and in doing so aims to open up spaces in which marginalized voices are able to be heard. In this sense the analysis offered in this book also contributes to the opening of these spaces by arguing that nonstate elements of the South Korean security debate should be included in examinations of Northeast Asian security in general, and the North Korea problem in particular. However, unlike poststructuralist theory, which, as Fierke argues, operates largely at the level of the abstract (primarily emphasizing discourse and language), I provide a more concrete embedding of these theoretical claims by examining the agency of those (nonstate) actors who are responsible for engaging in political action, including the wielding of a certain set of arguments about the operation of the South Korean nation-state.¹⁷

I argue that approaches to inter-Korean relations and security that seek to move beyond a military focus and adopt a more expansive view of conditions by taking a variety of other aspects into account—such as economic, cultural, and humanitarian factors—should be moved from the margins of post–Cold War scholarship and granted more serious attention by scholars and policy makers alike. Geopo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Note on Romanization and Citations
• Introduction
• 1. Political Activism, Discursive Power, and Norm Negotiation
• 2. Political Activism under Yushin and the Kwangju Uprising, May 1980
• 3. From Kwangju to Democracy, 1980–1987
• 4. South Korea in Transition, 1987–1997
• 5. A New Era of Inter-Korean Relations, 1998–2007
• Conclusion: Inter-Korean Relations from a South Korean Perspective
• Notes
• References
• Index