Four Ds of South Korea's modern history

By Kyung Moon Hwang

If one were to write a history of South Korea, he or she would have to make a big decision at the beginning: What should be the “master narrative” of this period of nearly 70 years? In other words, how does one best tell the “story” of South Korea’s historical experience?

This choice would reflect the author’s analysis of the most valuable factors and events, but also the sense of a broader purpose of historical change, and a judgment on the country today. The values and ideological stance of the author, in short, would play a large role in determining this master narrative.

Regardless of the narrator’s personal preferences, however, for South Korea it seems there are four major candidates for this grand theme, and they happen to all begin with the letter “d”: development, dictatorship, democratization, and division.

Development refers to the extraordinary pace and scale of economic change in the country, particularly since the 1960s when economic growth through export-oriented industrialization began as a national strategy. Everyone knows the story: From being one of the poorest countries in the world in the 1950s, when the country was undergoing recovery and reconstruction after the Korean War, within half a century South Korea became one of the most economically advanced.

By every measure, the material changes were precipitous, even unprecedented, and fundamentally altered the everyday lives of South Koreans. Along with this development came urbanization and population growth, a wild proliferation of occupations, basic transformations in society and culture, and a political system that was measured according to economic growth.

This is also why the second possible master narrative, dictatorship, remains very convincing. No historian would suggest that dictatorship should be celebrated, of course. But if one believes that only a strongman, like Syngman Rhee or Park Chung-hee, could have brought the necessary order and direction to a country ravaged by colonialism and civil war, then dictatorship can appear as a necessary ingredient for pursuing economic growth.

Autocratic rule in South Korea, after all, did not produce the totalitarian brutality seen in so many other countries of the 20th century, so the reasoning goes. As painful as they might have been, the excesses of dictatorship constituted the sacrifices, or perhaps necessary evils, for the sake of achieving economic growth and social stability. Even democracy, from this perspective, had to wait until this combination of stability and growth under dictatorship could mature.

For many others, however, democracy could have been realized much earlier without sacrificing economic development or social stability. Stability under dictatorship, furthermore, was but an illusion, for throughout the four decades of autocracy South Koreans fiercely resisted the dictators, along with the corruption and injustices that were inherent to their rule.

It was not dictatorship or even economic development, then, but rather the people’s continuing struggle to overcome political and economic inequality, that makes up the great story of South Korean history. Democratization, in short, is the proper master narrative for the country’s history.

This view also contains an inclination to find a clear direction in national history, a great collective cause for which the nation strived and finally achieved, though perhaps incompletely or imperfectly, in 1987. In a way similar to the goal-oriented view that sees economic development as having justified all the history that preceded it, the people-centered perspective tends to view the entirety of modern Korean history through the lens of democratization.

The origins of this eminent enterprise, then, are not necessarily located in South Korean history, but rather in the independence movements against Japanese colonialism of the early 20th century, or even further back in the Donghak uprising of 1894, for example.

Hence, even for those who favor democratization as the master narrative, there is a fourth theme that might ultimately be the most significant: division. For all the pride that accompanies the achievement of democracy, the greater task of overcoming national division remains. From this view, national division was the single most influential factor in determining the flow of South Korean history, particularly in the realms of politics and international relations.

This division was induced and reinforced by the domination of the Cold War system under which South Korea was formed in 1948 and developed thereafter. It then served as legitimization for the dictatorships, which instilled a feverish anti-communism as a way to justify their crackdowns on political dissent. And this fear and loathing of North Korea continues to fuel social and ideological divisions within South Korea today. For all these reasons, one cannot think about, much less write about, the history of South Korea without accounting for the commanding impact of national division.

Interestingly, however, those who argue for the dictatorship or development theme (or, more frequently, both) might agree.

For them, fueled by the horrific memories of the Korean War, the threat of North Korea was indeed the predominant reality that framed the history of South Korea, up to the present day.

But they would insist that this supports their position that the combination of dictatorship and development produced, in the end, the greatest accomplishments of South Korean history. To them, this South Korea should be celebrated as a vibrant, wealthy, and yes, democratic society that survived and ultimately thrived under the grave conditions of national division.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).