Conceptualization o f rupture in time: The subjective position interpreting the event

The debate on the historical origin o f modernity in the Korean context was

introduced in chapter 2. I argued there that, in spite of a significant

rupture, to some extent, from durable institutional customs, none of the

novel forms is sufficient to be regarded as the event from which modernity

- as the new epoch - began in Korea. Further, I asserted that as soon as

an event was singled out, the emphasis of its essential elements for

modernity tended to overshadow or ignore other essential elements of other

events. When the debate concerns the dilemma of the historical adaptability

of a concept under empirical scrutiny, then the notion of the time-scale,

from beginning to the end, becomes a basic requirement for evaluating an

event.

- The illusion o f beginning

The short summary of the Korean war above neglects some important

aspects, as it is based on the premise that 25 June 1950 is the day that

the Korean war began. The political process, which was illustrated

previously, revealed that South Korea was already engaged in a sort of

civil war, since at least 1948. As soon as one fixes the period of the

Korean war as beginning on 25 June 1950 and ending on 27 July 1953

and insofar as one searches for its independent meaning, then politics in

the post-liberation period in general and the civil war between the South

Korean state and the extreme-right groups, on the one hand, and other

nationalist, center-left and communist groups, on the other, lose their

significance as factors of war.

The problem of how to cut and measure the time-scale of the Korean war

should not be treated lightly. The periodization of an event is not a purely

objective method with an indisputable factual claim. Periodization itself is

irreducibly a way of reflecting the event: why did it happen? Who was

responsible for it? What consequences followed? While acknowledging

several limitations in the defining o f the event, one could still argue that

the Korean war happened on 25 June 1950: there was a different legal

status between the state army and the guerilla force; the scale of warfare

lead to more serious consequences and required different political measures;

Foreign armies were involved; there was a change of major political actors

and their political methods, and so forth. Needless to say that the three

years of warfare exhibited distinctive characteristics crucial for an overall

understanding of the Korean war. Is it not also necessary, though, to

identify the political conflicts regarding the building of a new nation-state

and the political processes in South Korea, even if only to interpret the

distinctiveness of the time when war broke out in 1950? Ignoring post­

liberation politics or an unbalanced interest in highlighting the three years

of warfare, restricts the understanding of political modernity in the Korean

context.

If the particular implications of the Korean war for Korean politics are

investigated, the war's contribution to state formation should be paramount.

As illustrated in the previous part of this chapter, the emergence of two

republican states was neither the peaceful product of a consensual

agreement between several political actors, nor the simple consequence of

strong enforcement by a few exclusive political groups having gained

hegemony. Several political actors who had grown with different ways of

responding to colonial politics, were unable to produce an unified view on

a number of political agendas for the new Korea. More seriously, the

American preference of anti-communist politicians in southern Korea and

the Soviet counter-response of giving preference to communist groups in

northern Korea, caused many nationalists and center-left socialists to be

fragmented through divisive political campaigns. During the process of

state-building, antagonistic attitudes towards other political actors intensified

and further produced physical conflict. To sum up, the South Korean state

was not the representative of the conglomeration of political actors in the

post-liberation scene: it was simultaneously a defensive and offensive

apparatus for a few political anti-communist groups. At warfare in June

1950, the South Korean state (and also its northern counterpart) - which

was just two years old and seriously contested - extended its political

powers by means of a violent closure of anti-state sentiment, on the one

hand, and with the imposition of military service, on the other. Anti-state

actors finally lost political power when the civil war extended into an

extensive warfare with several states involved. It is arguable that political

groups who were involved in the state ultimately received benefits from the

acceleration of the war in terms of the legitimation of state violence. The

interpretative shift, from conflicts between political actors, to those between

the state and anti-state groups, which had been intended by the actors who

occupied the state, was finally accomplished through the military conflict

between the two states.

Insofar as the Korean war is understood as a war among sovereign states -

two Korean states and their political neighbors - or merely as a symbolic

event representing a serious hostility between South and North, then the

reflexive attitude towards the beginning of the Korean war would become

marginalized. This would also be the case for any research that neglected

the implications of the war for domestic politics in South Korea by

concentrating on its inter-state characteristics. If the researcher wants to

understand the political process through which conflicts between political

actors resulted from the emergence of the authoritarian state in South

Korea, the inquiry concerning the beginning of the Korean war, or,

extensively, on the origins of the Korean war, is inescapable: how did the

Korean war, as a symbolically constructed event occurring on 25 June

1950, impact upon power relations among political actors.8

8) The confusion as to the beginning of the Korean war remains even

when its inter-state characteristics are the sole object. If previous military

conflagrations between the two Korean states in 1949 and 1950, over borders and terrain, are introduced into the discourse on the Korean war, it

- The illusion o f ending

If what is called the Korean war is understood as another political phase

for post-liberation politics in general, and for state formation processes in

particular, in which counter-state political actors in South Korea lost their

independent political voices due to a remarkably extended warfare which

enforces a conceptual reformulation of current politics, then the end of the war should also be reflected in the possible reconstruction of the

historiography of the Korean war. While one could argue that the war is

over, based on the observation that there have been no significant military

conflicts since 1953, the necessity for considering the whole picture of the

Korean war, militates against its ending with the cessation of military

conflict in 27 July 1953. Though practically persuasive, there are at least

two conceptual problems with such a view. Firstly, the South Korean state

did not sign the armistice treaty at that time.9 The Rhee regime in the

would provoke further disagreement as to the day the war began (Cumings,

1997; 1990).

9) For the purposes of the armistice treaty, the counterpart of the

commander-in-chief of the North Korean army and the commander-in-chief of the

Chinese army, was the commander-in-chief of the UN army, a role assumed by

the US. This procedural issue became a hot item for military communication

between the related states and provided the North Korean state with a tactical

opportunity for excluding the South Korean state from the compromise talks after

the armistice had been signed. The right of operation command for the South

Korean army had been subordinated to the USA since 8 July 1950 when the Rhee

regime abandoned its autonomous control of the South Korean army at the onset

of the war. This military devolvement lasted until 1 December 1994, when the

South Korean army reassumed the responsibility for ordinary military operations.

South did not want the end of the war, but hoped for its continuance until

the unification of Korea had been accomplished. The bellicose manner of

the Rhee regime lasted until its collapse in 1960. Even though later

regimes abandoned the policy of belligerent military parades, they

nevertheless continued to prepare for the expected reoccurrence of war - in

the strict sense, the continuation of the Korean war backed by the

assumed promise of American military support. Thus, the treaty drawn-up

for the cease-fire does not guarantee peace in the Korean peninsula, in

which, since 1953, the two Korean states and the US have maintained a

semi-war situation. Secondly, there is a reluctance amongst major players,

for whom the war served to legitimate the separate states, to acknowledge

that the situation has changed for peace. Above all, the political voices that

argue that the Korean war occurred on 25 June 1950 still maintain an

aggressive attitude for a sort of 'revenge'. The North Korean state also does

not willingly reduce its hostility to the US and the South Korean state,

retaining its ultimate justification in the idea of the peoples' liberation from

imperialism. Thus, not only in the contract-based understanding, but also in

the subjective interpretation of the political actors in the state, the Korean

war remains an on-going process.

The general periodization of the Korean war - the background of the War

(1945-1950), warfare (1950-1953), and the consequence of the War (1953-)

- which is widely accepted in Korean studies, could not properly address

the asymmetric relationship between the event - modified in the conceptual

reconstruction - and the situational resources and consequences. Insofar as

the time-scale of the Korean war is fixed from 25 June 1950 to 27 July

See the appendix in GOH Byung-Chul et al. (1992) and ROH Jung-Seon (1996)

for more detail of this process.

1953, the fundamental reasons for the war, on the one hand, and the

maintenance of strong military tensions between the South and the North,

on the other, are not identifiable. Even though reasons for the breakout of

war could be investigated in terms of its background, new research

knowledge is prevented from going beyond the end of warfare. At best, it

may furnish an excuse for North Korea, which, as initiator of the war,

must be liable to moral criticism. In order to better understand post­

liberation politics and to identify the complications of political direction in

a Korea divided since 1946, which has its roots in the development of the

two states, it may be necessary to extend the historical time-scale of the

Korean war from 1945 to today.

However, the historical extension of the Korean war is not without

difficulty either, as it generates a different set of conceptual problems.

From the various political processes since the end of the second world war,

the identification of the decisive point in time for the conceptual rupture

from which war can be said to have been generated, is difficult to

pinpoint. Not only is there a continuously accumulating process, but there

are also changing political issues and actors who come and go. Under the

general understanding of the Korean war, these changes, shifts and

disappearances are barely considered. If there were a theoretical implication

of the Korean war for social theory, it would be the recognition of the

ambivalence between the interpretive certainty and the uneasiness in finding

a relevant heading for the series of events. This may suggest, in reverse,

that the ease of naming the event is necessarily followed by a

de-contextualized interpretation in which the major characteristics of the

event are ignored.

Date and memory

The common way of memorizing historical events in the Korean style -

more accurately South Korean style - is to name the event with the date.

The Korean war is generally known as the 6.25 War or 6.25 catastrophe,

in the sense that the event occurred on 25 June 1950. This becomes

abbreviated, in many situations to the simple '6.25'.10 In this manner, what

has been argued as the problem of periodization of the Korean war is

more seriously exposed. For it implicitly or explicitly produces a strong

impression of the 'abrupt or unexpected' occurrence of the war. One could

argue that it is more appropriate to indicate the serious psychological shock

from the war situation for ordinary peoples who had no deep interests in

politics. In fact, the three digits, 6.25, instantly evoke the dreadful imagery

of warfare. However, initially, it still enforces peoples' distance from the

experience of what happened in the emergence of the state and its

subsequent political violence. Secondly, the conceptually induced situational

rupture around 6.25, constructs different political qualifications in the

separation of two political phases. One of the observable problems in the

conceptually driven separation, is that it superimposes value-judgements

based on the post-6.25 viewpoint, on the pre-6.25 situation. This becomes

serious, especially, when the evaluation of the war has already been

embedded in the mode o f naming 6.25. Thus, in the history of modem

Korean politics, the evaluation of post-liberation politics has been heavily

10) It is pronounced as "six two five" in Korean. Like 6.25, some major political

events follow this convention: the day of nation-wide protest against the Rhee

regime on 19 April 1960 is simply 4.19; the military coup on 16 May 1961, 5.16;

the democratic protest in the Kwangju area in May 1980, 5.18(the first day of

uprising); the statement after the meeting of the two leaders of South and North

Korea on 15 June 2000, the 6.15 statement.

influenced by state ideology that manipulates the meaning of warfare

between 1950 and 1953 to the maximum level. Ironically, this mutes and

creates indifference to the problems of the state elite in the first republic

and American foreign policy in South Korea.

In document The historical formation of modernity in Korea : events, issues and actors (Page 171-179)