The Military in South Korea and its Place in Korean Studies

April 13, 2018

(Headshot Image of Dr. Peter Banseok Kwon, 2018.)

Written by Peter Banseok Kwon, 2017-18 Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Korea Institute; Adjunct Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation

Since the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War (1950-1953), the North and South Korean regimes have maintained two of the world’s largest militaries, which today operate at the heart of the national and foreign policies of both governments. North Korea’s songun (“military first”) policy (선군정치) sets the military at the center of political and economic systems; South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense (MND), continuing the legacy of former president Park Chung Hee (1961-1979), maintains a policy of chaju kukpang (“self-reliant national defense”; 자주국방), with a nationalistic push for security independence. South Korea’s rapid postwar economic growth, commonly described as the “Miracle on the Han River,” peaked from the 1960s through the 1970s, as the Park regime employed “militaristic” mobilization tactics, ideology and institutions to lead national development. The vestiges of what sociologist Seungsook Moon has termed “militarized modernity” to describe South Korea’s development under the military rules of both Park and the subsequent Chun Doo-hwan regime (1979-1988), are thus evident in the contours of today’s Korean social and cultural institutions, corporate environment and workplaces, and throughout the industrial economy of South Korea.

Despite the saliency of the military in Korea’s history, the dynamic interconnectedness of this institution with business and civil society in South Korea’s modernization is seldom highlighted in Korean scholarship. As a significant oversight, the current literature lacks a fully articulated analysis of how military regimes (1961-1993), even more than subsequent civilian governments, advanced domestic science/technology and developed a highly skilled workforce, which determined the course of South Korea’s socio-economic transformation over the past five decades (1960s-present).

Other oversights in the narrative have resulted not only from issues of secrecy surrounding military operations, but also from cultural and political acrimony. Since the two Koreas have technically continued to be at war since the 1950s, with only a ceasefire agreement halting the armed conflict of the Korean War, military-related primary sources remained inaccessible, and until recently, they have been classified as top secret. The controversy surrounding Park’s Yulgok Operation (율곡사업), which included nuclear arms development, led to further suppression of military data in Park’s day and afterwards. Yet the paucity of scholarly work on the subject is also rooted in a cultural history that has shaped and maintained a negative image of the military. Traditionally, the ruling Confucian literati of Chosǒn Korea (1392-1897) systematically prioritized civilian rule and scholarship over military prowess, while in turn consigning the military to a “second class” status in society.

In the modern era, Japan imposed “military rule” on Korea to snuff out any resistance during the first ten years of its thirty-five-year colonization (1910-1945) of Korea. After Korea’s liberation, from the late-1940s to the 1950s, the new authoritarian regime of Rhee Syngman (1948-1960) in South Korea imposed similar draconian measures to suppress domestic rebellions. Finally, under the military dictatorships that had political control from the 1960s to the 1980s, a severe rift developed between the military and civilians in South Korea.

Park Chung Hee’s top down approach to development and the results of his rule epitomized the previous tensions. A former major general in the ROK Army, he seized power through a coup de’tat in 1961 and ruled the nation until his assassination in 1979. Park’s notorious implementation of the Yusin Constitution in October 1972, which granted him totalitarian rule over the society, enabled Park to implement a centralized chain of command to rapidly mobilize Koreans for industrialization, but at the heavy cost of civil rights. Civilian distrust of the military was only exacerbated when Chun Doo-hwan, another military general-turned-president, succeeding Park (also through coup de’tat), used military force to crush democratic protesters in the city of Kwangju in 1980.

When the civilian regimes came to power in the 1990s, then, the military was socially marginalized, as it also became a popular target of criticism by Korean politicians, scholars and the general public, all of whom demanded an immediate and full exclusion of the military from political affairs. In recent years, a growing disconnect between the military and civilian perceptions towards North Korea’s threats has also contributed to the political divide between the two camps. The gap between the military and civilian sectors is mirrored in the general lack of cooperation between military scholars(many of whom have military backgrounds) in government military institutes and civilian academics in South Korea, many of whom are former student activists under Park’s military rule.

Today’s intensely politicized views on Park and his legacy compound issues of scarce historiography on this subject. On the one hand, Koreans today hail Park for modernizing South Korea with unprecedented economic growth. On the other hand, others condemn the way regime’s economic and social policies suppressed democratization. The Japanese colonization of Korea likewise remains a sensitive topic in Korean politics today, and Park’s background as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1940s, along with his military-style development program rooted in colonial Japanese thinking, presents a stumbling block for Korean historians who strive to adopt unbiased approaches to analyzing his “militarized modernization” of Korea.

Beyond domestic challenges, Cold War historiography in both the East and the West has focused on superpower conflicts, while Korean scholars of the ROK military have followed suit in highlighting the role of the US as the military patron of South Korea since 1953. Throughout the development of this field, therefore, only limited exploration has been made into indigenous military initiatives. Further, in the past, the dearth of pertinent primary sources on this topic often led Korean scholars to overly rely on the more readily accessible US national archives to study the ROK military. The resulting imbalanced representations call for revisiting the narrative.

As democracy has gained strength, so have demands for freedom of information. Currently academics have unprecedented opportunities to expand studies on the complex and wide ranging influences of the military in modern Korea. In more recent years, ROK governments have made many more military primary sources available, whether in South Korea’s Presidential Archives of the National Archives of Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)’s Diplomatic Archives, museums and national libraries, and other public institutions in South Korea. The recent declassification of new documents should lead to more historical and objective observation and analysis of the military in Korea’s development. In my own research, I have used many of newly declassified Korean sources to demonstrate how the Park regime’s defense industry development in the 1970s contributed to South Korea’s rapid economic development during the Park era.

Besides addressing the above issues that have limited this field of inquiry, improved cooperation between the military and academic institutions is needed, as well as among scholars themselves, if the military is to be understood through serious academic inquiry. Further, in addition to more historiographical and empirical works, analysis must also include multidisciplinary approaches to examining the ROK military. Active participation by academia will be required to acknowledge and more deeply comprehend the integral and multifaceted role the military has played in Korea’s distinct social and political processes, as well as in the industrial and technological transformation of the nation.

Bio
Peter Banseok Kwon is the 2017-2018 Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute of Harvard University and an adjunct policy researcher in the Department of Defense and Political Sciences (DPS) at RAND Corporation. Peter’s research and teaching interests relate to the historic role of the military and military-civilian relations in shaping postcolonial Korean industrial, socio-economic and cultural transformation from 1945 to the present.

Peter earned his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages (modern/contemporary Korean history) at Harvard University in 2016. His dissertation examines the Park Chung Hee regime’s (1961-1979) policy on ‘self-reliant national defense’ (chaju kukpang), as this policy orchestrated South Korea’s independent military modernization during the Cold War. For his research in Korea, Peter received support from the FLAS Fellowship from the US Department of Education, the Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the Academy of Korean Studies, and grants from the Harvard Korea Institute. He was an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Korean Studies at Yonsei University, a visiting researcher at the Kyujanggak Institute at Seoul National University, and a recipient of the 2017 AKS Junior Researcher Fellowship. Peter is currently studying South Korea’s defense industrialization in relation to national business, technological, and industrial development as well as transnational forces with the rise of arms industries in developing nations during the Cold War period.