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[Mark Selden] East Asian Regionalism and its Enemies in Three Epochs

May 25, 2009

East Asian Regionalism and its Enemies in Three Epochs: Political Economy and Geopolitics, 16th to 21st Centuries Mark Selden Mark Selden is Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program, Cornell University, and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. His recent books include War and State Terrorism. The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (with Alvin So) and China, East Asia and the Global Economy. Regional and historical perspectives (with Takeshi Hamashita and Linda Grove). * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Spring 2009). © Mark Selden 2009
[Bruce Cumings and Paik Nak-chung] Korea and East Asia Amidst Global Economic Crisis

February 20, 2009

Bruce Cumings and Paik Nak-chung The Korean translation of this article was published in The Quarterly Changbi (Spring 2009). Bruce Cumings is a Professor in History at the University of Chicago. Paik Nak-chung is a professor emeritus at Seoul National University. © Changbi 2009 —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————– Dialogue/ Seoul, 17 December 2008 Korea and East Asia Amidst Global Economic Crisis Bruce Cumings and Paik Nak-chung Paik: I understand the main purpose of your visit to Seoul this time is to participate in the Yonsei University Conference commemorating the 60th anniversary of its Korean Studies Institute. Since your conference paper, “Korean Democracy and American Power,” is mostly devoted to a historical review of what has gone on since 1945, we may begin by your adding a sort of postscript to that paper regarding what’s happening in Korea today. Cumings: Well, I argue in the paper that Korean democracy came up from the bottom, that the motive force or real power behind the democratization of Korea was the masses of protesters in the streets, and events like the Kwangju rebellion and the June mobilization against Chun Du-hwan in 1987. Those watershed events, I think, created a very strong civil society based in young people and in labor groups. And as I’ve said, I think in many ways Korean civil society is stronger than American civil society, with more participation, more interest in politics. And these days young people are especially wired to the web. In the United States, to the extent that people ever talk about Korean democratization, they just assume, especially people in Washington, that it was a matter of nurturing the middle class and when the middle class became stronger, Korea democratized and the United States always stood behind that. But in fact, in my paper I argue that the middle class, when it gets its rights, usually wants to stop there and not extend them, and that much of Korean democratization came against American power in Korea, especially American support for one dictator after another. But I think the Korean democracy that we see today strikes me as like democracy everywhere; it’s very unsatisfying but it’s better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said it in a different way, that democracy may be a terrible system, but it’s better than all the others. Democracy in a highly complicated society like Korea or the United States can often be very disappointing. From my point of view, I was quite disappointed with the election of President Lee Myung-bak in South Korea, although I don’t vote here, so I don’t take it so personally; whereas in the United States I certainly did take Bush’s ‘election’ personally. But here in Korea I think one can’t be too disappointed because you had ten years of a liberal government under Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun. Much was accomplished in consolidating democracy, in opening relations with North Korea on the basis of reconciliation, and so I think that those ten years in Korea generally were very positive ones. But I do think that it’s only proper to say that actually existing democracy in a capitalistic society is bound to be disappointing, day in and day out, but there are victories that are won and one was 1998 and another was 2002 in Korea, and the third was the Obama election in the United States. I’ve regained my optimism about American politics because of Obama’s election which was very decisive, not on the margins like Bush, but very decisive, so in spite of the economic crisis that we’re all facing I’m very optimistic about the Obama administration, optimistic about American democracy because essentially the kind of stranglehold that the right wing and especially fundamentalist Christians had on American politics has been broken. So those are just some reflections on the current situation, but on balance I think one can say that the democratic development in Korea has been wonderful on the whole, much, much better than what existed 20 years ago. P: We’ll talk more about American politics later. On balanc, development of South Korean democracy may have been more encouraging than what happened in the US – until this past year. While in America Obama won decisively as you say, in Korea it was Lee Myung-bak who won, also quite decisively, in last year’s election, and launched a new administration earlier this year. Now, at first, even many of those who had opposed Lee were ready to concede that his victory had certain good points. I mean after all another transfer of power through the electoral process points to the progress of Korean democracy; and also this offers a good chance to shake up democratic or progressive forces in South Korea. But after less than a year, more and more people are worried that we have really elected another George W. Bush, as this President has embarked on a series of disastrous policies. I don’t know if you think these worries are exaggerated. C: No, I don’t think they are exaggerated. I think that the election here was rather like the 2000 election in the United States, in other words you had at that point 10 years of Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun and in America we had 8 years of Bill Clinton. And even though in both cases there was a great deal of accomplishment, voters get tired of seeing the same party in power or the same faces. I don’t know that I would say that Lee Myung-bak is like George W. Bush, for several reasons. One, he was genuinely elected, whereas Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court in his first term. Bush is closer to Kim Jong Il in the sense that he would never have been President without his father. And in that sense there is a commonality of aristocratic or monarchical aspect to Bush’s appointment in 2000. Anyway, in Lee Myung-bak I think you have a person who came of age and made his career inthe Park Chung Hee era and hasn’t really adapted to the post-dictatorial era. He wants to turn the clock back on any number of issues: on North Korea, to try and get tough with North Korea. I think the record of trying to get tough with North Korea shows that it generally doesn’t work. North Korea knows best that environment when their back is to the wall, and they always respond very negatively. Also, I think the textbook issue of trying to revise all the important history that we’ve learned in the era of democracy is very unwise. It’s like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube after the toothpaste is squeezed out. It’s impossible. There are many scholars here and also victims and civil society groups that have thrown light on unfortunate aspects of post-Liberation Korean history, and from my point of view as a historian, this has been a very welcome development with all kinds of new information. And this is a matter of establishing some kind of balance in our understanding of postwar Korean history, between the official story of what happened and the story of the victims or of critics, we will eventually arrive at a rather complete history of post-Liberation Korea. That was a very positive development in South Korea. It isn’t “left wing” to uncover truths that have been covered up by dictatorships. And sometimes you wonder what kind of advice President Lee is getting because he took a hard line against North Korea almost at the same time Bush turned around anddropped his hard line and began engaging North Korea. And the textbook issue only draws attention to the stories that he doesn’t want people to pay attention to, so I think those two things have been a kind of disaster for President Lee. P: The fact that he was genuinely elected while Bush was not speaks better for Korean democracythan for the American, but for President Lee Myung-bak this seems to have encouraged him to embark from the very first year on the kind of reckless unilateralism for which Bush needed 9/11. To be sure, Lee was reputed to be a pragmatist and some people still believe so, but I think he is a pragmatist only in the sense that he doesn’t have any firm principles except looking out for short term gains. A real pragmatist wouldn’t try to put the toothpaste back into the tube. And although itisn’t his fault that global economic crisis has erupted, you know the Subprime Mortgage crisis had already begun and well advanced in the US when he was promising a 7% GDP growth during his campaign. So this kind of poor judgment, inability to analyze the situation and collect competent advice must be counted as his fault. C: Well, I think you have two governments in East Asia that try to gain legitimacy on the baseis of certain percentage of growth. China is growing at 9 or 10% a year. Lee Myung-bak said 7% a year and of course the model for that kind of thinking is Park Chung Hee who always faced a question of his legitimacy, delivering growth year in and year out. When you listen to Lee Myung-bak, you have to say that at the core level of his assumptions, he thinks things were wonderful when Park Chung Hee was president and he was moving up in the Hyundai Corporation, and then something terrible happened in 1998, whereas I think most of us look at 1998 as a watershed where the opposition for the first time truly came to power and opened a new era in South Korean politics, with labor getting rights for participating in politics and becoming an essential part of the South Korean political system, with the opening to the North which I think received tremendous results with the SunshinePolicy. So they were not ten lost years. But I don’t think Lee Myung-bak wants to be a dictator. I mean one of the greatest achievements here is that the military is firmly in the barracks. He is thePresident and maybe because he’s President for only five years he wanted to move quickly at the beginning of his term, but I do think at the core level of his assumptions he thinks of postwar history very differently from how you or I would. P: Well, wanting to be a dictator and actually making it are two different things. I don’t know what Lee Myung-bak does want, but I would agree that he will not succeed in becoming a dictator even if he wanted to. We are a people who, as you observed, achieved democratization from the bottom up, and won’t let anybody to turn the clock back. As you mentioned, he talks of ‘ten lost years’, which is itself a preposterous proposition, but actually, as you also point out, he often seems to be thinking of twenty lost years, dreaming of the good old days before 1987. C: Right. There’s a curious convergence between his view and that of Americans in Washington who fancy themselves as kind of handlers on Korean policy. On the bipartisan basis they liked Kim Dae-jung better than Rho Moo-Hyun but they did, many of them, feel that we needed to get back to the good old days of Korean-American relationship where we understood each other, and you didn’t have aPresident talking about independence from the United States or getting American troops out of Yongsan base and things like that. I think Lee Myung-bak may have been thinking he had a constituency in Washington more than here in Korea for the kind of comments he made when he first assumed office, and I think it’s very shortsighted on the part of Lee Myung Bak, because most of those people are quite old now in Washington, they’re not going to be around a long time. I don’t think they’re going to influence the Obama Administration. I wondered how he could warm up to President Bush the way he did at Camp David and elsewhere. P: That wasn’t very pragmatic! C: It wasn’t, when President Bush already had become the most unpopular President in American history, but even if you discount that, what about the fact that he only had less than a year in office. So that was short-sighted, but it may have been based on the idea that the Republicans would win again in 2008 and then Korean-American relations would be very good and very close, but of course that didn’t happen. P: Well, you cited China and Korea as two cases where the government leaders had to have economic growth for their political legitimacy, but the sad thing is that in South Korea a President no longer has to achieve a 7% or 6% growth for his legitimacy. C: That’s exactly right. And then that’s why it was strange that President Lee would always run on that basis, but as I’ve indicated, that’s what Park Chung Hee always argued, that he delivered rapid growth. P: Because Park Chung Hee didn’t have constitutional legitimacy. But another factor may be that both in China and South Korea there is a big gap between rich and poor, so you do need a very high percentage of growth if you are to throw out some crumbs to the poor, and I think that since Lee Myung-bak has no policy for reducing the gap, he has to aim for a growth rate that’s impossible to achieve and probably more than is good for the country. But ‘ten lost years’ was a campaign sloganrather than the official motto of the new administration, which is, in Korean, sŏnjinhwa wonnyŏn—in English something like ‘Year One of Moving Toward an Advanced Nation’. The argument goes that we’ve accomplished industrialization, then democratization, and now it’s time to join advanced nations. If you take it at face value, it means that you embrace the fruits of both industrialization and democratization, and go on from there to become a more advanced economy but also toward a deepening of democracy. But what he is actually following is not the slogan of becoming truly advanced but the other one of ‘ten lost years’ or even twenty lost years. C: Well, I remember in 1996 when Kim Young-sam was trying to have Korea join the OEDC there was a lot of talk about Korea becoming an advanced nation. In some ways it may be an inferiority mentality,but I think that from the standpoint of South Korea’s economy, and especially the human capital, Korea is an advanced country. And sometimes I think that Koreans don’t recognize that as much as people on the outside do, that maybe Lee Myung-bak thinks Korea is not advanced enough so it needs to be more advanced, and that he doesn’t really care so much about democratic development that has happened. I don’t really think he’s a politician. He was a businessman and manager in a very large firm and I would imagine that he looked at the protests and the long struggle for democratization as not something that really meant a lot to him. But I don’t see where the appeal is to talk about ten lost years, to what constituency he is appealing with that. P: It managed to appeal to two very different groups simultaneously, which is why he won. One, those who during the 10 years really lost nothing except political power, in other words the rich andprivileged—as you can see from the profiles of his ministers and buddies. They are all quite rich and have been increasing their wealth during the past decade, most of them. But they had lost political power ago and had great grievances because they never thought their God-given right to domination would be taken away from them. And their reckless use of that power since taking office shows how keenly they had been feeling the loss. And then, there were a large number of ordinary people whose living conditions had deteriorated drastically after the IMF bailout in 1997. Even though Korean economy began its recovery under Kim Dae-jung and was doing pretty well under Roh Moo-hyun in terms of macroeconomic indices, decent growth rate, high stock prices, current account surplus and so on, lives of common people hadindeed become impoverished. So the slogan of ‘ten lost year’ resonated among both the rich and poor, for entirely different reasons; there came about a sort of grand national coalition, an unbeatable coalition at the time. It now turns out that Lee Myung-bak not only cannot sustain economic growth, which is not all his fault, but he has really no thought of improving ordinary people’s lives. All the economic measures he’s launching are in favor of the rich and the powerful. C: I was very interested in this coalition that Lee Myung-bak put together because it had the direct analogy in the Bush coalition in the US, and a lot of people whose livelihoods had deteriorated voted for Bush. But in the US much of this can be explained by cultural and social issues like abortion or fundamentalist religion or opposition to gay marriage, things like that, whereas in Korea I don’t see that there are cultural or social issues that would bring poor people to vote against their own interest. P: Well, the general perception here was that Lee Myung-bak was a pragmatist, and in that respect people made a sensible choice in picking Lee Myung-bak over Park Geun-hye when they had gottentired of Rho Moo-hyun. But I think we are lately waking up to the fact that he’s not a real pragmatist, at any rate not competent enough to act pragmatically. Another image of Lee Myung-bak that I would question is his being a successful CEO, because as you can imagine there were no real CEOs under Chung Ju-young in the Hyundai conglomerate, they were all COOs whatever their formal title, withonly one super-CEO. Lee Myung-bak prides himself on his nickname of a bulldozer, but I say he was a bulldozer driven by Chung Ju-young, and without the driver he is more of a bull in a china shop. C: Well, let me ask you a question because this is the same question North Koreans would have. I assume that Lee Myung-bak as a Hyundai executive would actually want to develop relations with North Korea, mainly economic relations the way Chung Ju-young did. But he doesn’t seem to care. P: You know, I never had any illusions that Lee Myung-bak would fulfill his campaign promise of makingSouth Korea an advanced society, but I did think that he would be pragmatic at least in his relationship with North Korea, that in some ways he could launch even bolder initiatives than previous administrations because as a conservative he could act more confidently in engaging North Korea. But things have turned out quite otherwise, and that is really another reason why I’ve come to revise my image of him as a pragmatist. C: It’s very hard to explain because I don’t see what interests are being served by his policy toward North Korea. P: I think one reason may be that he ran into strong domestic opposition in the early days of theAdministration and his popularity ratings dropped quite drastically. So what he decided at that point was to appeal to his conservative—or to be more blunt, reactionary—constituency rather than trying to gain broader support. Since then he has been a sort of hostage to those people. C: That’s a good way to put it. P: There are quite a few people in South Korea who live in a fantasy world as George W. Bush did, believing that North Korea would collapse very soon, and that if we kept pressure on it and had the patience to wait, then all sorts of good things would come to pass. Now as you have argued since the days immediately following the unification of Germany, it’s not going to happen any time soon, and certainly things wouldn’t be so good even if it did happen. Lee Myung-bak himself has been sort ofvacillating in his attitude towards the North. At first North Koreans were very patient, they waited about a hundred days between his election until the end of March, then they started attacking him harshly and personally, which hasn’t helped. C: I’m afraid this situation rather exemplifies what you’ve written about so often and so well,regarding the ‘division system’. This new situation just emerged in both North and South spontaneously to the human eye, but in fact it’s just a matter of getting the old forces in motion again and it’s very disheartening to see how rapidly the division system essentially came back to life. P: I have argued among other things that there are forces on both sides of the peninsula sustaining the division system. Even though on the surface they are very opposed to each other, they share this common interest. C: Oh, I think that’s true. I think we’ve talked about this before, but I think the hardliners in thePentagon also have a symbiotic relationship with hardliners in North Korea, especially with the Soviet Union gone, so that their defense projects really depend on having enemies like North Korea. But here the system that you’ve analyzed is so deep and so longstanding that it can be instantly reenergized by events like Lee Myung-bak’s attitude and the North harshly condemning him. But I was very impressed by the agreement that came out of the second summit meeting between Rho Moo-hyun and Kim Jong Il, particularly the economic agreements for opening up the ports on the West coast and Haeju and Nampo, and so on, and I wrote a couple of articles here in Korea that were about the political economy of that agreement and how it would fit with Rho Moo-hyun’s ideas of a hub economy in Northeast Asia. What’s astonishing to me is that Lee Myung-bak has been more critical of the second summit than the first, and yet it laid out a blueprint for a very rational kind of economic engagement with North Korea, and one that would be of great mutual benefit. So it may be that he’s just like George Bush, in that he doesn’t want to do anything that his predecessor did. P: The second summit agreement of Ocober 4, 2007 laid down a concrete program for implementing the earlier June 15 Joint Declaration of 2000. So for anybody who is opposed to what has been going on, the second one would be even more unpalatable than the first one. Of course, you can understand how any successor would naturally feel some displeasure about a predecessor who just before the end of his term makes all these agreements for the next President to carry out. But all he has to do is to announce that he supports the October 4th Declaration in principle and go on from there, proposing that the two sides get together and see what to implement first and what should be put off. The plan for a special peace and prosperity zone in the West Sea is the part of theDeclaration that Rho Moo-hyun himself was most proud of. Not that it could be implemented right away in any event, but because it finally resolved, or more accurately defused, the dispute about theNorthern Limit Line in the Western coastal area, which had been a serious obstacle for any further extension of inter-Korean relations in other areas as well. C: I was very excited by those plans when I read them, but politics just intervened. Think of it from the North Korean standpoint, they make agreements with Kim Dae -jung and Rho Moo-hyun and those agreements don’t count for the next administration, just as when they made agreements with Bill Clinton that didn’t count when Bush came in. People forget that Clinton signed an agreement, signed a statement that North Korea and the U.S. would not have hostile intent toward each other. And Bush just ripped it up and put North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’. It’s no way to conduct diplomacy. It means that North Koreans can’t count on the word of democratic leaders to be continued by whoever succeeds them. I’m sure it’s very frustrating for them. P: What do you think of the prospects for US-DPRK relations under Obama? C: Well, I think an obvious point to make is that he has hired many people from the ClintonAdministration and Hilary Clinton herself as part of his team, and it would be very easy for them to go back to agreements that Bill Clinton had made like the one I mentioned, but especially the missile agreement to buy out North Korea’s medium and long rage missiles. Clinton had essentially completed that agreement in November and December in 2000, but the Bush Administration didn’t like it and let it drop to the floor. So on a pragmatic level you could imagine them going back to find the papers and put them into implementation, but there are also many people in the Obama administration from the Clinton period who are concerned about proliferation and that has a good side and a bad side. It means that we’ll want to make agreements with North Korea, but it also brings back people who in 1994 planned for a preemptive attack on Yŏngbyŏn plutonium facility, so that’s a danger. But I think Barack Obama is a remarkable person, and in his own vision head and shoulders above those people. I don’t know Obama personally, but I know of him because a number of friends of mine knew him quite well and lived very near him in Chicago. Many professors and friends of mine live in the same neighborhood as Obama, in the area called Kenwood just north of the University, and they have a kind of rolling political discussion that goes from one person’s house to another, at Friday night dinners. In that neighborhood he was exposed to a range of political views much wider than any other President in recent memory. Professor Rasheed Khalidi who was a Middle East expert who went from Chicago to Columbia was a good friend of Obama’s. He would sit at Rasheed Khalidi’s table and discuss the Middle East, and Rasheed is a very moderate Palestinian but he’s still a Palestinian, so he’s going to give a different view than an Israeli would. And I’ve talked to those friends of mine, they play basketball with Obama and they all think that he has a wider vision, a wider range of vision and wider political spectrum of acceptability than any recent President. If you compare that to Bill Clinton who came out of Arkansas as an Arkansas politician, I think you can see that Obama is a very worldly person, not only in his own upbringing and the places he lived, but in the associates he had at the University of Chicago and in the city of Chicago, and so I think that you’re going to see a very different kind of diplomacy from Obama than even the Clinton years. I don’t think Clinton’s North Korea policy was really sorted out very well. I don’t think he paid much attention. He nearly got into a war with North Korea in 1994, then came the Agreed Framework and he didn’t pay any attention to that because of the right wing and Republican Party opposing it, and then in 1998 and ‘99, mainly I think through the prodding from Kim Dae-jung, the Clinton Administration developed a second set of engagement policies with North Korea, but Bill Clinton himself never paid much attention to North Korea or Iran for that matter. So I think Obama is—I mean I think we can have high hopes for him being a post-Cold War President, a very worldly President and one who is going to use unorthodox means toward dealing with American adversaries. I don’t think he’s going to run off and meet with Kim Jong Il anytime soon, but I do think he has a sensibility that is quite different from any President going back quite a long way. P: Well, I would think his diplomacy will be not only different from Bush’s— C: That goes with out saying. P: But also from Clinton’s. For one thing, as you say, Clinton didn’t have any vision about settling the relationship with North Korea. And secondly I think the whole situation has changed during the past 8 years. At that time it was the missiles, this time it’s nuclear weapons plus the missiles. Also, I think the North Koreans probably feel more insecure, in a more precarious position than 8 years ago. So if Obama just digs up the old papers from the last days of the Clinton administration and try just toimplement those, the North Koreans may not be ready to go along. By the way, have you read arecent article by John Feffer on the Japan Focus web page? C: Yes. P: I found it very interesting. It’s called “The North Korean Conundrum: Change You Can Believe In or Policy Status Quo?” He argues that you can’t solve the North Korean nuclear problem just by offering more goodies than Bush was willing to give. You would have to really engage North Korea in an entirely different way, mainly by supporting what he calls a regime change that North Korea has already embarked on. Their turn from doctrinaire socialism to what Kim Jong Il calls ‘real gainsocialism’ should be encouraged and supported by an American program of much more activeengagement. C: I think the most vulnerable period in North Korean history after the Korean War was in 1996, ‘97,‘98 when they had the floods and famine and very sharp confrontation with the ClintonAdministration over the long rang missile test at the end of August 1998. Then of course Kim Dae-jung had come to power and was implementing his reconciliation policy with the North and this slowly had an impact on the Clinton Administration to change its policies. But I think that was the period when maybe even the North Koreans themselves wondered whether they were going to survive. And the very fact that they’re still in power 10 years after the famine probably gives the Northern leadership more confidence than it had in the late ‘90s. I think what is vulnerable in North Korea is precisely thereforms that Feffer talked about. I mean in that article he described the extensive marketization of North Korea and that has turned it into a different place than it was 10 years ago. Most Americans including very well-informed American leaders don’t really know that about North Korea. It’s another reason why the second summit was so important because it coincided with the economic plans we talked about earlier, coincided with the move toward more markets, market allocation in North Korea. So I think John is right about the new markets, but I think he was wrong to use the term “regime change” because that implies overthrowing the North Korean government and it very much plays into the hands of hardliners in North Korea, but if you stipulate without using that term that American policy could support the moves toward market reforms while proceeding along the path of dismantling the Yongbyon reactor, I think that’s a policy that might work but it would have to be accompanied by guarantees of North Korean security along the lines Clinton made in 2000. I agree with John on that, but I think the worst problem we’ve today that we did not have in the 1990s is that North Korea actually exploded the atomic bomb. It’s been very hard for Christopher Hill in going forward with the dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor, because people question whether the North Koreans would ever give up their atomic bombs. I myself think that you have to nail down what you can nail down—in other words, if you can get rid of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor, that’s good, get rid of it. With the atomic bombs I don’t think there’s a chance you could ever be sure that they would give up all of their weapons, or even if they gave some up that they would not be hiding some. But if you nailed down everything else and then get rid of the missiles, it doesn’t matter so much that they have a couple of nuclear weapons to make them feel good. And that is an agreement that is doable. In Washington that would be criticized, but it’s doable and it will make a series of progressive steps that will make it very difficult for North Korea to claim to be a nuclear power or actually be a nuclear weapons state. But I think it’s going to be something that’s hard to sell to the Congress if there’s a chance that North Korea retains one or two or three nuclear weapons. When I talk about this to people, I say that our siege policy—you write about ‘the siege regime’ in North Korea in your book The Korean Division System in Crisis—the American siege against North Korea has produced the worst outcome because it’s a kind of rational response on their part. So if you looked at it in the context of 60 years of America bringing siege against this small country, its not surprising a) that they developed a nuclear weapon and b) it isn’t so terrible if they retain some capability. There are 15,000underground facilities in North Korea that relate to their security. You can’t ever expect to be able to have inspection teams going through all of them. And even if they did, they could move the weapons across the Chinese border and just bring them back in a truck. I mean, it’s kind of an absurd demand to say that we have to find every last nuclear weapon that they have. So if you stipulate that, you’re not going to get a perfect outcome. I think the Obama administration would get a very good outcome from negotiations with North Korea. What I hope is that Obama will fulfill his campaign pledge to speak to leaders that don’t like us. And that doesn’t have to mean a summit meeting or something like that, it just has to mean an orientation toward dialogue and diplomacy. And I think he will do that. P: When I said Pyongyang may feel more insecure now than say 8 years ago, I—of course I agree with you that in many objective conditions they are much better off now than 10 years ago, but on one hand they have this danger of economic reforms being imperiled and if they fail, they really don’t have a choice because this is another case of ‘toothpaste out of the tube’, they can’t go back tothe old regime however much they may wish. I am sure there are many people in North Korean rulingcircles who wish they could go back. So there is this danger that John Feffer mentions, but I think there is also another danger that I’m sure the North Korean rulers are very much aware of. That is the danger that would arise from the very success of economic reforms, and from the American siege being lifted, which will make their ‘siege regime’ much harder to justify to their people. Many progressive people in South Korea advocate for North Korea the kind of reform and opening that we see in China and Vietnam, but I doubt that it’s a feasible prospect in the present situation of division. Both China and Vietnam embarked on their course of reform after they had resolved their nationaldivision. I mean, In China’s case there remains the question of Taiwan but it’s more the threat of secession of a runaway province than anything comparable to the division of the Korean Peninsula or of erstwhile Vietnam. The Vietnamese of course won the war of national liberation against the Americans, and started their Doi Moi policy only afterwards. But South Korea will be there however the low tension may have become. There will always be a threat of some kind of unilateral absorption by the South as time goes on, so there has to be some political framework to guarantee the stability of the North Korean regime. C: If you look at President Kim Dae-jung’s policies, he thought about all of this. I mean his idea was that American troops would stay in South Korea even in the context of reconciliation before reunification with the North, and that would be among other things to maintain the border of the DMZ as a guarantee against absorption by South Korea. He pledged not to absorb North Korea, of course. And what you could imagine would be a North Korean Doi Moi in the context of Hong Kong-like situation where the border is maintained like an international border. Otherwise, millions of Chinese would be in Hong Kong the next morning, and if you maintain the DMZ as a kind of prophylactic barrier between North and South Korea, while the US has a good normalized relationship with Pyongyang, Pyongyang could embark on these reforms without worry that they’d be swallowed by the South. I think there was great logic in Kim Dae-jung’s policies in this regard that a lot of people in America, including leaders in Washington, don’t really understand. P: Actually, the point I’m trying to make is that Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong Il in the year 2000 already agreed on a general formula about how to proceed beyond peaceful coexistence. The June 15 Declaration not only guaranteed the stability of the inter-Korean border for the time being, but italso agreed on a formula for gradual, step-by-step reunification. They agreed that there were common points between the Southern idea of a confederation or union of states and the Northern idea of a low-stage federation. And what I’m saying is that once the US-DPRK relations are normalized and North-South exchanges greatly expanded, then we should really think more seriously about the second article of the June 15th Declaration with the union of states formula, because we’ll need by then a political framework which is a little tighter than the two quite separate states promising to coexist, but not too tight to threaten the regime on either side. C: Well, I think that’s right. But with North Korea I wonder myself, are they more worried about absorption by the South or are they more fearing their own people and conditions when reforms move forward successfully? I think the experience of China and Vietnam can give the North Korean leadership some confidence about going forward with the market reforms. In the U.S. you wouldn’t think there were any more Communist regimes, you know, they all collapsed in 1989 to 1991, but in fact what you had in East Asia is a kind of de-Communization in China and Vietnam, where particularly military leaders become heads of conglomerates and they start making money and they sell their products around the world, and you get a devolution from the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to corporate fiefdoms, and the same has happened in Vietnam, and it’s sometimes Communist party bureaucrats who do it. That’s happening in North Korea. I mean Cho Myŏngnok, who is a General who came and met with President Clinton in 2000, presides over the conglomerate that manufactures missiles and missile parts. In that kind of a situation, Communists see a future for themselves, of being wealthy man in a state-directed market economy. P: Well, I guess it’s about time for us to move on to the global economic crisis, and then to the EastAsian response. Neither of us is an economist, but you at least as a historian have delved into theNortheast Asian political economy. C: Well, I find all this pretty funny because I’m at the University of Chicago where we have the Chicago School of economics, and the Chicago School has been a dominant voice in economic thinking since the Reagan administration. It’s a fact that our economists are very quiet now because their fundamental prescription that the unregulated market can solve everyone’s problems has come crashing to the ground. I think we’re in a very profound crisis that will last a long time and is directly analogous to the Great Depression. The Depression caused a fundamental paradigm shift that lasted essentially 50 years in the world; the idea that markets could solve everybody’s problems or the problems of allocation of goods and services was thrown down, and instead arose the notion of regulated capitalism with the New Deal being a good example of that but after World War II the social market in Germany, the French system, the Japanese kind of corporate capitalism, and so forth. Those were all responses to the Depression and the War that grew out of the Depression, and the fundamental idea was that you had to have a floor on poverty and you had to care for those people who couldn’t care for themselves. This was an outgrowth of the crisis of the 1930s and it really lasted until the Reagan administration in the US. 1980 was a turning point where for the past 30 years all we hear is, just let the market rule, leave the market alone, let the market handle our problems. Well, I don’t think the Chicago economists who were always saying this can get up in front of an audience now and say that with a straight face. So that paradigm has been blasted to smithereens by theSubprime crisis that began as you said more than a year ago, but it culminated in the credit crisis that we have now, and one of the interesting things about living through this history for you and me and other people who kind of pride themselves on trying to understand the way the world works is that you can’t find anybody that knows solutions to our problems now. And people like Henry Paulson the Treasury Secretary, Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve Board, also Alan Greenspan who is now out of office, they don’t have a remedy for the problems we face, and so we have a classic crisis where all the old remedies don’t work and there isn’t a sign yet of what the new ones will be. But I think that the depth of the crisis can be grasped in that it began with the subprime mortgage loans given to people who didn’t really have the wherewithal to pay them back,and then that went into derivatives which are instruments growing out of the mortgages that spread all over the world, and then those derivatives were insured by Credit Default Swaps which is a term nobody heard of before the crisis. CDSs are a kind of unregulated insurance; if they called it insurance, the US Government would regulate it. And the total of CDS, their so-called value is now said to be between 50 trillion and 75 trillion dollars. Now, when you’re at that level, it’s greater than the combined GNP of all the countries in the world. It means that these financial instruments were priced in ways that a lot of people made a great deal of money, but the price has no relationship to reality, and so we’re in the beginning probably of a rather long deflation like the Great Depression.Whether it will become a depression is of course something none of us can answer, but it has smashed the paradigm of the unregulated market and it will no longer be possible for people to make those arguments until you have another 50 years go by and people forget what happened in 2008. P: In the search for new remedies or a new paradigm, it seems to me three thinkers who are also economists prominently come to mind. One is John Maynard Keynes, and the other two are Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx. Now, in the sense that all governments are taking a more activist attitude to the economic crisis, Keynesians are coming back instead of the Chicago people, but given the magnitude of the problem you’ve just described, it’s questionable whether Keynesian economicscould really address the problems. It might be just another of the old remedies even though a muchbetter one than the Chicago School’s neo-liberal formula. There may be both short term and long term problems with the Keynesian remedy. Even in the short run the magnitude of the problem may be too huge for government activism to remedy, although one certainly couldn’t do without government interventions. But secondly, supposing Keynesian activism does succeed and bring the situation under control for the time being, it might still run into new problems, including the classicalproblem of stagflation but possibly others stemming from a new stage of world capitalism quite unlike the 1930s and ‘40s. Which is why I think we need to move on from Keynes to Polanyi and, for even more fundamental reflections, back to Marx. C: Well, I think you pose the problem on the right level in the sense that for Karl Marx something like a derivative or credit default swap is a classic example of capital, and when you read Das Kapital, he talks about capital as often something quite mysterious. It’s a relationship between human beings where a price is put on something but you don’t quite know whether the price is correct or not. And both parties to the transaction have to agree on price for the price to be right. He has a very interesting passage in Kapital where he talks about gold and why we value gold, and it’s worth rereading because it demonstrates the degree to which a commodity like a “credit default swap” is a fiction. It’s a fictional thing and can crash to the ground when people can no longer agree on its price, and people have no idea how to price these things today, even a home that has a structure and stability and where a family lives—even that can’t be priced well. But I think Polanyi’s Great Transformation is a great diagnosis of the situation we find ourselves in because human beings like to enter into a fantasy world where they think the market can be the answer, and then they find that people have to control the market because the market can’t control itself. But what Polanyi finds so dangerous in his analysis of the 1930s is that in the Great Depression as it got worse and worse, one nation after another broke off and went on an autarchic path according to the idiosyncrasies of each country, so you got a new order in Germany and Japan, aNew Deal in the United States, Socialism in One Country in the Soviet Union, but you have the fundamental breakdown of the world economy and every nation is out for itself, and that of course is the seed of World War II. Today, I don’t think we have the kind of social configurations in the U.S. or Europe or Japan or Korea, where you would have a fascist movement or a Communist movement developing. In the 1930s there were still very strong reactionary influences from landlords andaristocracies so that the German or Japanese configuration could take a very reactionary form. I think maybe the part of the world where you see a Polanyi-like development in politics is Latin America where they have broken off one country after another against neo-liberalism, in Argentinaespecially, also to some extent in Brazil and smaller countries. So I can’t understand how this crisis could take the political form that Polanyi discusses so brilliantly in his book, of new orders and new deals in the 1930s, every country going on its own, reconfiguring both its economy and its politics. In the U.S. Keynes was the key theorist of the 1930s, and today Keynesiansm may have the possibility of solving our problems in the next few years by re-regulating Wall Street mortgages and a whole host of other things and in the American case fulfilling finally goals of universal healthcare. It’s possible. It may not happen, but that’s exactly where the Obama administration is going. When you look at an economy like South Korea from the U.S., there are certain fundamentals that are very good that haven’t been touched by this crisis, except that people aren’t buying as much. High technology industries, for instance. Samsung is the new Sony in this country; and in Silicon Valley when you look at the stock valuations, they’ve gone down, but in the case of Microsoft and Cisco Systems it’s only been 10 or 15%. And they’re still producing very well what they produce, and it’s the best sector and the most powerful sector of both the American and Korean economies, whereas finance is really onlyabout 10 to 15% of the economy. So you can see how through good Keynesian regulation,restabilizing the financial sector and enabling it to lend again, the more advanced sectors of the economy could be in good shape fairly quickly. In the US, it’s the second industrial revolution industries that are failing, automobiles preeminently, steel and chemicals and other industries. Butwith the automobiles you have still an industry that is very central to the health of the American economy, and Detroit can move very quickly to hybrid automobiles and electric cars, and because of this crisis Americans are going to be purchasing American cars if they can to help out Detroit, but they have to provide good models, good cars. So I think Obama’s idea of using this crisis to make the U.S. green, much more green than it is now environmentally, is a good idea and it’s doable. Korea is an economy that is remarkable for its human capital and there is nothing about this crisis that’s going to change that. So in that sense, while I do think that this crisis is one that may develop the depth of the Great Depression, I don’t think it has the potential to spin off fascist and Communist polarization in the world. When you look at Barrington Moore’s classic book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which is really about the idiosyncratic social formations in different countries and how they tend toward democracy or dictatorship, I don’t think we have those conditions in the advanced industrial economies today. P: I think the best part of Polanyi’s work is in diagnosing what terrible things can happen when there is a disjunction between economy and the other parts of society. C: Yes, well, one of the passages I always ask my students about and at first they don’t get it, you know. I say, “Polanyi has three commodity fictions, what are they?” Well, they can come up with acouple but not all three. First, it’s man: that human beings are commodities that sell their labor in a market is a fiction. Human beings have to be looked out for or looked after even when they’re not working, so they have to have a roof over their head and food and all of that. The second is land, the fiction that land which is the environment we live in can be sold like any other commodity. And the third is capital: that capital itself is a commodity fiction, which is where he shares a lot of agreement with Karl Marx. And for my students today I tell them if you want to see the commodity fiction operate, all you have to look at is the fictional mortgages called Subprime Mortgages, the fictional derivatives and the fictional Credit Default Swaps. They’re like viruses moving through the world economy, contaminating everybody and the reason is that there is nothing behind them. You can’t say there’s a quality investment that can be priced in a market, and it’s all going up in smoke before our very eyes. And so it’s a very instructive moment about why the market itself has to be regulated. P: If Polanyi were alive today and trying to find a remedy for the global crisis, he would have to seek for some formula to reinvent an economy embedded in society and culture, but not at the national level but at global or at least regional levels, and that is why I feel that we need some kind of analysis of capitalism itself by moving from Keynes to Polanyi and then on to Marx. Marx’s analysis actuallydidn’t agree too well with national situations in his day, but perhaps it becomes more persuasive when you put it in today’s global context. C: Well, that’s what I think Polanyi did at the end of his book. The first edition came out in 1944; he would have had written it at the height of World War II, and at the end of the book he essentially called for social democracy on a world scale, a new world system, but also in the epilogue talked about the values of the Old Testament, the New Testament and some kind of modern equivalent. He comes back to the philosopher Spinoza who tried to take Old Testament values and realize them in the here and now through some sort of social program, and I think that message of Polanyi’s epilogue will resonate throughout the industrial world. The move toward a different kind of world system is one that in a sense did happen after 1945. Its foundation was of course a capitalist one but it was also a regulated New Deal for the world as Roosevelt saw it, with the IMF and the World Bank and other mechanisms in the same year of Polanyi’s book, 1944, and I think for the advanced industrial world those mechanisms worked well to revive wartime economies in Europe and East Asia. But neo-liberalism of the 1990s was essentially the international equivalent of the Chicago School in domestic economy, and it has been dealt a very heavy blow by this crisis. Among the Latin American left wing governments there has already been a very strong reaction against neo-liberalism. In the case of Europe, East Asia and the US, too, I don’t think you’re going to hear a lot of neo-liberal talk coming out of the mouths of leaders. P: Except from the current South Korean government, though even here they don’t like to call it by the name ‘neo-liberalism’. C: But President Lee Myung-bak is in a time warp. He was elected in the wrong place at the wrong time for his policies, so he’s been bumping his head against the wall. But from the standpoint of your work on the division system and its connection to the world system, we’re essentially at the point Polanyi was talking about, where we do need something to overcome neo-liberalism on a world scale,and it might be that the European Union is an example of at least trying to do that, because they have tried to develop a region-wide stimulus package to get their economies moving again. Germany, the biggest economy, is still balking, but if Germany and France and the EU countries can move together in the direction of the stimulus and a transnational economic policies, that will help pull us out of this crisis. That would be good, but it would still be founded on a capitalist model. P: I would agree that the capitalist world system entered a new stage in 1945, but I wouldn’t say thatthere was any fundamental change in the system. The spread of welfare programs among advanced industrial nations would be equivalent to the adoption of welfare policies within some advancednational economies in the pervious stage. That’s not a transformation of capitalism into some kind ofwelfare capitalism. At the global level the same kind of inequalities have persisted. C: I think that the policies that I talked about after 1945, the Bretton Woods agreements and the social market in Germany and so on, these were all very beneficial to the populations in the advanced industrial countries. And almost all of those countries except for the US were ones that had been completely or partially destroyed during World War II and so rebuilding those economies, in Japan and Germany especially, was a ticket to very rapid growth. I do think that in a country like Germany or France, or Italy for that matter in spite of its crazy politics, people were able to achieve a combination of decent growth, social welfare and civilizational congruity that maybe is about as good as you can get in the real world, in the sense that when I go to cities like Paris or Munich or Berlin, I think well this is the way civilized people live. It doesn’t mean that the world system as a whole is not one of extraordinary and gross inequality because it is, but in Germany you don’t see that gross inequality. In my own country you see it all the time. I live that gross inequality in that the University of Chicago is on the South Side that most white people are afraid to visit. I don’t see those conditions in Korea or Germany or France. The U.S. is backward in that sense, and it is by virtue of the devotion of American leaders to market solutions that we end up with millions of people having no livelihood whatsoever. But the US in a sense is a microcosm of the larger world system. And in thatrespect capitalism doesn’t provide a remedy. P: There is no doubt at all that by now neo-liberalism provides no remedy. But if you take a very long view of capitalist world system, you could say that neo-liberalism was in a sense a logical response to capitalism’s inherent inability to remedy the problems of inequality and poverty and so on. Since you couldn’t solve the problem for everybody anyway— C: —why not solve it just for some people? P: Exactly. And they couldn’t do even that either without creating all these bubbles. And this brings back Marx’s idea of the falling rate of profit. Now all these bubbles—I mean, on the surface it’s the credit crisis that has created the current economic problems now reaching the Main Street or the real economy, but behind the financial crisis may actually lie the falling rate of profit, which necessitates the creation of these continuous bubbles to keep the economy going, and they have to burst some time or other. Now I’m not trying to go back to the old— C: The remedy that Polanyi has at the end of his book is a social democracy on the world scale that implies some kind of world government, some kind of global mechanism of governance that would redistribute wealth as well as create wealth, and I think you and I could agree that that would be a much better system than the one that we have today. I think it’s important to realize that we’re living in a world as people who have been around for a while, we being in our 60s, where a number of solutions to the problem of inequality have been tried and unfortunately several of them failed. And certainly the collapse of socialism, collapse of the Soviet Union, was a blow to those of us who wanted to believe in some sort of progressive solution, because they turned out not to have theanswer to many problems. That vast attempt to solve the problem of inequality essentially failed. And the capitalist attempts, whether the regulated New Deal or the neo-liberal follow up to that in the‘90s have failed, too, when it comes to inequality on a world scale. I think markets are good for allocating goods and services when they are controlled and regulated. So we have to have some mechanisms to have democratic politics, or regulated market and redistributive programs, and it’s redistributed programs that are in my country so hard to achieve. P: I agree with what you say about the failed attempts to the solve problem of capitalism. That’s why I was about to say I’m not trying to go back to the old model of a general crisis of capitalism automatically leading to revolution and to the establishment of a socialist society and so on. But you mentioned Latin America as an example of a regional movement or a set of separate movements withinthe region, to build something like what Polanyi envisaged. Personally I am eager to see if they will come up with a coherent alternative to neo-liberalism, and in case they do, whether it will be a variant of old social democracy or something more radically new. But perhaps we should focus on the possibilities of a specifically East Asian response to the crisis, which may offer the world a new and meaningful alternative. C: Japan dealt with these problems all through the 1990s as a country that has a large welfare system but also had a sclerotic leadership both in the Liberal Democratic Party and the government. Theytried different palliatives to get the economy moving again, none of which worked. In conditions somewhat similar to what we all face today, deflation, falling real estate crisis, collapsed mortgages and so on, Japan has not solved the problem even 10 years later. I mean, the economy in Japan is decent, it grows here and there although next year they will have minus growth, but Japan gives us an example of one East Asian response to the crisis of tinkering a little bit here and there. China’s is I think the most untested East Asian response because they’ve been used to 30 years of double-digit growth. And China has to grow about 8% to bring all the new people in, to give jobs to all the new people being produced every year for the job market. So if they fall to a 4 or 3% growth they have a huge problem of unemployment and social unrest. In the case of Korea, Lee Myung-bak says that it will be 3% next year. I think probably his government will be in the Japanese tinkering mode of trying to do relatively small things by way of response. North Korea is a country that you might think its political economy was made to deal with a crisis like this by virtue of self-reliance and relative lack of involvement in world economy, but it would be impossible to say that North Korea is a model for anyone at this point. I think the United States is going to be the most interesting country in terms of how it responds to the crisis. It was the source of the problem to begin with, and how the ObamaAdministration deals with it will probably be a good indication of how other countries are going to deal with the crisis. Of course I don’t know how he’s going to deal with it, but I think you’re right that certainly Keynes is going to be a key thinker for him, and unfortunately Polanyi won’t be. It will be quite fascinating to see how this plays out. Fascinating for us as intellectuals, maybe not so fascinating for people about to lose jobs or having already lost their jobs. I do hope this crisis would be one like the 1930s in the sense that people would come to a new recognition that markets have to be controlled and that the least among us have to be supported if anybody is going to get wealthy. The problem with the falling rate of profit that you mentioned is a very interesting one, because in the US we move from one bubble to another, the Silicon Valley bubble of the late 1990s and then a real estate bubble and then now a credit crunch not necessarily a bubble, a bubble has been punctured. I’m not sure that any of those had to happen in a regulated capitalist economy. You could make 7% profit a year at Cisco Systems and still be relatively happy. I mean, the tendency of capitalism to always push things toward a bubble is unquestionably true of the United States but not so true of other advanced industrial economies. In England under Blair and Thatcher I think you have the same tendency, but I don’t think it’s a necessary tendency in that through regulation and maybe even profit ceilings of some kind or a tax system that would confiscate a lot of the wealth of people who do very well in the bubble. Some people say that is a Communist idea. It’s not. Our top tax rate was about 90% until the Reagan years. So if you make 10 million dollars, you only got 1 million dollars out of it. Now that is not a Communist or even socialist idea. It’s just a way of redistributing wealth. P: I agree. As for the falling rate of profit, that of course is a thesis at a very high level of abstraction, applicable to global capital as such rather than its various local instances. But I am really out of my depths here, and we had better get back to East Asia. First of all, let me say that in Korea we would be happy enough if our government emulated even the Japanese model of tinkering, for they wouldat least be doing something positive. But I’m afraid unless Korean civil society mobilizes itself once again to somehow rein in this regime, they won’t be satisfied with tinkering, they would want to rush full speed in reverse gear. C: That would be just another way in which he’s just in a time warp. P: And that would be another way for him to contribute to the deepening of democracy in this country. C: That could be a silver lining. P: Yes. Now regarding East Asia, I think there are two conflicting prospects. One, that East Asian economies will come off better than other regions or at least the United States because they enjoy strong fundamentals in so many areas and, in Japan for instance and Korea too in a different way following the financial crisis in 1997, have dealt with these problems for the past 15 years. Also, China and Japan have a lot of cash, and ready money speaks even more loudly in a time of depression, so itshould work to the advantage of the Northeast Asian region. The other view is that since these economies are so much oriented toward exports, they will suffer more than others. C: I think Japan, Korea and China all have a problem because Americans aren’t buying and therefore consumer spending in the US will definitely affect exports. Even Toyota is being hurt by the fact that Americans don’t want to buy cars. But I think that China is the country that is most vulnerable to the decline in the American market because of its necessity to grow at 8, 9, 10%, as we were saying a minute ago. There is one company that is doing better in the U.S. and that’s Wal-Mart, because Americans are going from Macy’s to Wal-Mart to buy Christmas presents. And something like an eighth of all Chinese imports to the United States are from Wal-Mart subsidiaries in China, so that is one mechanism that could keep China’s exports going. In the case of South Korea, I think their bank exposure is greater than Japan’s to the viruses in the international financial system, but I also think Korea, because it’s involved so heavily in knowledge industries and doing so well in them, is relatively better off than a number of other countries that don’t have that kind of basis. P: Well, in the event that Northeast Asian countries are less ravaged by the current economic crisis,this might create a different problem, in the sense that people might just want to ride out the storm and wait for the good old days to come back rather than really thinking hard about new solutions. C: Well, I’m sure that will happen in Japan, it’s a country that’s rudderless. I mean, their leadership consists of one Prime Minister after another who comes into office and is almost immediately unpopular and lasts maybe a year or so, and now Aso is also very unpopular. So Japan has a crisis of political leadership that goes back to the loss of their sense of what they were doing circa 1990. So I think tinkering in economic policy and serial replacement of Prime Ministers is likely in Japan, and I don’t think you’re going to see the kind of restructuring or reform that is needed. P: I think Korea is a crucial variable in this picture. One, because as I said we happen to have aPresident who is determined to go on with the old way of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich and so on, which is necessitating civil society and opposition forces to rise up and try to rein in this kind of preposterous behavior. C: It’s much more likely to happen in Korea than in Japan. P: Yes, I hope and trust that it will happen in Korea. And if this kind of input from below succeeds inbringing about a reversal in government policy, it will produce a more fundamental rethinking than if the President voluntarily listened to some Keynesian advisors and opted for the tinkering formula. And another factor peculiar to us is the relation between North and South Korea because—well,things are at a standstill now, but if they start moving again and we develop collaborative projects between a fairly advanced capitalist economy and a very different kind of economy, this would create all kinds of new opportunities and also the necessity for innovative projects and it will also expand the space for innovation and creative thinking within South Korea. C: We should start by going back to the second summit agreement we were discussing before, but I think the Lee Myung-bak Administration has to change its policy because it’s quite isolated now, in that nobody is paying attention to it in the Six-Party Talks because there is a tendency for South Korea and Japan to band together and Japan has been isolated in the six party talks, so if Obama supports the Six-Party Talks, which I’m sure he will and I think his advisors will move toward pushingsome sort of a mechanism of Northeast Asian security coming out of the Six-Party Talks, then Lee Myung-bak is going to have to change, going to have to get with the program. P: Personally I’ve abandoned by now all hopes of Lee Myung-bak changing on his own initiative, so— C: So he would have to be forced to change from outside. P: From outside the country and from outside the Government within the country. And we could envision a different kind of alliance between the US government and South Korean citizens. Before, itused to be the alliance of the Bush Administration and the conservatives within South Korea blocking the reform movement in South Korea and reconciliation with the North. Now for a change we need an alliance and solidarity between Obama and Obama supporters in the United States and the democratic reform forces in South Korean civil society. C: I think that will happen anyway. P: Well, let’s stop on that hopeful note. Thank you very much.
[Norma Field] The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship

February 20, 2009

Norma Field The Korean translation of this article was published in The Quarterly Changbi (Spring 2009). Norma Field is a Professor in Japanese Studies in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. © Norma Field 2009 / Korean Translation ⓒ Changbi 2009 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Commercial Appetite and Human Need: The Accidental and Fated Revival of Kobayashi Takiji’s Cannery Ship Readers of Changbi are likely to be acquainted with the news that Japan’s best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kōsen (The Cannery Ship) by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008. They are likely to know as well that the revival of the novel is attributed to the deepening impoverishment of the ranks of the irregularly employed, now widely said to account for one-third of the work force. The majority of the latter earn less than two million yen per year. It is their increasingly insistent presence that has given such terms as “income-gap society” (kakusa shakai), “working poor” (waakingu pua), and more recently, “lost generation” (rosu jene) widespread familiarity. That said, it remains difficult to formulate a statement along the lines of “Because of a momentous socioeconomic shift, therefore the revival of a novel published in 1929.”　Why not a contemporary novel for grasping contemporary conditions? How can a novel from eight decades ago even be readable today, especially by those young readers whose circumstances it is said to elucidate? And finally, what meaning should we find in the “boom” beyond amazement that it actually happened? These questions entail each other. They can only be answered provisionally, not only because the process is ongoing, but also because any meaning we might ascribe to it is itself an expression of our understanding of the present and of our obligations to the future, in other words, of our consciousness. In order to make even rudimentary sense of the “boom,” however, it is first necessary to take account of its implausibility. Why the “boom” was improbable Let me speak briefly from personal experience. For approximately five years, I have been studying what is called Japanese proletarian literature with a focus on Kobayashi Takiji. I have stayed at length in Otaru, the port city in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, where this writer grew up. Even there, where most people had at least heard his name, if I told people that I was studying Kobayashi Takiji, I was greeted with surprise. The surprise was often benign, but it could turn skeptical, and especially with intellectuals, aggressively so. Why are you bothering with someone like him now, was the accusation I read in people’s faces even, or especially when they didn’t voice it. In Japan, it is generally acknowledged that “the season of politics” was over by the early 1970s, after both the popular struggle against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 had been crushed and the student struggle of 1968-70, which was an explosive protest against the bureaucratized, competitive, consumption-centered society that had followed upon the “income-doubling” plan announced in 1960, ended in a widespread sense of defeat. What did this mean for the legacy of a writer like Kobayashi Takiji? At the time of his death, at age 29, by torture at the hands of the Special Higher Police, he was a member of the then illegal Japan Communist Party. Leftist intellectuals from the 60s and 70s movements, who might be thought to feel some affinity for him, were alienated by the fact of his membership in a party that had sought to control them. For others, saturated in postmodernist ideology, a body of works produced in a class-based revolutionary movement was simply laughable. But surely there was more to the hostility of middle-aged leftists than party affiliation or intellectual camp. Takiji’s name awakened an all but forgotten reconciliation with a retreat from politics. It registered as a dull, irritating reproach. For the young, he was simply an unknown entity or at most, a name attached to a title in a list of modern Japanese writers. The “boom” was manufactured and real To be sure, during the five years preceding the boom, several developments laid the ground for expanding interest in Takiji beyond the tiny circles of devotees. A Takiji Library（http://www.takiji-library.jp/index.html) was established through the remarkable initiative of Sano Chikara, a hugely successful businessman and graduate of Takiji’s alma mater, Otaru University of Commerce. The Library became a centralized source of information; it also sponsored the publication of ten books including a manga version of The Cannery Ship to attract a young readership to, and together with the University, co-sponsored a series of international symposia. A documentary film, “Strike the Hour, Takiji” (http://home.b09.itscom.net/takiji/) was released in 2005; screenings became occasions for new Takiji gatherings. The film’s foregrounding of Takiji’s opposition to imperialist war served to link it to the national movement to preserve Article 9 (the no-war clause) of the Constitution. These initiatives were significant achievements in themselves and led to a new Internet presence as well. It is striking, however, that the antiwar angle failed to spark a broad interest in Kobayashi Takiji. What was required for that to happen was not only a widespread acknowledgement of economic crisis, but the much more difficult recognition—for a society habituated to regarding itself as homogeneously middle-class—that the solutions being adopted were creating dramatic disparities. The bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1990s led to an onslaught of structural readjustment. Suicide rates took a leap beginning in 1998. (The figure of 30,000 per year has not changed in ten years and places Japan second only to Russia in the G8.) Signs of economic “recovery” came around 2003 and were heralded in the media without acknowledgment of the cost, which was growing income disparity. Prime Minister Koizumi himself provided distractions from such recognition by playing up his eccentricity as evidence of independence and by engaging in a hyper display of patriotism in visits to Yasukuni Shrine, obscuring the real damage he was doing to the majority of Japanese citizens. Concurrently, a blame-the-victim approach was prepared through government responses to the three young hostages in Iraq (2004), captured in the expression jiko sekinin, “personal responsibility.” Perhaps the first sign of recognition that the economy, if indeed it was recovering, was doing so in a way that benefited the few and injured the many came in the selection of the phrase “income-gap society” as one of the ten keys expressions of the year 2006. The alarming numbers of the irregularly employed and the concentration of unemployment among the young made it apparent that the emphasis on “free” in the expression “freeters” (furiitaa) was no longer appropriate. If increasing numbers of the young were to be found in dispatch and other forms of irregular employment, it was no longer because they preferred to be unshackled to a regular job, but because they had no choice. The precariouslysituated young (yielding the term “purekariaato,” said to derive from an Italian grafitto combining “precario” and “proletariato”) found their champion in the erstwhile rightist punk-rock-band-singer-turned-labor-activist-and-writer Amamiya Karin. Amamiya, a conspicuous media figure in her “gosu rori” (Gothic Lolita) fashion. It is one of her book titles that has provided a slogan for the anti-poverty movement: “ikisasero,” or “make us live,” a neologism insofar as it is a demand and not a plea to “let us live.” Amamiya was to play a key role in the Cannery Ship revival. Here, a brief chronology of the boom might be useful. Two newspaper articles served as major catalysts. First, a conversation between Amamiya and established novelist Takahashi Genichirō in the nationally circulated daily Mainichi (January 9, 2008) in which Amamiya observed that reading Cannery Ship, she was struck by how the conditions depicted mirrored the current desperate situation of young workers. (Why was Amamiya reading this work? She was preparing for a discussion on literature and labor to be published on the pages of Minshu Bungaku (Democratic Literature), a formally independent journal with close ties to the Japan Communist Party. Amamiya, in her early 30s, seems to effortlessly cross the boundaries between old and new left and new new left, liberal, socialist, and communist publications.) Amamiya’s comment was quoted widely and found its way into the second influential article, in the major liberal daily Asahi on February 16. In the course of the article, senior editorial writer Yuri Sachiko referred to an essay contest on Cannery Ship in which she had been a judge. Cosponsored by the Takiji Library and Otaru University for Commerce, the contest targeted (a) young readers (age limit of twenty-five) but also (b) made room for older and unconventional readers (such as homeless readers, through internet café submission) and offered substantial prize money for responses to Cannery Ship, or more precisely, the manga version published in 2006 by the Library. (In fact, the winning entrants went on to read the novella, as evident from the collection of submissions, which in turn sold well: Watashitachi wa ikani kani kōsen o yonda ka, or How We Read the Cannery Ship). The Asahi article prompted a bookstore worker in charge of stocking paperbacks to read the novel. Stunned by how it spoke to her own experience of three years as a “freeter,” she ordered 150 copies from Shinchosha, the publishers of a paperback edition, who were frankly bewildered to receive such an order for a long-forgotten title. Once received, the copies were stacked with a handwritten pop-up sign suggesting that the conditions of the “working poor” might constitute a veritable “cannery ship.” “Working poor” was already familiar as a phrase, and here it was effectively paired with the unfamiliar, but concretely suggestive “cannery ship.” Middle-aged male readers, the first to notice, began to yield to young people in their twenties. Then, on May 2, during the slow-news period of “Golden Week,” the top circulation conservative daily Yomiuri made the boom—which did not yet exist–its topic article of the evening edition. Soon, television stations began vying with one another to take up the improbable hot topic of the day, their cameras going to bookstores, and filming essay contest winners. By the end of May, Shinchosha had reprinted 200,000 copies. By December 2008, it is estimated that 600,000 copies of this edition alone had made their way to bookstores. Other publishers followed suit; one (Shūkan Kinyōbi) produced a new hard-cover edition with an introduction by Amamiya in which she meticulously analyzed the parallels between labor conditions as depicted in the novel and those of the present-day. There are now four manga versions on the market. A documentary on Takiji’s life by Hokkaido Broadcasting Corporation won the Agency for Cultural Affairs Grand Prize, edging out major productions by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). Not only are more titles forthcoming in 2009, but a stage production and a feature film scheduled as well. All of this would surely have been welcome to Takiji, an eager filmgoer, ardent yet critical fan of Charlie Chaplin, interested in all genres that would bring the movement to more people. What can we make of this concatenation of events? It seems to be a miraculous meeting of pure contingency and absolute necessity, of commercial appetite and human need. Without the long investment in Takiji and his works (collecting, editing, reprinting, issuing newsletters, observing his death anniversary) on the part of a few groups, many associated with the Japan Communist Party, the resources would not have been available for this historic moment. Takiji could have lived on like this for another decade, until the aging keepers of the flame died out. To be sure, there were individuals newly interested in him thanks to the activities of the Takiji Library, but they did not constitute a group; if they knew each other, it was through the Internet. For Takiji to survive beyond dusty library shelves, something utterly different needed to happen. That is, somehow, there had to be a meeting between his 1929 fiction and the political-social order of the present, a meeting that could only take place in the hearts and minds of those compelled to live under the strictures of the latter. Two liberal newspaper articles, an initial book order of 150 copies, then a conservative newspaper article turned the trickle of interest into a flood. Finding a story that sells is of course a central preoccupation of the media, with the hoped-for outcome being a cascade of sales. The aura of newsworthiness prompted publishers to reprint more copies, bookstores to provide more space, provoking further media attention, then more copies reprinted. And in this largely commercial process, something began to happen. Kitamura Takashi, in a report at the 2008 Kobayashi Takiji Memorial Symposium at Oxford in October (collected papers published by Kinokuniya Shoten as Takiji no shiten kara mita shintai chiiki kyōiku [Body, Region and Education from Takiji's Viewpoint] in February, 2009) observes a shift in the nature of the reporting, which began with the familiar observation of similarities but then evolved to registering and reproducing the novella’s claim that banding together in resistance can lead to social transformation. In other words, journalists following the story began to recognize themselves in it and to express their own desires in print and on the airwaves. Not That We Are Exploited, but Why and How, and What We Must Do The phrase “kani kōsen” ended up among the top ten key expressions of 2008. The phrase, in other words, had become a metaphor that enabled many people to grasp their condition. It drew together terms such as “working poor,” “lost generation,” and “income-gap society” into a coherent whole in its image of inescapable exploitation: a factory ship, subject neither to international maritime law nor factory regulation because of its hybrid nature, operating in frigid waters near the Soviet Union, with workers of diverse origin who were driven to compete for marginal advantages in literally deadly conditions of labor. In fact, it was this condition—that workers were confined on board ship and faced with a visible enemy in the form of slave overseer-like bosses—that led some to question the applicability of the novella to present-day conditions, wherein temporary workers are scattered and the exploitation often abstract and impersonal. Takiji makes clear in the work, however, (1) that it is a slow, difficult process for the hierarchically separated, motley group of workers to reach the understanding that only through solidarity do they have any chance of survival and (2) that their real enemy is not the brutal overseer before them, but the structure comprised of bankers in Tokyo, the imperial military, and global capital. (In fact, the workers’ first uprising fails because they expect the imperial navy to defend them, loyal imperial subjects, against their unjust bosses. Having learned their lesson, they must rise up “again…and again.”) About his next major work Fuzai jinushi (The Absentee Landlord, 1929), Takiji wrote his editor that his purpose was not to show tenant farmers that they were wretched, which they knew all too well, but why and how they were maintained in that condition, and that the way forward was struggle through solidarity not only among themselves but with urban workers as well. After decades of depoliticized emphasis on consumer pleasures, accompanied by atomization masquerading as individualism and fostered by educational and workplace competition—decades in which the word “labor” was all but forgotten despite the rising phenomenon of death-from-overwork (karōshi)—it should, in fact, not surprise us that there was no contemporary literary work that could provide such an intuitively compelling image of both exploitation and resistance. Indeed, now that we have been thrust in a worldwide depression, the image of the “cannery ship” is more comprehensive than ever, coinciding with that image of “spaceship earth” from a time when astronauts still provided us heady excitement and hope. The aspect of the “cannery ship” image that continues to be under-recognized is that of the military. Acutely attuned to the imbrications of the class system, colonialism and imperialism, Takiji argued for the need to join the class struggle with anti-imperialist struggle. In his penultimate work of fiction, Tōseikatsusha (The Life of a Party Member), published after his murder in 1933, the protagonist, together with comrades, is organizing in a factory that has suddenly been ordered to produce gas masks for use on the continent. The goal is to persuade regular and temporary workers to stand together for their rights and to oppose the use of their labor for an imperialist war. Since permanent workers were inclined to safeguard their privileges from encroachment by cheaper temp labor, and temp workers were grateful for a war that was providing at least short-term wage labor, we can imagine how daunting this organizing task was. Daunting, but correct in terms of principle and analysis. If Japanese activists today, often securely middle-class, well educated, and middle-aged and older, who are dedicated to problems of historical consciousness, the former military comfort women or Article 9,have not seemed engaged by the antipoverty movement of the young, then the latter have not taken up the antiwar cause. Given the limitations of time and resources, this is altogether understandable. But in order to catch up with the consciousness of Takiji and his comrades of the late 1920s and early 30s, in order, therefore, to be adequate to the demands of the present, it is necessary to join the antipoverty and antiwar struggles. That entails overcoming the sectarian residues from the 1960s and 70s as well as generational divides. Two new journals give a hint of the discussions and actions that are underway: POSSE (http://www.npoposse.jp/magazine/index.html), run by an NPO membership in their early twenties and dedicated to labor issues, and Losgene, which bills itself as a “Pan-left Journal” (http://losgene.org/). The New Bearers of Solidarity and Struggle The Cannery Ship boom issued from and feeds a hunger for collectivity and activism amid the loneliness and cynicism produced by neo-liberal callousness. Communist Party membership has been increasing at the rate of 1000 per month over the past year and has attracted mainstream media attention. New kinds of unions are springing up around the country, welcoming single members, providing legal advice and support, demonstrating that collective bargaining is possible even for dispatch workers. From December 31st to January 5th, twenty some organizations, including these unions as well as mainstream labor confederations, came together as part of the Anti-poverty Campaign (http://www.k5.dion.ne.jp/~hinky/) to establish a “Greet-the-New-Year-Dispatch-Workers’ Village” for workers who had been summarily terminated and rendered homeless just as administrative offices closed for the new year holidays. Tents went up in the heart of Tokyo in Hibiya Park, under the nose of the Labor Ministry; food and legal advice were provided, and most importantly, the New Year was greeted in the company of others and before the eyes of the nation. No doubt Takiji would have rejoiced in these developments, too. Committed as he was to the cause of poor women—often depicting their skills as organizers in his fiction–he might have been especially intrigued by the case of Iwagami Ai, who was unlawfully fired by a shop specializing in the BABY line of Lolita fashions. (http://blog.goo.ne.jp/koube-roudou/d/20090112 ) Clad in her long black Gothic Lolita dress, surrounded by customers in pink and white ruffled dresses, Iwagami speaks at May Day rallies and labor-rights’ study groups. She has won broad support from the new unions and is taking her case to court: “Workers have the right to stand in unity, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take collective action.” Why Literature? In Cannery Ship as well as in other works, Takiji makes frequent reference to the colonies and to the “semi-colonial” brutality of the police. He understood the periphery to represent both backwardness and possibility. Looking to the Scandinavian writers who raised key issues in modern literature, he acknowledged a similar aspiration for himself, an “absentee writer,” absent, that is, from the center in Tokyo, situated as he was in the semi-colonial periphery of Hokkaido. But he expected truly great “absentee writers” to emerge from the colonies, from Korea and Taiwan. No doubt, again, that he would have been gratified to see a new Korean translation of Cannery Ship appear in 2008. But he would also have been thrilled with the rediscovery of an earlier translation and the journey of the translator (李貴源, Yi Kwiwon) and publisher (李相炅, Yi Sanggyŏng)to speak at his birthplace in Akita Prefecture in February of 2008. Yi Kwiwon recounted how, as he translated the works of Marx or Lenin from Japanese translations in the course of underground activities in Pusan, he began to yearn for works of literature. Encountering Takiji’s works for the first time, and feeling a strong affinity for the portrayal of state violence (in “March 15, 1928″) and underground struggle (“The Life of a Party Member”) as well as the narrative of the Cannery Ship, he translated the three, and his friend published them under the title of The Cannery Ship as soon as the Chun Doo-hwan regime came to an end. Why did Yi Kwiwon feel the need for works of literature? Why, for that matter, did Takiji and his comrades feel the need to produce literature during their busy, danger-ridden pursuit of social transformation? And how important is the fact of its being a work of literature to the revival of the Cannery Ship? We know that the title has provided an invaluable metaphor enabling people to grasp their current condition, but what about the work as a whole? It remains to be seen if, and how, in these strange and familiar times, the experience of novelistic ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking will serve people seeking to redefine their world: from a collection of atomized consumers to a collectivity of citizens who, by forging solidarity around the necessity of work, have once gain begun to dream of a society dedicated to the flourishing of all.
[Roberto Schwarz] A Brazilian Breakthrough

November 24, 2008

A Brazilian Breakthrough By Roberto Schwarz Roberto Schwarz is professor of literary theory, University of Campinas, São Paulo. Professor Schwartz’s materialist interpretation of cultural history has produced many works of critical theory, spanning 25 years. His books include Um Mestre Na Periferia do Capitalismo: Machado de Assis (1990) and Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (1992). * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Winter 2008). © New Left Review 2005
[Mike Davis] Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Meltdown

October 15, 2008

Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Meltdown Mike Davis Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. He is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change. * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Autumn 2008). © Mike Davis 2008 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
[Paik Nak-chung] A Singular Modernity, Plural Postmodernisms, and a Do…

August 1, 2008

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University The following presentation was made at the Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, 25 November 2008, in honor of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize recipient, Fredric R. Jameson. The text records the talk as it was given, assigning to footnotes those remarks in the prepared text omitted from the oral presentation. The filmed talk is to be made available at http://holbergprisen.no/fredric-r-jameson/holbergprisens-symposium-2008.html. © Paik Nak-chung 2008 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- It is a great honor to be speaking at this Symposium honoring Fredric Jameson. I have written out what I have to say, because I wanted to be sure of saying it within the allotted time. I confess to you that after hearing Professor Jameson and other speakers this morning I feel a great temptation to add impromptu remarks, but I promise I’ll exercise heroic self-restraint, even omitting some lines in the prepared text. There are three terms in my title: a singular modernity, plural postmodernisms, and a double project. I shall take them up by turns in that order, and I begin with a strong endorsement of Fredric Jameson’s idea of ‘a singular modernity’. Behind the easy resort to such distinction is the assumption that the true aim of the June Struggle was to build ‘people’s democracy’ or socialism—or at least social democracy—in South Korea. From such a vantage point, the June 29th Declaration (by government candidate Roh Tae-woo acceding to many of the protesters’ overt demands) was nothing more than a deceptive move to prevent the full success of the popular struggle, and such interpretation turns the past twenty years into a period of thwarted hopes where the people won the shell but lost the core of democracy. In my view, this is a very one-sided interpretation of Korea’s reality. Going beyond such one-sidedness is an important task for us as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the June Struggle. The notion of multiple modernities does have its merits. For one thing, it challenges the once-dominant ideology of ‘modernization’ as a universal and essentially uniform historical process; and for another, it explodes the monolithic view of modernity entertained by those who attempt to stand apart from the modern world and reject it in toto. While neither of these positions functions today as credible intellectual doctrines, they remain potent enough as ideological forces, especially the unquestioning valorization of modernity. Notions of multiple or ‘alternative’ modernities, according to Jameson, represent precisely such ideological maneuvers that block fundamental questions regarding modernity. “Whatever you dislike about the latter [the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model of modernity],” he writes in A Singular Modernity, “including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and ‘cultural’ notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so forth. … But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself. The standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or late stage of the system casts considerable doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order.”[1] Although I have a very limited knowledge of the topic, I have noticed that capitalism itself rarely receives serious analysis in discourses of multiple or alternative modernities (including at the 2006 Holberg Symposium with Shmuel Eisenstadt[2] ); and while modernity as a contested ground is emphasized, its contradictions are hardly mentioned. These omissions prove all the more glaring in the light of this year’s global economic crisis. Of course, so long as the system lasts, different nations, cultures and regions will cope with it in different ways, but the existence of capitalist modernity as a common problem appears more convincing than ever. Jameson calls the ‘cultural logic’ of this third and presumably last stage of capitalism[3] by the name of ‘postmodernism’. He also uses the word ‘postmodernity’, mostly for the current stage of capitalism but at times also for its cultural logic. This leaves us with many things to ponder and sort out. But here let me make a short digression on Jameson’s presence in South Korea’s literary and intellectual scene. Marxism and Form was the first of six Jameson books to be published in Korean.[4] I will not conceal my pride in the fact that it was translated by two of my pupils and issued by a publishing house I am closely associated with, Changbi Publishers. At the time of its publication (1984) South Korea was still under military dictatorship, and using the original title was out of the question, so that the Korean edition opted for the more innocuous-sounding ‘Unfolding of Dialectical Literary Theories’. Yet both in those days, when open Marxist discourse was severely suppressed, and after democratization in June 1987, when the enlarged freedom saw (among other things) a resurgence of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism, this book rendered invaluable service to South Korea’s intellectual life. Here was Jameson the great transcoder, not only working on a set of diverse codes but transcoding for an audience habituated to non-dialectical thought. Rising to that challenge gave the book its cutting edge (as Jameson himself remarked in the book’s preface), ensured its relevance to a national situation as different as South Korea’s and, in my view, gives it an enduring power even today, for “to think dialectically, to acquire the rudiments of a dialectical culture and the essential critical weapons which it provides”[5] remains as urgent and as largely neglected a task as when knowledge of dialectical theories was far scantier. The monumental Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is also frequently cited among us, but I would say its impact has been less profound or pointed than his earlier work (up to, say, The Political Unconscious), not only because there is no Korean edition yet, (one is forthcoming), but for other reasons too. The relative weakness in Korea of non-literary critical discourse (on architecture, film, video art, etc.) would be one of those reasons, but more crucially, there is the difficulty of discriminating Jameson’s postmodernism from aesthetic and philosophic doctrines of the more fashionable kind (whose fashion, incidentally, has by now waned in Korea), a difficulty owing considerably to the fact that the cultural objects Jameson discusses are often the same ones that the latter theorists celebrate. Indeed, it has been difficult in our situation to distinguish even the ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ features, many of which would reach our shores simultaneously and with the effect largely, though not exclusively, of colonial or neocolonial domination. This brings me to the second term of my title, ‘plural postmodernisms’. There is no need to survey the full range of uses of the term.[6] The crucial discrimination seems to me the one I already referred to: between Jameson’s notion and what I have called postmodernisms of the more fashionable kind, which often prove to be variants of what Jameson calls ‘late modernism’. His own postmodernism, in contrast, is based on an economic analysis (relying on Mandel) of contemporary reality as the third and last stage of capitalism, and bespeaks a political will to overcome capitalist modernity as such. All the same, the term ‘postmodernity’ is ambiguous. It could mean the sum of all the genuinely ‘postmodernist’ features, but in that case, just as ‘modernity’ is not coterminous with ‘modernism’, one should guard against conflating ‘postmodernity’ with ‘postmodernism’. If, on the other hand, ‘postmodernity’ refers to a historical period (the current one), it may risk the danger of blurring, in Jameson’s words quoted above, “the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.” Mandel’s late capitalism, as Jameson reminds us, is a stage of purer capitalism than the previous stages, but then the term ‘full modernity’ might better fit this final maturation of capitalist modernity. Jameson’s choice of the term despite such difficulties seems to reflect his eagerness to foreground the radical break between this purer capitalism and the less pure ones of the past, and his aim of questioning modernity as such from a radical vantage point. If this be the case, rather than arguing over the terminology, we should concentrate on looking for a persuasive criterion to discriminate between what is genuinely postmodern and what is speciously so, whether in politics or culture. I have already stated that such discrimination is extremely difficult in Korea’s peripheral or semi-peripheral condition. Not only various kinds of postmodernism, but modernism and postmodernism?indeed the whole triad of Jameson’s realism, modernism and postmodernism?have tended to be mingled in an overpowering influx from the hegemonic West. This accounts for the appeal that many Korean intellectuals have found in Lukacs’s somewhat different notion of ‘realism’ as the doctrine best suited to the task of a genuine overcoming of capitalist modernity, vs. ‘modernism’ as the doctrine amounting to a virtual (though not always self-conscious) surrender to capitalism. Lukacs’s “ideology of modernism”[7] actually has much in common with what Jameson designates by that name. But whereas Jameson confines it to ‘late modernism’[8], Lukacs not only attributes it (often with glaring injustice) to Jameson’s ‘high modernists’ but also would have it cover (with considerable justice, in my view) some of his ‘realists’?those whom Lukacs calls naturalists. We can have little doubt that, had he known the term and the figures, he would have so characterized many of Jameson’s postmodernists as well! Specific critical discriminations aside, Lukacs’s scheme remains attractive because it speaks to the historical task that I have elsewhere defined as “the double project of simultaneously adapting to and overcoming modernity.”[9] This double project is in fact a unified endeavor with double aspects, an inevitable option in the face of the singular modernity of worldwide capitalism. For even the work of adaptation will require for its success a coherent long-term strategy for its overcoming, while no meaningful work of overcoming can be expected from empty (and at worst pernicious) talk of abolishing modernity without learning to live through it. In Korea’s case, the project reflects the realities of a nation forcibly incorporated into the capitalist world-system in the late nineteenth century, ravaged by colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth, then plagued by prolonged national division and attendant ills (including an internecine war and decades of dictatorship on both sides). Given such experience of modernity, simple emulation would be both impracticable and unpalatable, while a measure of modernization has been necessary even for the sake of overcoming this ruinous modernity. As a matter of fact, the principal task for the population of the Korean peninsula today?that of overcoming what I have called its ‘division system’[10] ?entails at once a more effective adaptation to the modern world-system and a decisive step in the worldwide endeavor to transform it. I would now submit that the double project is not a parochial agenda confined to the periphery or semi-periphery, but a planetary one applicable to the metropolis as well. If most people in the core areas do not feel that way, the reason may lie, on one hand, in the false consciousness that adaptation is no problem to the ‘advanced nations’, and, on the other hand, in the absence of powerful social movements for overcoming modernity. But what will be the upshot? Either capitalist modernity will drag on till “the common ruin of contending classes” (The Communist Manifesto), or the double project should take on a planetary scale with a substantial input from those national and local situations where such a project enjoys a vigorous life. In closing I should like to return to the cultural field, and suggest how Perry Anderson’s thesis in his seminal essay on “Modernity and Revolution” of a “triangulated” field of force for the flourishing of modernist art, a thesis Jameson strongly endorses,[11] may be expanded?though at some cost to the original notion’s precision?to fit other moments of artistic achievement and, indeed, a globalized double project. For instance, regarding Anderson’s first coordinate, “the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts, which itself was institutionalized within official regimes of state and society still massively pervaded, often dominated, by aristocratic or landowning classes… in… pre-First World War Europe,”[12] we may revise it to cover the nearly ubiquitous phenomena of ‘the persistence of the old regime’ and outmoded cultural forms in societies where capitalism has made considerable headway. The second coordinate, “the still incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution,” may also be rewritten to include fruits of both the first industrial revolution and more recent technological revolutions. As for the third coordinate, “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” (idem.), something similar may be discerned easily enough in societies other than those of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. So revised and enlarged, they are precisely the coordinates that provided the condition for the flowering of the great realist novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, and (with a necessary time-lag) Dostoevsky and Tolstoy?or indeed the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth, or the German works of Goethe, Schiller and Holderlin?all of them representing struggles to cope with modernity yet rich with impulses for its overcoming. And if, as Anderson points out, in the advanced capitalist world “[i]t was the Second World War … which destroyed all three of the historical coordinates,”[13] in numerous parts of the globe the same post-War period saw those coordinates coming to obtain, often for the first time in history. South Korea’s double project, too, owes its life to that worldwide phenomenon. It is my hope that a truly planetary solidarity for overcoming the singular modernity may be built through dialogue and collaboration between Jameson’s project of ‘postmodernity’ and the double projects being pursued in diverse national and local situations. This is how my prepared text ended. But with Fred’s permission, I would like to rephrase the last portion to read, “…dialogue and collaboration between Jameson’s project of ‘postmodernity’ and other double projects in diverse national and local situations.” Thank you. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- 1] Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Verso 2002), 12-13. [2] See http://www.holbergprisen.no/HP_prisen/en_hp_2006_symposium.html. [3] For his understanding of this stage Jameson draws on Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (NLB 1975). [4] See the bibliography in Jameson on Jameson, Duke University Press 2007, 241-46. [5] Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press 1971) xi. [6] The first two chapters of Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso 1998) provide a sufficiently rich and incisive summary. [7] Cf. Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press 1963), ch. 1 ‘The Ideology of Modernism’. (The original for ‘modernism’, however, is Avangardemsmus.) [8] A Semngular Modernemty, Part II ‘Modernism as Ideology’. [9] Paik Nak-chung, “Coloniality in Korea and a South Korean Project for Overcoming Modernity,” emnterventemons: emnternatemonal journal of postcolonemal studemes vol. 2 no. 1, 2000, 79. [10] Paik, op. cit., 76-78. [11] A Semngular Modernemty, 134-35. [12] Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (Verso 1992), 34. [13] Ibid., 37.
[Paik Nak-chung] Toward a New Encounter

November 15, 2007

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University This address was delivered at the opening session of the 2007 Jeonju Asia-Africa Literature Festival (AALF) at Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Korea, on November 9, 2007. © Paik Nak-chung 2007 —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Yesterday I gave a welcoming speech as chair of the AALF Organizing Committee. Today I am going to offer you some personal thoughts according to the decision by my younger Committee colleagues, who, without consulting the chairman, invited me to deliver this speech. I am nevertheless honored and delighted by the invitation. Asia and Africa are vast and diverse places, each comprising a world on its own. Even the concept of a continent with the name ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’ did not emerge until Europeans gave those names. Numerous civilizations merely have come and gone, many of them with histories much more ancient than Europe. Asia and Africa, however, share the common experience of being marginalized by the Europeans as the Other, and of having had most areas fall victim to European colonialism. Among those that escaped direct rule by Western nations, China suffered from various colonialist invasions and partial occupations, and Korea was colonized by a surrogate imperial power. Even Japan, which achieved early success in imitating the West, has not been free of cultural and intellectual colonialization and, in my opinion, still shows symptoms of its aftereffects. Africa and Asia also share the feature that the preponderant majority of their population is suffering from poverty, disease, dictatorship and exploitation. Among them, Iraq suffers direct occupation by the hegemonic superpower, while Palestine would offer an instance of surrogate occupation. As for Korea, although I do not believe foreign powers are solely responsible for the continuing national division on the Korean peninsula, the division initially engineered mainly by the United States continues to fetter the people of both Koreas. In short, the rich legacy of African and Asian civilizations has been either defaced or insufficiently recognized because of such a state of affairs, and the creative energies of Asian and African writers have been either oppressed or, when productive and fruitful, have been marginalized on the world stage. Even our mutual contacts are usually dependent on the languages and publishing markets of the hegemonic nations. Endeavors were not lacking in the past to build direct networks of dialogues and solidarity, overcoming dependency and marginality. A good example is the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference and its activities in the middle and late decades of the past century. There were also attempts to include Latin American writers in a wider solidarity. Some of you in the audience have personal experiences of working in these movements. Although they advocated ‘non-alignment’, African and Asian writers’ movements in the past century were actually on closer terms with the socialist bloc, and in any case operated within the framework of the Cold War regime. Therefore, the end of the East-West Cold War and the collapse of the socialist bloc led to the weakening and virtual demise of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. The Korean peninsula failed to make significant contributions to that movement. Politically, North Korea was an important member of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, and even hosted the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Pyongyang, but their literary contributions, I believe, were rather limited. South Korea, on the other hand, did have a vigorous presence of writers espousing what we then called ‘the Third-World perspective’, but because of its heavy dependence on the United States could hardly claim a respectable share in the Non-Aligned Movement or the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. When we Korean writers look back on this regrettable past, we are all the happier that we can host this Asia-Africa Literature Festival in Jeonju. This has been possible because in the ensuing years South Korea has successfully struggled for democracy and economic development, and continued to reduce its dependence on the United States. At the same time, the world today needs a new type of solidarity in order to resist the ever-spreading sway of global capital after the end of the East-West confrontation. Now more than ever we need to realize that ‘the Third-World perspective’ should serve not to divide the globe into three parts but to see the problems of a single globe from the point of view of ordinary people rather than that of the vested interests of either the ‘First World’ or the ‘Second’. It is time that we organized our creative energies and collective wisdom accordingly. This festival, too, is a part of that project. In a sense, it seems appropriate for a country like South Korea to play a special role in this endeavor, a country neither too rich nor helplessly poor, placed somewhere between the so-called First World and the Third World, a country that, moreover, has entered the process of reconciliation, cooperation and gradual reintegration of the socialist North and the capitalist South. In any event, it is beyond all doubts a great blessing for us Korean writers. The encounter with fellow Asian and African writers will also be a valuable occasion for us to rethink and sort out our own literary agendas. In the days when we were fighting military dictatorship and had to struggle for the very space for reunification movements, the idea of ‘national literature’ served Korean writers of resistance as a rallying point their political and literary endeavors. ‘National literature’ in this context is a very specific notion based on the unique reality of divided Korea. Refusing to be the literature of only one half of the divided nation, it aspired to be the literature of the entire Korean nation-in other words, a literature of the people, representing the desires and needs of the preponderant majority of the population across the peninsula. However, ‘national Literature’ no longer serves as a productive slogan in today’s Korea. Since the Democracy Struggles of June 1987, South Korea has continued its process of democratization, accompanied by a further deepening of capitalism, and as a result, it now shows signs of rapidly turning into a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, I cannot agree with some of those in Korea’s literary world who dismiss as outmoded nationalism even the vision for a reunified Korea contained in the discourse of national literature, especially since that vision proposed not a simple end to the partition of the land but the building of a more humane society than that under the current division system and thus contributing to the endeavors toward a new civilization for humankind. Such a wholesale abandonment of the project of ‘national literature’ with its emphasis on writers’ sense of responsibility for the realities of national division, can only make ourselves more easily subject to the neo-liberal trends that all the more effectively carries out the essentially anti-artistic and anti-poetic logic of capitalism by tolerating or even encouraging a certain degree of individual and collective differences. I believe the Asian and African writers in attendance today will not find it difficult to empathize with the problems faced by Korean writers, even though you belong to societies very different from Korea. For you must have worked to give voice to the sufferings of your own people, and often espoused urgent national agendas, but you must also have felt the need for international solidarity and the importance of high artistic standards. We do have to move beyond simple-minded militancy and nationalism, but we should not surrender ourselves, in the name of ‘global standards’ and intellectual sophistication, to neoliberal global domination that threatens the life of literature itself. The Third World, I repeat, cannot be confined to specific regions of the globe. The Third World is there in the so-called First World and in the erstwhile Second World as well; while within the nations designated as the Third World, we find First-World elements, and even attempts to enlarge their privileges by touting the cause of the ‘Third World’. That art and literature that enable us to see this complex world with clear eyes and a balanced mind will truly deserve the name of art. In order to achieve such genuine art and literature, we shall have to pay much more attention to the experiences of continents and nations alienated from the center of the world-system, even though the concept of the Third World is not a cartographical one. And we have to build a network of dialogue and communication of those writers who tend to be neglected in the world literary market precisely because they respect the experiences of Asia and Africa, so that these writers can come together to recognize their mutual good will and can strengthen their passion for true art and literature. Needless to say, each of us will need above all to devote ourselves more wholeheartedly than ever to his or her daily creative work. I hope this 2007 Asia-Africa Literature Festival in Jeonju will be a point of departure for many more creative encounters. Thank you very much.
[Hwang Jeong-mi] Time to Qualify, Not Quantify, Motherhood

September 13, 2007

Time to Qualify, Not Quantify, Motherhood Hwang Jeong-mi Researcher of Korean Women’s Development Institute This article was published in The Changbi Weekly Commentary (2007.5.29) and translated by Korea Foundation later (see the webzine of Korea Foundation, KOREA FOCUS [http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/]). © Hwang Jeong-mi 2007
[John Lanchester] Warmer, Warmer

September 3, 2007

Warmer, Warmer John Lancester John Lanchester is an English novelist and contributing editor of the London Review of Books. He is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, including Granta, the New Yorker and The Observer. His first novel, the highly acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure (1996) won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize. HIs most recent work is a book of memoir, Family Romance (2007). * The Korean translation of this article was published in the Quarterly Changbi (Autumn 2007). © John Lanchester 2007
[Paik Nak-chung] Twenty Years After June 1987: Where Are We Now, and W…

June 7, 2007

Paik Nak-chung Editor, the Quarterly Changbi . Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Seoul National University This is the English version of the keynote speech at the International Symposium ‘Democracy and Peace-Building in Korea and the Choice of 2007’, Los Angeles, California, USA, May 12, 2007, co-sponsored by the Korea Democracy Foundation, Center for Korean Studies at UCLA, and the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation in the US. Footnotes have been added subsequently. © Paik Nak-chung 2007 ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————– I. The June Struggle for Democracy and the Regime of 1987 The nationwide uprising of June 1987 put an end to the tyrannical rule of Chun Du-hwan’s regime and opened a new chapter in South Korea’s contemporary history. True, it has had its background in the April 19th Student Revolution of 1960, the Pusan-Masan Uprising of 1979 and the May Democratic Struggle of Kwangju 1980. But it represents a categorically new achievement in having initiated a democratization process that has continued for the past twenty years without experiencing reversals such as the military takeovers of May 16, 1961 and May 17, 1980. At the same time, there is a prevalent sense of crisis in Korea today that the so-called ’87 regime that was formed after June 1987 has now reached its limit and is in need of a new breakthrough. While searching for an answer, some analysts offer a diagnosis that although formal and procedural democracy was achieved through the June Struggle, substantive democracy in the economic and social fields has remained inadequate or has even suffered a retreat. This view grasps only part of the truth and we must beware of such a facile dichotomy. Political democracy itself, even after its foundation was laid by the establishment of a democratic constitution and the direct presidential election in 1987, still had to be fought for and arduously extended at each step through the regimes of Roh Tae-woo, Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Mu-hyun. Nor can we yet assure ourselves of its ‘irreversible achievement’, even though the possibility of reversal through a military coup has more or less been eliminated. Furthermore, just as the July-August Great Labor Struggles of 1987 led both to improvements in workers’ welfare and an advance in procedural democracy, the distinction between the ‘form’ and ‘substance’ of democracy is at best facile. Behind the easy resort to such distinction is the assumption that the true aim of the June Struggle was to build ‘people’s democracy’ or socialism—or at least social democracy—in South Korea. From such a vantage point, the June 29th Declaration (by government candidate Roh Tae-woo acceding to many of the protesters’ overt demands) was nothing more than a deceptive move to prevent the full success of the popular struggle, and such interpretation turns the past twenty years into a period of thwarted hopes where the people won the shell but lost the core of democracy. In my view, this is a very one-sided interpretation of Korea’s reality. Going beyond such one-sidedness is an important task for us as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the June Struggle. At any rate, there exists a broad consensus that the ‘regime of 1987’ (if we call by that name the general political, economic, and social order created by the June Struggle and its immediate aftermath) constitutes an order much superior to what preceded it, but that it was from the beginning an unstable structure based on a number of make-shift compromises, and has by now almost reached the end of its tether. True, some would go further and assert that it was already replaced by the ‘regime of 1997’ at the time of the financial crisis and the IMF bailout. Others contend that the ’87 regime has been finally destroyed in 2007 by the government’s arbitrary decision to conclude a Free Trade Agreement with the United States; while still others, of the ‘New Right’, call for the launching of a ‘regime of 2007’ in a different sense, namely, one that puts an end to the ‘pro-North Korean leftist regimes’ (i.e., those of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun) through this year’s presidential election. All in all, one rarely hears a voice claiming the health of the ’87 regime and its warrant for continued existence. II. Looking Beyond the ’87 Regime The vision of overcoming the ’87 regime depends largely on what we consider to be the larger system of which the ’87 regime is a subclass, and within what more comprehensive scheme of periodization we place the post-1987 period. For instance, the argument (including the above mentioned notion of ‘the 1997 regime’) that the progress in political democracy since 1987 actually amounts to the failure of substantive democracy, accompanied as it was with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, represents a point of view that seeks to understand the South Korean society of the last twenty years mainly in terms of the ‘neoliberal phase’ (beginning in the early 1980s) of the modern world-system. It is an undeniable fact that South Korea exists as a part of the capitalist world-system, and that the global trend of neoliberalism has exercised a great influence on the post-1987 history. However, in order to determine the precise extent and manner of that influence, and the best possible response that South Korean society may adopt toward it, we need not only a more exact understanding of neoliberalism, but a closer analysis of the concrete ways in which it affects Korean society. I am no expert in either of the two topics, but I will try to lay down my basic understanding of the concept of neoliberalism. In my view, it is an attempt to return to an even older form of liberalism than the ‘old’ liberalism itself, namely, to liberalism in its early days before it managed through a laborious route to combine itself with values of democracy and the welfare state. Capitalism in its crisis of accumulation in the late twentieth century has decided to subvert those values and replace them with the resuscitated doctrine of unrestricted free market.[1] One may well doubt whether this ‘new’ liberalism may even qualify as ‘liberalism’, since it has lost even the progressive aspects of early capitalism, such as the removal of feudal fetters and the promotion of healthy individualism, attempting instead to solidify the inequalities created by contemporary capitalism. Even so, the effects of neoliberalism differ according to the time and place. In South Korea’s case, the decisive turning point for its ascendancy was the financial crisis of 1997, but the consequences also included the implementation of certain reforms either liberal or democratic in nature that Korean society urgently required. Ending the arbitrary dominance over the financial institutions by the government was one of them, and the financial crisis also helped the peaceful transition of political power to the opposition in 1998, facilitating the political reforms in the initial days of the Kim Daejung government. Of course, one may offer the counterargument that all such reforms only contributed to the expansion of liberal politics and the establishment of capitalist institutions, but in that case one must produce a fuller critique of liberalism or capitalism per se, together with persuasive short-, middle- and long-term projects for countering it, rather than using ‘neoliberalism’ as a blanket term to include everything one opposes. Global perspective is not the only requirement necessary to illuminate the concrete nature of the ’87 regime. The peninsular or all-Korean perspective must come into play as well, given the fact that Korea still is a divided country. At a symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the June Struggle, I proposed that “instead of seeing the June Democratic Uprising only within the context of South Korea’s history, we should comprehend and evaluate it as an occurrence within the peninsula-wide division system.” (‘The Historical Significance of the June Struggle and the Meaning of its Tenth Anniversary’, The Shaking Division System, Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 1998, p. 212) Although the country was first partitioned in 1945 and separate regimes established in 1948, it was only after the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953 that the division came to take on a certain systemic character.[2] This division system subsequently survived such challenges as the April Revolution of 1960 and the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and was not terminated by the June Struggle of 1987, either. When seen from this perspective, the ’87 regime comprises a subclass of what we may call the 1953 regime. But the division system entered a period of instability when one of its pillars, the military dictatorship in the South, was overturned. It lost another, a crucial one at the global level, when the East-West Cold War came to an end. Then in June 2000, with the North-South summit meeting in Pyongyang and the June 15 Joint Declaration issued there, the prospect of overcoming the ’53 regime finally came into view. As this brief survey shows, applying the peninsular perspective on the ’87 regime is not a ‘division-centered reductionism’ that emphasizes only the inter-Korean relations at the expense of changes within South Korea or the global geopolitical order. The very term ‘1987 regime’ is an appellation that foregrounds events internal to the South, and implies such major domestic agendas as continuation of the democratizing process, the search for a new developmental model, and either the accommodation or the rejection of neoliberalism. But the peninsular perspective does insist on not losing sight of the fact that responses even to these domestic agendas operate within the force field of the division system and that domestic progress in democracy has owed much of its success to factors like reunification movements at the civilian level, which never stopped even under the ’53 regime, and to attempts at the government level to mitigate the North-South confrontation such as the Roh Tae-woo regime’s ‘Northern policy’ (itself an achievement of the ’87 regime). Consequently, the recognition in the division system theory of the decisive significance of the year 2000 represents a different stance from that of ‘national liberation’ or nationalistic privileging of reunification above all other goals. The ‘Age of June 15’ that takes the year 2000 as its starting point does have a special meaning in providing a periodization scheme that the two Koreas have seldom been able to share since the partition in 1945, and especially since 1953 (the year of the Armistice), but the degree of its realization in terms of the concrete social reality on either side remains rather limited. Not that it has been working at the symbolic and ideological level only, for its impact on everyday life, too, has been considerable. Yet, speaking of the South, ‘the Age of June 15’ has not terminated the ’53 regime and indeed, cannot even be said to have ended the ’87 regime. The IMF crisis of 1997 was much more powerful so far as direct impact on South Korean people’s daily lives is concerned. To find in it the inauguration of the ’97 regime, however, amounts to an overestimation of the progressive character of the ’87 regime. In other words, such a view minimizes the many inherent limitations of this regime as a subclass of the ’53 regime, and overlooks the fact that the 1997 financial crisis was no more than a dramatic exposure of South Korean society’s pursuit, in some ways more reckless than anything before 1987, of the dream of ‘joining the advanced nations’ and ‘absorbing North Korea’. At the same time, it is still another oversimplification to assume that the positive dynamics of the ’87 regime were totally exhausted in the IMF crisis. Again, more adequate appraisals demand the peninsular perspective, which provides a much more complex yet in its own way a coherent picture of the interconnections between 1987, 1997 and 2000. In this picture, 1987 marks a decisive turning point in the democratization of South Korea and inaugurates the ‘period of oscillation’ of the division system, but neither the constitution nor the major political parties nor even most of the social movements of the ’87 regime set out with ‘the overcoming of the division system’ as a clearly conceived agenda. The consequent accumulation of unresolved problems led to the economic crisis of 1997 and in combination with the crisis in the North including the food crisis, came to seriously challenge the division system. The ensuing June 15 Joint Declaration would then represent at once the direct effect of the peninsula-wide crisis and the product of the resilience and dynamism of the Korean people seeking a new opening in mutual reconciliation, cooperation and gradual reintegration, rather than in persisting with the status quo or resorting to an increased dependence on foreign powers. I have argued that the year 2000 marks the turning point from the division system’s period of ‘oscillation’ to ‘disintegration’ (`Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense, Changbi Publishers 2006, p. 6), but periodizations that take as their respective unit of analysis the whole Korean peninsula and only one half of it need not be in full agreement. Thus, the view that the ’87 regime in the South has persisted beyond 2000 does not necessarily contradict the notion of ‘the period of disintegration of the division system’ that begins in the year 2000. However, for such disintegration to run its course and lead to a better system, the overcoming of the decrepit ’87 regime in the South is a prerequisite. The 20th anniversary of the June Struggle, when the international conjuncture seems more favorable than ever for the establishment of a framework for peace in the Korean peninsula, and the terminal symptoms of the ’87 regime are becoming daily more apparent, would be the moment for taking a decisive step toward a new age. III. South Korea’s Choice in 2007 2007 also happens to be the year of the presidential election in the South—another reason for its potential as a decisive watershed. Voices in the conservative camps of South Korea, too, find in this year’s presidential election a crossroads for the entire peninsula, rather than just an opportunity for retrieving political power in the South. The goal is to put an end to the period of drifting since 1987, particularly the rule of ‘pro-North leftist’ forces over the last ten years and to launch a regime of ‘becoming advanced’. In my view however, the electoral victory of the conservative opposition will hardly result in overcoming the ’87 regime. Despite the belligerent pronouncements by speakers of the ‘New Right’ and hardliners within the opposition party, I do not believe that even if returned to office, they can overturn the results of the democratization process since 1987 or abrogate the June 15 Joint Declaration. On the other hand, with the prolonging of the ‘bad stalemate’ of the ’87 regime, this regime’s terminal symptoms may become aggravated. This is not a partisan argument to oppose in principle the coming to power of a particular political party. It merely conveys the judgment that any party that seizes power under the hegemony of elements that find little to criticize in the ’53 regime—not even in the ’53 regime before 1987—and consider the period of democratic reform governments as nothing but ‘ten lost years’ can only add to the woes of the waning ’87 regime. Indeed, things will not prove any better even if a ‘grand conservative coalition’ of some sort is formed under a government that once proudly flaunted its reformist and democratic credentials but is now attempting to force a speedy conclusion of the Korea-US FTA with conservative blessings. ‘Radical (or transformative) centrism’ is the term I have used to characterize what today’s Korean society needs. (Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense, pp. 30-31, 58-60) Its explicit use dates from a relatively recent past, but actually it was already apparent with the opening of a new stage after the June Struggle that neither of the two main currents of the radical movement, namely, ‘national liberation’ and ‘people’s revolution’, nor moderate reformism lacking any visions of social transformation, could meet the demands of the time. [3]In the period of tyrannical rule by the government of a divided nation, mere advocacy of the principle of peaceful and autonomous reunification or of an egalitarian society, or the immediate struggle for basic civil rights could serve to shake the division system. However, with the end of military dictatorship and the newly opened space for more substantive endeavors, the need arose for a centrist line that could incorporate the various agendas of various forces with a view to a clearly conceived goal of transforming the division system. Close to twenty years later, Korea now finds itself in an even more urgent need of a line focused on radical transformation in this sense and broadly centrist in practice. Since the ’87 regime essentially comprises a part of the ’53 regime and many of its problems derive from the vertical repressiveness (vis-à-vis its people) and lateral weakness (vis-à-vis foreign powers) of the division system itself, any project of overcoming the ‘87 regime that lacks a broader design of transforming the division system can hardly succeed. This is true not only of the conservative logic that finds little problem with the ’53 regime, but also of the ‘anti-neoliberal’ position that underestimates the determinative influence of the division system, and of the line of ‘reunification through national self-reliance opposing American obstruction’, which does foreground the fact of national division but remains too little aware of its systemic character. As a matter of fact, forces of progressive reform had managed to form a fairly broad coalition in the movement criticizing the Korea-US FTA negotiations. Along with forces opposing the FTA from the start for reasons of ‘national autonomy’ or ‘social equality’, people critical of the conduct and certain particulars of the negotiations joined in the efforts to stop an overhasty agreement. The result, as is well known, was a failure: the deal was announced in early April in time to meet the deadline set by America’s Trade Promotion Act. The biggest cause for that failure must be the determined drive on the part of President Roh Moo-hyun and his ‘participatory government,’ while one contributing factor may be found in the temporary setback suffered by popular movements when North Korea carried out a nuclear test in October 2006. We must also admit, however, that the movement itself, unable to go beyond a largely tactical alliance of various camps with different implicit agendas, showed a limit in its ability to persuade a preponderant majority of the population. With the successful conclusion of the negotiations, even that tactical alliance has suffered considerable damage. Some of the once moderate critics have moved to a more militant position rejecting outright the results of the negotiation, but many others have resigned themselves to the eventual ratification of the FTA and are adopting the line that, having succeeded in removing some of the worst provisions, we ought now try to make the best of the situation and prepare for the aftermath. On another side, those who have opposed in principle all free trade agreements, or at least any FTA with the United States, are enraged by the deal yet also welcome the new political terrain where a clear line seems to be drawn between two camps, for and against the Korea-US FTA. The point, however, is whether such a configuration augurs well for overcoming the ’87 regime. The strengthening of the more radical progressive camp(s) in such an alignment will not be without its positive meanings. But there is an acute risk that an easy electoral victory for the conservative opposition, plus the existence of radical sects satisfied with mere quantitative expansion, may prolong and further embitter the downward slide of the ’87 regime in its final days. Precisely at this moment when room for unprincipled ‘middle of the road reformists’ has shrunk due to the conclusion of the FTA negotiations, we should bring about a regrouping of forces for progressive reform with ‘radical centrism’ as their main tenet—without of course, necessarily holding on to the term as an electoral slogan. It is not certain whether these forces, plagued by the divisive influence of the so-called KORUS FTA, can achieve such unity. But just as a broad alliance was formed to oppose a rash deal, a similar alliance is both possible and necessary to prevent a quick ratification and the many undemocratic practices foreseeable in the process; and it need not be ruled out that, on the strength of a thorough and responsible scrutiny of the contents of the deal and their implications, the movement may come to agree on a course of action that will obtain wide popular support. Only, this time it must manage to go beyond mere tactical alliance and be able to persuade the public with a clear insight into the nature of the ’87 regime and with effective projects for overcoming the division system. IV. ‘Reunification Korean-style’ and the Role of ‘the Third Party’ ‘Radical centrism’ can become a realistic alternative because of the unique character of the reality of the Korean peninsula. Korea is peculiar enough in remaining divided to this day, but it constitutes a truly unprecedented case in that the process of its reintegration differs from any previous case of national unification. Briefly put, not only is a Vietnamese-style reunification through military conquest out of the question in Korea, but even a peaceful reunification, unlike that of Germany or of Yemen, can only proceed gradually, stage by stage. And it so happens that such a reunification process has already been agreed to between the top leaders of North and South Korea in the June 15 Joint Declaration. Such an agreement has a far-reaching effect not confined to the relations between the two governments. Initiatives by ordinary citizens are bound to be limited in a speedy, one-shot unification, whether violent or peaceful. In contrast, a gradual, step-by-step process opens up space for civic participation. And where, as in South Korea, civil society possesses both the will and the ability to utilize this space, citizens’ say in determining the timing and the specific contents of a given intermediate stage must continue to increase, and eventually it will not be possible to prevent the sphere of civic participation extending to the entire peninsula. From such viewpoint, I have argued that South Korea’s civil society—taking it in a broad sense to include the private business sector as well—ought to function as a ‘third party’ besides the two governments. As yet, this ‘third party’ remains far too weak to act as an equal partner, nor does our civil society display sufficient self-consciousness or self-esteem as ‘the third party’. But the expansion of civic participation will be inevitable as the DPRK-US relations improve and inter-Korean exchanges proceed in full swing. Here I shall consider two contingencies in which the role of ‘the third party’ may prove decisive. One may come about in the course of resolving the issue of North Korea’s nuclear programs. As I prepare this text at the end of April, no solution has yet been found to the problem of North Korean accounts at BDA (Banco Delta Asia in Macao), and the initial steps specified by the February 13th Agreement have not been followed through. Yet the more general view still is that the Six-Party Talks will be able, even if after repeated delays, to go through the second stage of ‘disablement’, while considerable skepticism prevails regarding the possibility of reaching the final stage of ‘dismantlement’ of all nuclear programs. Of course, we need not give up hopes of completing at some time the third stage as well, since North Korean authorities have strongly asserted that “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is an injunction to posterity by the late President Kim Il Sung” and also because the United States will not agree to provide adequate compensation for any settlement short of ‘dismantlement’. The problem will arise however, in the event of a tacit collusion occurring between America’s preference for withholding compensation and maintaining an appropriately controlled ‘low-intensity nuclear crisis’ and the North Korean calculation that there exists no surer means of regime security than possessing nuclear weapons. This of course is sheer conjecture, but if or when such a situation comes into existence, one can hardly expect the South Korean government to display sufficient will or capability to effect a breakthrough. It will be a case requiring interventions by a civil society that advocates denuclearization not only as the North Korean leader’s injunction to posterity but as a matter of utmost interest to the concrete lives of ordinary people in both Koreas. The special role of ‘the third party’ would also be essential when the nuclear problem is satisfactorily resolved, DPRK-US relations normalized, and inter-Korean exchanges greatly expanded. One need not resort to the logic of hard-line defenders of vested interests to grant the possibility that such contingency might imply a real threat to the North Korean regime. A divided country is by definition unstable, and given the current balance of forces on the peninsula, it is the North that will feel seriously threatened by the presence of the other side. Probabilities for the smooth process of reform and opening in the manner of China or Vietnam should be rated low under the division system. At the same time, the realities of the peninsula rule out the possibility of removing the instabilities of a division regime either by agreeing to a permanent division or through a speedy reunification. Precisely this state of affairs gave rise to the agreement in the June 15 Joint Declaration that the two Koreas would work for reunification but without haste, by going through an intermediate stage of ‘union of states’ or ‘a low-level federation’.[4] But such an agreement will hardly be carried out if left to the authorities themselves. Even a confederative structure that leaves two sovereign states in existence will not offer a sufficient guarantee for the self-preservation of the North Korean regime and it is moreover in the nature of governments everywhere, including both Koreas, to desire either reunification on their own terms or else the status quo, and not to relish the prospect of handing over even a small portion of their power to organs of the confederation. All the same, while carrying on the process of reconciliation, cooperation and reintegration to meet the real needs of the people on both sides, we need a minimum institutional device to manage the dangers of that process. Provided that the only possible answer lies in a union of states or a loose confederation, there is for the moment no one besides ‘the third party’ to actively study and promote this project, nor will it be possible, without large-scale participation by it, to prepare the ground for such a confederation through various inter-Korean contacts and networks in every field. Finally, in lieu of a conclusion, I will briefly discuss the role of Koreans abroad. As the space for civilian efforts for reunification and for direct contact between North and South Koreans has expanded under the ’87 regime, and particularly after June 2000, we have come to depend less on devoted activists in the diaspora in the struggle against dictatorship and for national reconciliation. Moreover, once the building of a confederation emerges as the central agenda, the Korean diaspora can hardly be expected to play a role equal to that of the residents of the peninsula, since the confederation will be a confederation of the two Korean states, not a tripartite union of North, South and the diaspora. As a Resident Korean activist in Japan has put it, “the overseas Koreans will be the subjects of reunification like any other Korean, but the leading role must belong to the North and the South.” But precisely such a situation opens up the way for broad and diverse popular participation overseas as much as in South Korea during the ‘Age of June 15’. Without having to gird themselves for superhuman self-sacrifice, ordinary people can contribute towards the reunification process the experiences, visions and influences on the scene unavailable to the population of the peninsula, while remaining true to their daily lives in their respective places of residence or citizenship. This will be particularly true of the Korean and Korean-American communities in the United States, by their very presence in the most powerful nation on earth and with the wealth of outstanding talent among them. Their contribution will not only enrich the content of Korean-style reunification, but the project of building a global network of Koreans will become all the more meaningful as a result. They will also contribute in no negligible measure to making the future human civilization a more just and diverse world. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- [1] See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press 2005). [2] The literature on this topic is quite scanty in Western languages. My essay, Habermas on National Unification in Germany and New Left Review 1/219, Sept./Oct. 1996, may serve as a convenient introduction in English. Readers of Japanese may consult the Japanese edition of my book The Shaking Division System: Peku Nakuchong (Paik Nak-chung), Chosen hanto toitsu ron – yuragu bundan taisei (Tokyo: Kurein, 2001). [3] See Paik Nak-chung, The Reunification Movement and Literature (1989), especially the section Perspectives on the Period after the June Uprising, pp. 202-7, in Kenneth M. Wells, ed., South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence University of Hawaii Press 1995. [4] It is noteworthy that while Pyongyang clings to the term yonbang (the Korean word for its official English translation calls for a Koryo Democratic Confederal [rather than Federal] Republic.

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