Peace and Reconciliation

In Search of Shared Identity

Pauline Kollontai, Sebastian C. H. Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317082897
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Establishing a shared identity is an important part of any process of peace and reconciliation. This book discusses issues and theories of identity formation that can be implemented for peace and reconciliation from the perspectives of theology and religious studies, whilst interacting with politics, socio-cultural studies and economics. By focusing on the theme of peace and reconciliation, and employing an interdisciplinary approach, this volume will make a significant contribution to the discussion of the situation of the Korean peninsula, and wider global contexts. The volume explores theoretical issues such as political and economic implications of reconciliation; interfaith and biblical perspectives; and the role of religion in peace making. Furthermore the contributors examine practical implications of the theme in the contexts of Germany, Northern Ireland, South Africa, India, East Asia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Korean peninsula. The book offers invaluable insights for policy-makers, academics, and lay leaders, besides being an important tool for researchers and students of theology, religion, sociology, politics and history.

Chapter 1

Establishing a Shared Identity: The Role of the Healing of Memories and of Narrative

Robert Schreiter

Introduction

Building toward social reconciliation is a long and complex process, requiring attention to many different aspects and issues. One of the most important issues is establishing a shared identity between the two aggrieved or separated parties. This is of course a complex undertaking in itself, involving an analysis of current identities— both as they are narrated within a community and to those outside the community—as well as adjudicating the different versions of history maintained by each party. Moreover, the purpose of a shared identity is not just to create a common past, but also to provide a platform for a different future.

When seeking a shared identity after conflict for the sake of reconciliation, it is important to recall that there is no formula or strategy for reconciliation that will be applicable in every instance. Indeed, there is a temptation to look only at the contested issues as the matter that must be addressed in reconciliation. There are however two other areas that need attention as well. One of these is the cultural patterns that form the context in which the process of reconciliation is to be worked out. Are there rituals of forgiveness and reconciliation already available within the culture that can be utilized in the process? What are the rules about silence and the saving of face that can constrain certain kinds of reconciliation efforts? These and other questions about cultural processes are important to keep in mind.

The second has to do with larger issues of context and time. The impact of outside forces beyond those internal to the world of the two separated parties themselves may either enhance or impede reconciliation efforts. The passage of time can also play a role, especially when the wound that opened the division slips beyond living memory.

Let me mention just two examples of how culture and time will have an impact upon how processes of reconciliation are pursued in the Korean situation. First of all, the Korean Peninsula has been one of the most homogeneous societies in the world in that there are virtually no cultural or linguistic minorities within its boundaries. That has changed somewhat for the South through the presence of foreign troops on its soil for more than half a century, and the more recent arrival of foreign workers from Central Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Because of this cultural homogeneity, overcoming ethnic differences does not figure in the challenge of bringing about reconciliation. People are freer to concentrate on social and ideological issues rather than ethnic ones when it comes to establishing common identities. A common Confucian and Buddhist heritage can also provide a cultural framework for pursuing reconciliation. To be sure, Communism in the North and Westernization in the South have attenuated the common cultural heritage, but it is still far from being beyond reach as a resource for the process of reconciliation.

This cultural parting of ways since 1948 ushers in consideration of both contextual and chronological factors. The division of Korea that occurred in the mid-twentieth century came on the heels of a traumatic occupation of the country by Japan that had lasted more than three decades. A significant aspect of that military occupation was policies and actions intended to destroy Korean language, culture, and institutions themselves. The consequences of this experience could not be resolved in any measure before the tragic events following 1948, and still linger to the present time. Most notable are unresolved issues of Korean women forced into sexual slavery in Japan. Thus trauma is compounded by further trauma: clearing away the debris of the experience of separation of the two parts of Korea reveals yet another trauma underneath.

The passage of time adds an additional burden to the process of reconciliation. Because more than fifty years have passed since the end of the armed conflict, and sixty years since the division of the Korean peninsula, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a vision of a united Korea since the great majority of the population on both sides of the thirty-seventh parallel does not remember a united country. We have witnessed the continuing difficulties in Europe that have arisen in the reuniting of the two parts of Germany after forty-five years of separation. The division in Korea is now approaching sixty years, and the lengthening of time will make any reunion only more difficult. At the same time, however, experience elsewhere has taught us that it is often the next generation that finds the way toward reconciliation. They do not bear the full burden of injury that those who experienced the separation as adults do. While being faithful to the suffering of their parents, they often find new ways forward that are not open to the older generation. A current example of this can be found among Catholics in China. The younger generation is blurring the distinction between Catholics who remained openly loyal to the Vatican (the so-called Underground Church) and those who accommodated themselves—at least publicly—to the Communist government (the so-called Patriotic or Open Church). A significant number of younger clergy and nuns have received education outside China as well, opening up other perspectives that may lead to a reconciliation between the two parts of the Catholic Church in China.

I have noted all of this—information familiar to anyone familiar with the Korean situation—to say that reconciliation always has a context that involves history, culture, outside forces, and the passage of time. Establishing a shared identity, after more than fifty years of separation, is a distinctive and daunting challenge.

I will focus upon two elements that figure in reconciliation, in the Korean situation and elsewhere. These elements are memory and the narration of memory. More specifically, I want to explore how memory is shaped and the place it occupies within identity, and how the healing of memories contributes to the process of reconciliation. Regarding narrative, I will pursue especially its role in the truth-telling that is necessary to come to reconciliation, that is, how narrative is both witness to the past and constructive of the truth that emerges as reconciling and restoring for divided communities.

The building of common memory and the quest for truth that heals and restores is not done in a vacuum. It occurs first in those hospitable social spaces where trust is built, a sense of belonging is restored, and a renewed sense of common purpose and destiny can be nurtured. In this presentation I will also try to look at how religious traditions can foster such a social space, as people are forged into communities of memory and communities of hope. I will concentrate here on the contributions that Christian faith can make to this process.

These elements of memory and narration will be explored here in three parts. In the first part, memory’s role in establishing identity will be examined, under the headings of the shaping of memory and the healing of memory. The second part will turn to narrative in its dual aspects: as witness to the past and as creating healing and restoration in the community. In the third and final part, memory and its narration will be placed within a religious context of communities of memory and hope.

I am not in any way an expert on Korean history and culture. But I hope that these remarks—growing out of a familiarity with reconciliation elsewhere and combined with some limited knowledge of Korea—will contribute to a greater understanding of the challenges that the Korean situation poses, as well as offer some thoughts to situations beyond Korea where communities are seeking a way of reconciliation and peace.

The role of memory in establishing common identity

Memory, as is well known, is an essential part of identity. At the individual level, the heartbreak of seeing an elderly family member lose memory through dementia or Alzheimer’s disease has become a regular feature of wealthy societies where people live much longer. The loss of memory both diminishes an individual and makes relationships difficult with persons who have shared those memories.

For societies to be cut off from memory makes them myopic. For societies to suppress memory can make them dangerously explosive, especially when those suppressed memories burst forth in a displaced manner, cut off from their original source. A common example of such cutting off of memory arises in decisions to protect children from the horrific events that affected their parents, but happened before the children’s birth. When youth are ‘protected’ from the traumatic events that occurred before their births, they find it hard to come to terms with the larger identity of their people and the histories that have shaped their own selves. The many accounts now being published of children of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust are replete with the dilemmas that arise: on the one hand, the children are given little direct knowledge of what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. But on the other hand, they are never permitted to forget what happened to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Cambodia, for example, is struggling with this at this very moment. In an effort to spare the young from the horrific events of the Pol Pot years and the genocidal activities of the Khmer Rouge, parents and indeed the entire nation conspired to keep this history from the children born after the demise of the Khmer Rouge. Now that a Truth Commission is beginning its work investigating the events of the 1970s, efforts must be made to convince university students—born after those years—that such atrocities even occurred. Many of these students think this Commission is part of an international conspiracy to defame Cambodia.

At times the reconnecting or resurgence of memory can have explosive social consequences. The ferocity of student uprising in Germany in 1968 was caused in part by the fact that their parents had—to their children’s minds—suppressed the memory of the Holocaust and their own complicity in it.

Forgetting or hiding memories of the past can be a well-intentioned (although ultimately misplaced) way of protecting a younger generation. More insidious and more dangerous has been the suppression of memory by wrongdoers to hide their own responsibility for past misdeeds. In the 1980s, for example, the leaders of the military junta in Argentina used the word ‘reconciliation’ as a way of “overcoming the past,” i.e., erasing any memory of it. To this day, such forgetting has made it hard to use the rhetoric of reconciliation in many parts of Latin America. When there are calls to forget or overcome the past, it is always important to listen to who is asking for this: the perpetrators or the victims. Erasure of memory is a tool used by perpetrators to domesticate erstwhile victims into accepting injustice and to forego investigating wrongdoing and punishing wrongdoers.

Memories can be considered discrete objects that are held in the mind. A closer examination reveals a more complex reality. Memory turns on relationships, the relationship of the present to things and events past. Memory is continually shaped by a dialectic of remembering and forgetting. As some authors have noted, we do not, cannot, and even should not remember everything.1 To do so would keep us frozen in the past, as creatures who have no future. When we invoke the adage “time heals,” we are in effect acknowledging that our relationships to the past change over time. That does not necessarily entail a rejection of the past, but rather an altered relation to it. The emotional intensity surrounding a memory may weaken, and new perspectives on the memory emerge as it is set in a different web of relationships. Especially in traumatic events such as the death of loved ones or having to flee one’s home, there are losses that can never be regained. To insist on only one way to relate to those losses can keep us in the orbit of those losses, forever caught in the toxicity of disappearance. The fact that we can come to terms in some measure with loss and get on with our lives is evidence of how memory changes.

Forgiveness is perhaps the most salient dimension of this change of relationship, especially to a toxic past. In forgiving we do not forget, for how could we forget something that has so irrevocably changed our lives without diminishing ourselves and undervaluing the loss we have incurred? To forgive is not to forget, as the old saw goes, but to remember in a different way.2

It is precisely this possibility of remembering in a different way, in coming into a different relationship with the past, that I wish to explore here. For it is these changing relationships that make possible the establishing of a new, common identity between parties that have become estranged or divided in whatever way. I will do this by looking first at the shaping of memory and then at the healing of memory.

The shaping of memory

The American philosopher and political scientist W. James Booth has recently put forward some thought-provoking ideas on the shaping of memory, especially as it relates to social identity and to justice.3 He is particularly interested in how national memories are developed and transformed.

His work takes as its point of departure the development of the nation-state as it emerged in the eighteenth century. In that historical period, nations—traditionally understood as cultural or ethnic unities—were bundled together into states. The new state had to seek a common coherence and commitment from communities that had heretofore never been together in any political unity nor saw themselves as having a special bond with one another. In order to do this, nationalism was born: it was an attempt to give states as political entities a coherence like that of a tribe: hence the concept of the nation-state. Sometimes a mythic past was invented in which all parties were to be able to recognize themselves. This happened in the case of Germany where Bismarck forged a single state out of dozens of principalities. In other instances, commitment to a set of ideas as a kind of social contract was intended to be the mortar that held together the national edifice. Post-revolutionary France saw its commitment to republican ideals as setting it apart from any previous history (hence the ideology of the five ‘republics’).

Booth notes that the nationalism of the first type—one that sees coherence arising out of shared ethnicity and traditions—creates a “thick” kind of memory, whereas the second type—constructed from a set of ideals or an ideology—creates a “thin” kind of memory.4 The so-called thick memory is enmeshed in a long history of historical relationships that are acknowledged and appropriated by the citizens of a state. The thin memory feels free to disavow any responsibility for a state that existed prior to the assumption of this ideology. Booth holds up as examples here the different relationships West Germany and East Germany had to the Nazi past. West Germany acknowledged its continuity with that past even as it struggled to move beyond it—an example of thick memory. East Germany, on the other hand, saw its embrace of Marxist Communism as a clear break—even liberation—from the past and refused to acknowledge any responsibility for the Nazi period. This is an example of thin memory. In a similar way, France has been loathe to accept responsibility for the Vichy government and its collaboration with the Nazis, because it represented a betrayal of republican ideals. This has continued, even though complicity in the lives of Fifth Republic political leaders has now been connected to the Vichy period.5

I offer Booth’s distinction because it may provide a way of establishing a new common identity between the two Koreas when such a moment will present itself. The Republic of South Korea rebuilt the royal complex in the center of Seoul after the Japanese Occupation had destroyed it, completing the work in 1995. In doing so, it allied itself with the pre-1910 history of the peninsula, making a bid for a thick or traditionalist understanding of memory. North Korea under its socialist leadership has adhered more to the liberal or constructivist understanding of thin memory. (The terms ‘traditionalist’, ‘liberal’ and ‘constructivist’ are all Booth’s). Should the time come when North Korea would set aside its socialist ideology, would not the point of rapprochement between the two Koreas be better situated in the thick memory of a two-thousand-year history than in the nearly sixty years of socialist-capitalist divide? Might not a rereading of the history of the twentieth century be better taken from this longue durée rather than from a century marked by foreign occupation and subsequent ideological division? I can only propose this as a non-Korean, but suggest that looking at the different ways memory is shaped will have a lot to do with the possibility of bringing them together or merging them in some way.

The point here is not to choose between traditionalist and constructivist—thick or thin—memory. Both have their bright and shadow sides. Traditionalist approaches to memory have sometimes given countries great stability as have constructivist ones. On the other hand, both have been destructive as well, as Nazi and Communist forms of socialism have shown. The ‘imagined communities’ whose historical ident...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Establishing a Shared Identity: The Role of the Healing of Memories and of Narrative
• 2 What Does Common Identity Cost? Some German Experiences and Provocative Questions
• 3 Truth and Reconciliation: An Interfaith Perspective from India
• 4 Peace and Reconciliation: Biblical Themes in the East Asian Context
• 5 Religion as a Tool for Waging Peace: Theoretical Perspectives in the Context of Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 6 Embracing a Threatening Other: Identity and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland
• 7 Towards Reconciliation and Justice in South Africa: Can Church Unity Make a Difference?
• 8 Korean War: The Origin of the Axis of Evil in the Korean Peninsula
• 9 Towards Peace and Reconciliation between South and North Korean Churches: Contextual Analysis of the Two Churches
• 10 Strategies for Peace and Reunification in Korea
• 11 Reconciliation Possible? The Churches’ Efforts Toward the Peace and Reunification of North and South Korea
• Appendix 1: July 4th North-South Joint Statement
• Appendix 2: North-South Joint Declaration
• Appendix 3: Declaration on the Advancement of South-North Korean Relations, Peace and Prosperity
• Appendix 4: Declaration of the Churches of Korea on National Reunification and Peace
• Index