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One of the more interesting long-term patterns in Korean history has been the balance between civilian and military control over politics. Strikingly, this dynamic remains somewhat fluid today.
As elsewhere, most major shifts in governing form, from the establishment of new kingdoms and dynasties to foreign conquests, came through military means and were led by military men. Through the influence of Confucianism, however, in Korea an overriding principle of civilian control over the military, instead of the other way around, emerged relatively early.
In the ancient period, Korea could not have been considered a place that escaped strong military influence. The constant warfare among the so-called Three Kingdoms from the 4th to 7th centuries was followed by Silla's conquest, with the military help of China, of the other two kingdoms. Two centuries thereafter, local strongmen emerged around the peninsula to challenge the rule of the Unified Silla.
This period of internal conflict, which lasted several decades, finally came to an end through the exploits of Wang Geon, a local military leader based in present-day Gaeseong. In establishing the Goryeo Kingdom, Wang reunified the Silla territory, incorporated new lands in the northern part of the peninsula, and consolidated his control through strategic marriage alliances with dozens of other local strongmen.
However, Wang's immediate successors to the throne prevented a military domination of politics by implementing a Confucian governing system, including state examinations for selecting officials. This had the effect of prioritizing civilian officials over military ones, a division within the aristocracy that would remain until the modern era.
The civilian supremacy that set in over the next two centuries, for complex reasons, induced a backlash among military officials, who overthrew the civilian government in the late 12th century. Thereafter the peninsula came under the hereditary control of military officials, who nevertheless maintained the sovereignty of the Goryeo kings.
Ironically, not long after taking over, these military elites found themselves under the siege of Mongolian forces that would eventually go on to conquer and rule Korea, China, and much of Eurasia over the next 150 years. Like the Korean military elites before them, however, once the Mongols secured control over the peninsula, they allowed a civil-dominated governing form to take hold.
As the Mongolian overlord period came to an end in the latter 14th century, another Korean military figure arose whose ancestors had served the Mongols in the northern fringes of the Goryeo realm: Yi Seong-gye. Like Wang Geon, though, Yi, though himself a celebrated general, shed his military garb and established a dynastic rule, the Joseon Kingdom, directed by Confucian principles of civilian command.
Unlike Goryeo, however, the Joseon Kingdom successfully cemented this hierarchy between civilian and military, and such a culture pervaded not only politics but the rest of society as well. It helped that there were no major external threats in the first two centuries of the kingdom, but even after the devastating Japanese and Manchu invasions of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the military never came to dominate Korean life.
So this relationship between civil and military rule followed a somewhat repeating pattern since the Silla unification of 668: long stretches of peace or internal stability, followed by bursts of major political or dynastic change driven by the military that, in turn, established a firmer foundation of civilian rule.
Such a cycle came to an end in the late 19th century with the onslaught of imperialism, which overturned almost permanently the longstanding general hierarchy between civilian and military forms of governance in Korea.
The conquering Japanese had perhaps the most to do with this. Japan gained control of Korea through two major wars at the turn of the 20th century and colonized the peninsula with a heavily militaristic approach. Not only was the colonial state led always by a Japanese military commander, but the legions of soldiers and military policemen spread a way of life that elevated the martial. This became even more the case when Korea became mobilized for total war in service to the Japanese empire's aggressive expansion in the 1930s and 1940s.
As it turned out, Japan's defeat in World War II and Korea's liberation in 1945 did little to return the peninsula toward a subordinated standing for the military. The circumstances of the post-liberation period, framed by the American and Soviet superpower occupations, only increased the standing of military solutions and military figures.
In North Korea, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter, Kim Il-sung, took control and promptly launched the Korean War in 1950. Thereafter North Korea became perhaps the most heavily militarized society in the world, as the entire population became permanently mobilized for war in order to maintain the totalitarian rule of the Kim family.
In South Korea, a heavily anti-communist state ideology, intensified by the Korean War, laid the foundation for its own military strongman to appear. This happened with the coup d'etat led by Park Chung Hee in 1961, and for three decades thereafter regimentation and political violence pervaded South Korean life.
The onset of democratization over the past two decades has witnessed a return to civilian control over the military, the culture of which has gradually retreated to the barracks. As long as the North-South confrontation of national division remains in place, however, the return of militarization is always a possibility.
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).
