South Korean Identity and Global Foreign Policy

Dream of Autonomy

Patrick Flamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032092652
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the 20th century, South Korea was usually seen as a "shrimp amongst whales", a minor player with limited agency in regional and global affairs. Korea's risen status as a "middle power" today, however, begs the question about related changes in the South Korean identity or "sense of self" in the world.

In this book, Patrick Flamm presents the first comprehensive and agency oriented empirical account of South Korean international state identity and Seoul's global foreign policy in the 21st century. Advancing a performative and narrative understanding of identity in International Relations, Flamm uses South Korea's global engagement in peacekeeping and climate diplomacy to offer much-needed insight into the various identity narratives and role conceptions at play. In the case of peacekeeping and climate diplomacy, South Korea's identity as an international actor has been dominated by practices of self-identification that position the country at the brink of advanced countries, aspiring to lead the rest of the world but with the overall objective to maintain national autonomy in a changing regional and global context.

South Korean Identity and Global Foreign Policy is a must-read for scholars of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis and Asian/Korean Studies.

1
Introduction

In the 20th century Korea lost its independence, was colonized, then liberated, devastated by war, divided by geopolitics, and ruled by military dictators. Robinson therefore speaks of a “turbulent twentieth century” for Koreans, with a “disproportionately important role in in the last hundred years of world history.”¹ The hardships of the Korean 20th century are usually explained with the country’s geographical position amid bigger, more powerful neighbors² and often described with the metaphor of a small shrimp among big whales, after the Korean proverb “a shrimp’s back breaks in a fight among whales.”³ The shrimp metaphor alludes to the country being merely a small nation geographically caught between powerful neighbors, Japan, China, and Russia, and consequently a perennial victim at the hands of greater forces. It is Korea’s geo-political vulnerability that is said to have led to colonialism, war, and national division. As a shrimp, Korea has for a long time been seen as a minor player with limited agency that was determined by an unfavorable regional power structure and thus in need of protecting allies, whether these were the Chinese dynastic emperors in a Sino-centric world of tributary relations, Imperial Japan amid Western encroachment on Asia, or the US during times of national division and the Cold War.⁴

But Koreans in the Southern Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea hereafter) have also experienced unprecedented economic development, built a stable democracy, and initiated (a once-promising) rapprochement and engagement with their estranged Northern cousins through what became known as the “sunshine policy.” With regard to the achievements of South Korea, in contrast, Cumings speaks metaphorically of Korea entering the world stage and finding its “place in the sun”⁵ as one of only a handful in the “solar system of advanced industrial states.”⁶ This “rising Korea”⁷ is generally referred to as a middle power that has been repeatedly “punching above its weight”⁸ or is described metaphorically as a “dolphin”⁹ that is outsmarting¹⁰ other sea creatures. These images refer to the facts that Seoul now is part of the G20, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the “club of rich countries,” and the OECD Developmental Aid Committee (DAC), as the first former aid recipient country ever to do so. Just a few decades after the Korean War, in which soldiers from over 20 United Nations (UN) member states fought alongside South Koreans, today ROK troops are serving as UN peacekeepers in South Sudan and in the coastal waters of Lebanon. The country also initiated its own space program¹¹ and is an emerging power in polar politics.¹² Therefore, at the dawn of the 21st century, South Korea started to be seen as “no longer a pawn but a pivotal player in Northeast Asian affairs”¹³ and in international politics.

Today, international scholars and pundits project certain hopes and expectations on the country for the present and the future. For Ikenberry and Mo, the middle-power ROK is already at the center of today’s global order and will be one of the key states for the future of liberal internationalism,¹⁴ quite in contrast to other rising powers, such as China or Russia. Snyder, however, sees Seoul more through the prism of its long-standing alliance with the US and thus as a supporter of US hegemony in East Asia, as well as a key pillar of Washington’s pivot to Asia.¹⁵ The story told is that of Korea’s journey from an “insular country to an outward-looking nation,”¹⁶ that engages with the rest of the world to an unprecedented extent.¹⁷ Typical for these perspectives is the realist focus on South Korea’s position or standing vis-à-vis other states, which is something that can be assessed from the outside without necessarily consulting Korean domestic perspectives. To these observers, rising South Korea looks like a middle power, walks like a middle power, and thus is a middle power.¹⁸ In their prognoses, South Korea is likely to and is also well advised to proceed on a middle-power trajectory toward a stronger US alliance, more business with China, further contributions to the common good, eventual unification with the North, and maybe even a “normal” relationship with the former colonial master, Japan.¹⁹ What is missing from this picture, however, is how the ROK and South Koreans themselves are seeing their role and place in the world. What is missing is how South Korea as a country relates itself to a globalized world. This crucial question is more about self-identity and agency than structural position and behavior.

To be clear, identity is a broad, multilayered, and multifaceted concept and can be explored among individuals, social groups, or polities, and South Korea’s international rise and encounter with a globalized world have been investigated on different levels of analysis and from different angles. In the cultural and everyday social spheres, for example, Lee explores how national and global identities were negotiated on Korea’s theater stages,²⁰ while Chun and Han researched the global ambitions of language-traveling Korean youth and how these students saw their place in the international order compared to Canadians and Filipinos.²¹ In the religious and political spheres, Han documents how Korean evangelical missionaries “constructed and presented Korean history as a teleology of modernization, industrialization, and Christianization”²² in Africa, and Robertson studied the diplomatic style of Seoul’s emissaries on the world stage, finding, for example, “a preoccupation with status, widening generational change, [and] high levels of cosmopolitanism”²³ among South Korean diplomats.

There is no comprehensive study as yet looking at the formation and changes of state identity from the perspective of South Korean global foreign policy, neither in the International Relations nor Korean Studies literature, which is arguably still one of the main avenues for the construction and formation of South Korean international identity.²⁴ A telling example of this gap is the edited volume Korea Confronts Globalization,²⁵ which features chapters on globalization and women’s identities, regionalism, labor relations, democratization, party politics, and religions, but none on Korea’s relations to other countries or global governance. What is most significant, however, is that a sound understanding of a state’s identity is, first, instrumental in understanding the stability and trajectory of its foreign policy behavior. Identity matters, as constructivism teaches us, because “without interests identities have no motivational forces, without identities interests have no direction.”²⁶ Second, taking the self-identity of a state actor seriously is a way of taking the state actor’s own agency seriously, especially in a postcolonial context like this. Simply inferring the identity of a polity from its behavior, or its role performance, toward other political communities ends up as a convenient ignorance that obscures a better understanding of a polity and its constitutive inner conflicts and deviant voices.

The Research Question of the Book

Against this background, a number of questions arise: How did the proverbial shrimp grow into a dolphin? What happened to the old shrimp self-understandings of postcolonialism, anticommunism, and anti-imperialism? Is the wishful optimism about Korea’s future global foreign policy behavior by some observers justified, and is the rising Korea really going to be a cornerstone of liberal internationalism? Is the global outreach of the early 21st-century South Korea commonplace among foreign policy makers, or is it politically contested within the country? Was it maybe just a phase with a “globalist school”²⁷ at the helm of Seoul’s foreign policy agenda, or has there been a substantial and lasting change in state identity supported by the foreign policy community and the Korean society at large? And what is the self-understanding put forward by this globalist school? Is it about transcending national boundaries, as Robertson’s finding of “high levels of cosmopolitanism”²⁸ among South Korean diplomats might indicate, or a mere extension of the “national interest” into the global arena? All these questions, however, ultimately come down to the main question of how does rising South Korea’s global foreign policy and Seoul’s unprecedented international leadership ambitions relate to a Korean collective sense of self or the country’s international identity?

Generally, the narrative from “insular country to an outward-looking nation”²⁹ that focuses on the hermit kingdom turned global model student should be treated with caution. There are three main reasons for this. First, when South Korea opened its economy for global markets in the 1990s, it was a “state-enhancing, top-down strategic plan”³⁰ termed segyehwa, literally meaning globalization, initiated by President Kim Young-sam (1993–1998) and aimed at enhancing the nation’s international competitiveness. The plan was to restructure Korea not just economically but also politically, socially, and culturally in an attempt to transform Korea into an “advanced nation.” For several critics of the ultimately unsuccessful program, segyehwa remained “subservient to nationalist goals,”³¹ with “no fundamental learning—no paradigm shift [… and] only situation-specific tactical adaptation.”³² Others suggested that globalization, by being “appropriated by the Korean nation,”³³ has actually been reinforcing nationalism, leading to a “paradox”³⁴ of Korean globalization. To illustrate this, a recent media analysis of the South Korean global citizenship discourse of the last two decades also supports a skeptical observer in finding that “global citizenship is primarily about national advancement rather than any sort of transcendence of national identity into cosmopolitan ideals.”³⁵

Second, the entrenched “generally negative, self-doubting narrative”³⁶ that Korea is a small country and a perennial victim of larger forces surely must remain influential, but how so? The experiences of Western encroachment, colonization, and national division have fostered a deep sense of the inherent value of national sovereignty in both South and North Korea. What happened to those traditional identity understandings that have been politically relevant for decades? True, one segment of Korean society, the younger generation, is beginning to see things differently. According to the findings of a long-term study, “pride in ROK’s achievement and its growing international importance is a key part of [younger Koreans’] national identity,”³⁷ but how this relates to changing concrete foreign policy actions remains unclear, especially because Koreans in their 20s have been found to be “security conservative,” often in accordance with the generations older than 60 years.³⁸

Third, one may want to challenge the purported novelty of the narrative about Korea’s rise. Even Cumings, in his seminal monography Korea’s Place in the Sun, not only referred the metaphor to Korea’s 20th-century development but had already titled one of the book’s subchapters on the scientific, technological, and cultural advances of Goryeo (918–1392) and medieval Joseon Korea “Korea in the Sun.”³⁹ For example, he refers to Koreans inventing movable metal type printing in 1234, long before Johannes Gutenberg in Europe. The capit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Korea in the World: Identity and Foreign Policy
• 3 Identity and Roles in IR
• 4 A Model for Inquiry into International State Identity
• 5 South Korea and Peacekeeping
• 6 South Korea and Climate Diplomacy
• 7 South Korea and Global Foreign Policy: Snapshots of Identity
• 8 Conclusion: Dream of Autonomy
• Appendix: List of Inductively Retrieved Identity Elements From Both Case Studies
• Index