Sino-NK

Brian, Reynolds Myers. The Unloved Republic [사랑받지 못하는 공화국]. Seoul: Bakyeongsa, 2024. 176 pp. ISBN 979-11-303-18884-4.

On June 25, 2024, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon announced a plan to build a towering flagpole over Gwanghwamun Square, the political heart of the city. According to the mayor’s office, the sight of a 100-meter South Korean flag waving over a new “national symbolic space” would be sure to inculcate patriotism in the citizenry.^[1] One can’t help but wonder if Oh eventually abandoned the plan after some persuasion by Brian Myers, a North Korea specialist at the Dongseo University in Busan.

Myers argues in the introduction to The Unloved Republic, published in Korean this February, that South Korea’s Taegukgi national flag is an ethnic symbol, and when Koreans sing the national anthem in front of it, they feel pride in their race, not in their state. Mining the minjok (민족) discourse is not a new seam for Myers — he has long argued that North Korea’s true ideology is a kind of naive racial supremacism — but The Unloved Republic is both his first book in Korean and his first with the Republic of Korea in his analytical sights. The crux of his thesis is that South Korea’s political leaders have chosen to compete with Pyongyang in a losing battle to represent Korean ethnic identity, rather than elevating the heritage of their own republic.

Like the ancient Greeks, Koreans are an ahistorical people, writes Myers. They skip around history like a sandbox rather than a timeline, connecting events years apart. The Unloved Republic unfolds in a straight line, though, as both a potted history of 20th-century South Korea, an argument in favor of civic nationalism, and as a personal narrative of Myers’ own relationship with the country, which started in 1984 with a visit to his father, a U.S. military chaplain stationed at Yongsan Garrison.

Myers’ chronology reserves both its strongest defense and foundational criticism for the country’s first leader, Syngman Rhee, as well as Park Chung-hee, the architect of its economic success. Most Western scholars are quick to append the word dictator to both presidents, especially the latter, but Myers urges the reader to take a more nuanced view. Echoing a common talking point in the conservative Korean press, he argues that Rhee’s excesses pale in comparison to those of Abraham Lincoln, who closed opposition newspapers, suspended habeas corpus, and arrested ministers who didn’t include him in their prayers (p. 38).

Despite preaching a broader appreciation for Rhee, who Myers argues was an excellent wartime president, Myers denounces his decision to name August 15, 1948, as the date of South Korea’s founding. This date is shared with Japan’s surrender in World War II, which today is celebrated as Liberation Day. This conflation of celebrations elevates an ethnic triumph over the founding of the state — an original sin of the republic, in the view of The Unloved Republic. Park, who Myers deeply admires for his wise economic stewardship, continued this legacy (p. 59). His administration was characterized by its hypocritical elevation of the Korean race, criticizing American morals as unfit for Koreans while maintaining an alliance with the United States and beatifying 16th-century admiral Yi Sun-sin as an anti-Japanese icon during the normalizing of Seoul-Tokyo relations in 1965. Thanks to Park, there are more statues of Yi across South Korea than any other figure.

Myers is razor-sharp when diagnosing the reasons why many activists who fought for South Korean democracy paradoxically identified with the totalitarian North. As they looked beyond the DMZ for inspiration, domestically they saw a repressive South Korean political culture and foreign troops stationed in their country to protect the government. Myers notes that although democratization activists may have disagreed with Park’s methods of ruling the country, they actually internalized his government’s anti-American and anti-Japanese racial patriotism (p. 65, 66). The South’s own propaganda backfired, conditioning young people to admire the North, which professed a more extreme version of Korean nationalism that forcefully rejected the twin masters of the United States and Japan.

The legacies of the 1980s and its democratization movement hang heavy over all 20 chapters of The Unloved Republic. Myers doesn’t have much new to say about the Gwangju Democratization Movement, but his recollections of a visit to the Democratization Movement Memorial Park parking lot in Icheon, Gyeonggi, are genuinely revelatory. On a wall in front of the parking lot, Myers discovers a bronze art installation. Next to the words “Democracy is People” stands a depiction of a rowdy crowd carrying sticks and signs — a crowd that could grow violent if its demands are not met. If democracy in the United States means pluralism and the ballot box, in South Korea, it refers to the thoughts and feelings of the public, or minsim (민심).

This people-first attitude carries over to state affairs. When something goes well in Korea, it’s a testament to the people; when something goes wrong, it’s the fault of the government. Myers argues that this tendency explains why former President Park Geun-hye was irrationally blamed for the 2014 Sewol Ferry sinking, which she could not be reasonably expected to have prevented.

While excoriating the tendencies of South Korea’s political class, Myers dips frequently into their argot: politicians are arranged into liberal and conservative blocs (진영), and media can be classified as pro-North (친북, like the Hankyoreh) or conservative (보수) — although Myers argues that the so-called conservative media is currently nothing of the sort, having been infected with the left’s view of history. In spite of the rhetorical patterns, one should not mistake Myers for a traditional South Korean right-winger, even if his views on the threat posed by North Korea align him closer to that camp — he cites Antonio Gramsci approvingly and is roundly dismissive of neoliberal economics.

Myers does keep an even keel when discussing most of South Korea’s leaders. He is no fan of Roh Moo-hyun’s anti-American tendencies but appreciates that Roh changed the pledge of allegiance to replace loyalty to the “homeland and Korean race” (조국과 민족) with the “free and just Republic of Korea” (자유롭고 정의로운 대한민국) (p. 64). 

But this evenhandedness dissipates when dealing with South Korea’s most recent liberal president, Moon Jae-in, who “denied the entire history of the Republic of Korea” during his term in office. (p. 137) Myers argues that Moon played a “bait-and-switch” trick with the public, shying away from North Korea during his presidential run before launching a campaign of negotiations that Myers believes was aimed at establishing the left’s purported dream of an inter-Korean federation — an idea that in reality has long been pushed by conservative administrations.[2] (p. 133)  He’s basically right on two major points: Moon displayed the most single-minded focus on improving relations with North Korea of any South Korean president to date, and his administration played a smooth PR game with the foreign press and diplomatic corps. But in addition to his ceaseless outreach to North Korea, Moon presided over major leaps in South Korea’s independent military capacity — precisely the approach advocated by Myers.

Of all inter-Korean events since the millennium, the 2010 sinking of the ROKS Cheonan in the West Sea, which killed 46 South Korean sailors, looms largest in The Unloved Republic. Myers was deeply disappointed that both the left and the right failed to respond firmly to what was clearly an attack by North Korea. But a speech made by President Moon ten years after the Cheonan sinking — where he both promised to christen a future warship as the Cheonan and affirmed his belief that Pyongyang was responsible for the sinking — calls into question Myers’ portrayal of Moon as a president who reviles the Republic of Korea:

“The power of national unity is the strongest form of national defense and security. Only by protecting the peace of our nation and its people through strong national defense and security can we truly honor the sacrifices of the heroes of the West Sea… strong power creates peace.”^[3]

In both form and substance, the attitude Moon expresses is little different from a 1968 speech by Park Chung-hee, which Myers praises as emblematic of a “sense of national ownership” that South Korean conservatives too often ignore:

“We must abandon the complacent and dependent mindset of simply strengthening our bond with our ally. When faced with provocations, we must not be caught unprepared, expecting others to come protect us without first thinking and preparing to defend ourselves. The owners of this land are our people; we are the subjects of our national defense.” (p. 24)[4]

Like Park Chung-hee, Moon used the Korean term citizen (국민/gukmin; lit. state-person) rather than Korean race (민족, minjok) to refer to the people, just as the constitution does. Both presidents speak to their citizenry in a deeply state-patriotic tone. As Myers is quick to acknowledge before launching into another salvo, historians must learn to paint in shades of gray rather than black and white. The closer The Unloved Republic comes to the present day, the more its author fails to follow his own mantra.

While attributing the candlelight protests that ousted former President Park Geun-hye to misogynistic hysteria (which was certainly present to a degree), Myers skips over the inconvenient fact that the protests originated in months of dedicated investigations into Park’s corruption by female students at Ewha Womans University.^[5] Myers concludes that Park’s impeachment and removal showed the weakness of South Korea’s state, as a democratically-elected leader was felled by the fluctuations of the minsim. Never mind that Park’s impeachment was carried out in an orderly fashion according to the constitution, and she was later convicted on 16 criminal counts of cut-and-dry corruption.^[6]

Myers’ background is in literary criticism, which shows in his approach to writing The Unloved Republic. He skims history like a novel to unearth contradictions and test hypotheses. This yields a book whose core premises are too easily disproved.

Yet as a writer — in English or Korean — Myers is a pleasure to engage with. He believes in a strong and self-confident Republic of Korea, but Myers’ rhetorical skills stand head and shoulders among the bumbling crop of conservative alliance-worshippers in the think-tank crowd who are often associated with these ideas. It is a credit to him that he took on the challenge of putting out a book in Korean, a feat which very few Western Korea scholars have attempted.

It is certainly not a challenge that has been accepted by 80-year-old American historian Bruce Cumings, who Myers depicts as the fraudulent dean of Korean studies the world over, a man the author claims can’t understand spoken Korean and fails to acknowledge new sources that conflict with his ostensibly pro-North views (such as the 1991 release of Soviet archives indicating that the North started the Korean War — a criticism Myers first made, in English, two decades ago). The chapter on Cumings and his academic descendants — “Revising the Revisionist Myths About the Liberation Period” — takes the bitter, unpleasant tone of a scorned academic to an extreme. But it is a relevant chapter nevertheless. Myers argues that Cumings is largely responsible for the myth that North Korea more thoroughly purged Japanese collaborators in the post-1945 years. This myth endures beyond the academy, and the argument that only the South rehabilitated collaborators harmed the illegitimacy of the Republic of Korea reaches even to the obligatory taxi driver who Myers quotes as saying “North Korea at least started better than South Korea.” (p. 27)

Like its liberal academics, Myers argues, the United States is both trusted unduly by South Korean conservatives and reviled excessively by the left. Some Americans might have turned introspective after witnessing the anti-American sentiment Myers claims was rife on the streets of the 1980s. Instead, he wonders about why the Koreans aren’t thankful enough — “Is this country really an American ally?” (p. 71).  After all, the Americans have done so much to defend this country which they split in two. In this text, South Koreans are, on the whole, ungrateful for the American security umbrella. Although Myers has elsewhere contended that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the peninsula is the ultimate goal of North Korea, the reader gets the sense that he wouldn’t mind the Southerners tasting the consequences of their insolence.[7]

On the whole, Myers sees America’s foreign policy professionals as unduly accommodating to the North, with little to show for it. His views on the Council of Foreign Relations as a pro-communist coven run by Wall Street, dragging the State Department behind it, sound more like the deranged pages of the Epoch Times than surgical critiques. (p. 22, 23)

Myers plays (and perhaps truly is) the unaligned outsider, but there is nothing particularly unique about insisting, as he does, that North Korea attempted to influence the South’s domestic politics; that Park Chung-hee was not as repressive as Kim Il Sung; or that conservatives in South Korea should not support a law commemorating the anti-government 1948 Yeosu–Suncheon rebellion. Indeed, Myers’ central belief that South Koreans need to develop pride in their own republic is a now-orthodox view among many influential conservatives, having been pushed to prominence by the New Right movement that started in the late 1990s.

In the conclusion, Myers leaves but one recommendation for South Korean readers: replace National Founding Day (개천절) with Constitution Day (제헌절) as a public holiday. This would replace an ethnic holiday commemorating the mythical birth of the first Korean dynasty Gojoseon with one celebrating the modern Republic of Korea. He also lays out his warning for the future of the Korean Peninsula, a dark fantasy of political violence that starts innocently with the establishment of a North-South federation: “Most of the public, naively waiting for the economic effects of North-South cooperation, will be indifferent or favorable to the continued construction of a peace framework, and there will be no serious resistance from the conservative camp” (p. 148).

Would South Koreans truly react with passivity rather than resistance as inter-Korean cooperation grows, and would they anticipate positive economic effects? The case of the unified Korean women’s hockey team at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Games provides an illuminating example. North and South Korea formed a joint hockey team, but the South’s athletes themselves were loath to yield their playing time to their ethnic compatriots.^[8] For the so-called 2030 generation — at least as good a barometer for minsim as the older activists Myers is fixated upon — today’s South Korea is at least partially defined by a logic of fair competition for limited resources, which may not be compatible with an open embrace of millions of economic challengers from the North.^[9]

The author leaves on the table the easiest argument in favor of civic nationalism, which is that by including those outside the minjok, pride in the republic itself could serve South Korea well in an era of increasing immigration. Instead, he strangely praises South Korea’s “nationalistic exclusivity” (민족주의적 배타주의) in contrast to the “United States or Western Europe, which have been thrown into great turmoil due to unrestricted immigration” (p. 153).

Myers lived for much of his life in Germany, where he traveled to the GDR and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the country’s reunification. It’s unsurprising that he frequently turns to West Germany as a lens to understand South Korea, like many scholars of divided nationalities. But displays of nationalism in Cold War Germany carried a taboo unique in history, and ethnic nationalism was widespread across the postcolonial world.Here Vietnam might be a better point of reference.^[10]

South Korea’s reliance on blood nationalism may indeed have been well-suited to the demands of the early years of the Republic, but Myers insists that love of the new state alone should have taken precedence. He leaves unexamined South Korea’s early leaders’ motivation for choosing ethnic nationalism over civic nationalism, which he refers to as national spirit (국가정신). Why would they make such an apparently shortsighted gamble? The answer might lie in the reality of South Korea in its formative years: a contingent state, divided by and dependent upon a foreign power, formed out of an election imposed by the United Nations, with a government that consistently violated the principles of its constitution. The situation provided little in the way of ingredients to conjure civic pride out of. South Korean leaders may have reached for ethnic nationalist rhetoric both in response to its use by its communist neighbor, and because emphasizing the grand principles of liberal democracy would have exposed the contradictions and frail foundations of the state itself.

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^[1] “Mayor Oh Se-Hoon Will Build South Korea’s Highest 100m-Tall Taegeukgi National Symbolic Structure to Honor the Noble Spirit Of National Defense” [오세훈 시장, 숭고한 호국의 뜻 기리기 위해 대한민국 최고 100m 높이 태극기 국가상징조형물 세운다], Seoul Metropolitan Government, June 25, 2024. https://mayor.seoul.go.kr/oh/seoul/newsView.do?photoGallerySn=2915&main=pc.

[2] For an analysis of presidents Chun Doo-whan and Roh Tae-woo’s unification plans – which very much resembled an inter-Korean federation – see Dylan Stent, “Moon’s Plan for Inter-Korean Relations Is Actually 40 Years Old,” The Diplomat, October 23, 2020.

^[3] President Moon Jae-in’s Commemorative Speech for the 6th West Sea Defense Day [문재인 대통령, 제6회 서해수호의 날 기념사], YTN, March 3, 2021. https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/0101_202103261428566095. Translation by James Constant.

[4] Translation by James Constant.

^[5] Youkyoung Lee, “How sparks at S. Korean women’s school led to anti-Park fire,” AP, March 14, 2017. https://apnews.com/general-news-f26782acb46246a0835ecfc412ed7db1.

^[6] Park Si-soo, “Ex-President Park sentenced to 24 years in prison,” The Korea Times, April 6, 2018. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/04/251_246856.html.

[7] Song Sang-ho, “Ex-Pentagon official stresses need for war plan rethink, swift OPCON transfer, USFK overhaul,” May 08, 2024. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20240508000300315.

^[8] Young-sam Lim et al., “Sociological Discourses regarding Single South-North Korea female Ice Hockey Team during 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games [2018평창동계올림픽 여자아이스하키 남북 단일팀 구성 논란에 대한 사회학적 담론],” Korean Journal of Sociology of Sport, Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2018. https://www.dbpia.co.kr/journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE07613353; Moon Byeon-gi, “President Moon Jae-in Encouraged the Ice Hockey Team… Some Players: ‘A Unified Team is Ridiculous” [아이스하키팀 다독인 문재인 대통령… 일부선수 “단일팀 어이없어”], Dong-A Ilbo, January 18, 2018. https://www.donga.com/news/Politics/article/all/20180118/88219937/1.

^[9] A notable recent book describing and critiquing this emerging “empty fairness” ideology is Radical 20s [급진의 20대] by Kim Nae-hoon (2022).

^[10] Source: Nu-Anh Tran, “Contested Identities: Nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (1954-1963)” PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2013. h,ttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4407j6sj, p. 161.