Reconciling Democracy and Reunification

Since 2005, I have found the issue of Japanese collaborators in South Korea, and how it has impeded national reconciliation in the country, fascinating.

That was the year I took a course on Law and Politics in South Korean Society taught by Prof Hahm Chaihark in Seoul. I was even moved to write some semblance of a poem about it and handed it up as response paper for the week. I will go dig it up and perhaps post it in a subsequent posting.

Anyway, in an article by Katharine Hyung-Sun Moon, the Wellesley College academic noted that South Korea's past has "long harassed and haunted society, and healing has been difficult." (Reconciling Democracy and Reunification, in Insight Into Korea, Herald Media 2007).

She noted that without warning, individuals have been "politically stripped and whipped for their alleged connections or family relations to chin-il-pa (collaboration with Japanese), socialist activism, pro-Americanism, anti-government radicalism, and so on."

"Depending on who is doing the judging, there has been no shortage of targets. Suspicion, accusation and condemnation, rather than reconciliation and respect, have too often determined the course of politics," Moon wrote.

Moon argued that the witch-hunting process endangers democracy, "for people may become paralyzed from thinking, speaking and acting freely today for fear of judgment tomorrow."

The accusations and condemnations had also discouraged people from working together as "a national community", especially after more than "a half century of violence, ideological indoctrination ... and political memories."

Taking the process one step further, Moon even wondered if "the ideological divides and the zero-sum political mentality that already exist in the South" will be extended to the North in the event of a North-South unification.

"Will a politics of division rule even after reunification?"