Right-Wing Nationalism, Anti-communism, and the State

With the end of colonial rule in 1945, anti-Japanese sentiment ran high among the Korean public. While some right-wing figures, such as Kim Ku (1876–1949) and Syngman Rhee (1875–1965), were associated with anti-Japanese nationalism, many other members of the conservative elite had been closely associated with the colonial regime. However, this did not preclude the right wing from appropriating anti-colonial nationalism; the heightening of Cold War tensions and the division of the Korean peninsula into communist and anti-communist regimes produced another opportunity to shift the frames of Korean nationalism. Soon after its establishment, the South Korean state and its conservative allies mixed anti-communism and right-wing nationalism, a combination that historian Kim Su-ja (Reference Kim2008) argues became the hegemonic discourse in South Korea for decades. The result was an anti-communist nationalism that appropriated the theme of anti-colonial resistance by directing it against the communists, who were labeled pawns of Soviet imperialism. Moreover, anti-communist nationalism was innately statist: its core premise was that South Korea was the legitimate representative and defender of the Korean nation.

Within the framework of anti-communist nationalism, communism was labeled as anti-national, not only for its elevation of socioeconomic class over the nation, but also for its association with what was deemed Soviet “Red imperialism.” The trigger for this narrative was the trusteeship crisis at the end of 1945, in which Koreans of all political stripes erupted in furor against the proposed joint management of the peninsula by the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China. When Korean communists abruptly switched their position to favor negotiations on trusteeship instead of outright opposition, the right wing quickly accused them of being Soviet stooges, shifting the dynamics of Korean politics and nationalism (Cumings Reference Cumings1981, 214–25; Kim Su-ja Reference Kim2008). Rightists, many of whom had struggled to escape their collaborationist backgrounds, went on the offensive and claimed nationalist legitimacy for opposing renewed foreign rule. They derided communists, who had once been praised as nationalist heroes for their anti-Japanese activities, as “anti-national traitors” (pan minjok maegungno or panyŏkcha) for supporting continued foreign rule while taking orders from a foreign power, the Soviet Union. The North Korean invasion that sparked the fratricidal Korean War in 1950 was given as further proof of the communists’ lack of nationalist credentials for decades onward: not only was it believed that Soviet puppet masters had commandeered the invasion, but the war also claimed the lives of millions of Korean nationals, while North Korea's continued aggression afterward prevented the attainment of the pressing task of peaceful national reunification (Kukpangbu 1979; Kukpangbu Chŏnghun'guk 1979).

Consequently, the South Korean state and its allies, including nationalist historians, claimed that it was South Korea that had truly inherited the Korean nation's historical tradition of anti-colonial resistance. Few were as central to the dissemination of a conservative, anti-communist, nationalist historiography than the historian and bureaucrat Yi Sŏn-gŭn (1905–83), who has sometimes been labeled the chief ideologue of the Park Chung Hee regime.Footnote ⁸ Yi's frameworks of “the history of overcoming national crisis” (kungnan kŭkpoksa) and the “autonomous nationalist view of history” (chuch'ejŏk minjok sagwan) deeply influenced Park and were integrated into state-mandated history textbooks beginning in the 1970s (Pak Ch'an-sŭng Reference Pak, Yong-dŏk and Hiroshi2008; Son Reference Son2009).Footnote ⁹ In Yi's framework, instances of internal division and factionalism hampered the development of national strength while inviting ruinous foreign invasion. But at every such juncture, the Korean nation overcame these crises through total unity and the display of a resolute spirit of anti-foreign resistance. This spirit was continuously transmitted throughout Korean history all the way back from the hwarang of Silla to the March First Movement in 1919. As the legitimate successor to the Korean Provisional Government that arose directly after the March First Movement, South Korea inherited and embodied the Korean innate spirit of resistance as well. The parallels to and lessons for the modern era were obvious: once again facing a national crisis of foreign invasion—that of communist, Soviet imperialism, whose Korean supporters could be accused of practicing toadyism (sadaejuŭi)—it was imperative that Koreans unite behind the South Korean government (Son Reference Son2009).

The South Korean state's legitimacy was thus intimately connected to its role as the true representative, guardian, and advocate of the Korean nation. In South Korea, government propaganda during and after the suppression of the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn Rebellion in 1948 painted the Republic of Korea and its coercive organs as the competent, compassionate guardians of the Korean nation against leftist forces that threatened its members’ lives (Im Reference Im, Hae-dong, Chŏng-hwan, Su, Pyŏng-ju, Yong-gi and Tae-sŏk2006, 286–92). Meanwhile, right-wing youth group leaders such as Yi Pŏm-sŏk (1900–1972) and An Ho-sang (1902–99), both of whom were cabinet members of the inaugural Rhee administration in 1948, asserted the congruity of the state and the Korean nation (Pak Ch'an-sŭng Reference Pak2002, 231–42).Footnote ¹⁰ For example, in his articulation of the doctrine of ilminjuŭi (One People Principle), the unofficial state ideology for the first few years of the First Republic (1948–60), An wrote that the “state is the house of the nation”; the conflation of state and nation continued to be expressed in 1970s military education documents (An Ho-sang Reference An1950, 32; Kukpangbu 1979, 45). In the 1960s, the state commenced major historical commemoration projects that implicitly connected the Park regime with illustrious nationalist heroes, such as Yi Sun-sin (1545–98), the admiral who had helped defeat the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s and shared Park's military background, and King Sejong (r. 1418–50), the Chosŏn king credited with the invention of han'gŭl, whose reign represented a past golden age for the Korean nation that Park sought to echo through economic development (Chŏn Reference Chŏn2000, 85–107). Moreover, military ideological training (chŏnghun kyoyuk) materials, perhaps the most systematic expression of South Korean state ideology, taught soldiers that South Korea possessed nationalist legitimacy through its inheritance of national tradition and spirit and its pursuit of the great national tasks of modernization and peaceful reunification (Kukpangbu 1979; Kukpangbu Chŏnghun'guk 1979).

The ultimate objective of anti-communist nationalism was the defense of the state through nationalist legitimation. Over time, however, there was growing skepticism about aspects of the anti-communist nationalist frame, such as the trope of “North Korean puppets” (Pukkoe) of Soviet imperialism, which increasingly rang hollow when compared with South Korea's own unequal relationship with the United States. By the late 1970s, critics of the regime began brandishing potent nationalist ammunition of their own by drawing on South Korea's turbulent history, dealing devastating blows to the state's nationalist legitimacy.

Leftist Nationalist Historiography and the Delegitimization of the South Korean State

The statist nationalism of the Right remained hegemonic from the birth of South Korea in 1948 to the end of the Park regime in 1979. However, despite the state and its supporters’ claim to the anti-colonial nationalist mantle, the right wing's associations with external colonial or neocolonial powers—namely, Japan and the United States—created significant vulnerabilities in the Right's nationalist credentials. The turning point was the rise of leftist historiography in the 1980s, which represented a dramatic intellectual revolt against the authoritarian state. While anti-communist and leftist nationalist paradigms shared a focus on resistance to foreign encroachment, the leftist nationalist narrative of Korean history diverged in asserting that the Korean nation (minjok) had not yet gained true autonomy from external forces—the United States, not the Soviets or communists—that had maintained control of the nation after 1945 through the complicit, collaborationist elite holdovers from the Japanese colonial regime who led the authoritarian South Korean state. Thus, it was nationalist to oppose the state and seek to overthrow the dictatorship, which would simultaneously liberate the Korean nation. This task required a revolutionary reading of the Korean past, one that separated the nation from the South Korean state. The result was a shift in control over nationalist discourse from the Right to the Left, setting the stage for the Right's eventual divorce from nationalism altogether in the 2000s with the rise of the New Right.

The prelude to the leftist nationalist revolt came during the tumultuous period of transition from one dictatorship to the next after the assassination of Park Chung Hee in 1979. Hopes for democracy quickly vanished with military general Chun Doo Hwan's (b. 1931) successive coups in 1979 and 1980, culminating in the massacre of hundreds of civilians during the Kwangju Uprising in May 1980, cementing Chun's grip on power. A notable result of Kwangju was a surge in radicalism and anti-American nationalism among the opposition, especially among student activists. The central role of laborers and the unemployed during the Kwangju Uprising confirmed to guilt-ridden leftist activists and intellectuals that the masses (minjung), whom they considered the core of the Korean nation, were more than ready to assume their role as the main agents of Korean history and the leaders of potential revolution (Lee Reference Lee2007, 44–55, 234–39). Consequently, Marxist ideas spread rapidly among student activists. Furthermore, already disillusioned by Washington's nonintervention in preventing the bloodshed, activists and intellectuals began to perceive, especially after the United States endorsed the Chun regime (1980–88), that the Americans openly supported dictatorship and opposed sociopolitical change in South Korea. Anti-American sentiment sharply rose in the 1980s as a result.

In this context, leftist histories became preoccupied with explaining the prolongation of authoritarianism throughout Korean history despite the public's demand for democracy. The representative text here was the series Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik (hereafter Insik), translated as An Understanding of History before and after Liberation, the first volume of which was published in 1979.Footnote ¹¹ In this monumental series, the emphasis on the minjung and the rising tide of anti-Americanism in the 1980s were combined and refocused in critical examinations of the American military occupation of southern Korea (1945–48). Insik and similar leftist histories “exposed the inglorious origins of the South Korean state and negated cold war historiography by positing as nationalist the resistance to the UN-sponsored separate elections in 1948 on which South Korea claims its legal basis” (Em Reference Em2013, 16; emphasis in original), transforming anti-state, anti-establishment oppositional discourse into a nationalist cause. The subversive underlying argument of the series was that because of the state's dubious origins as a product of American and right-wing collusion, the South Korean regime in all its iterations from Rhee to Chun was anti-national and illegitimate, and opposition to the state was thus innately nationalist. In sum, Insik extensively utilized nationalism specifically to critique the conservative regimes that had dominated South Korean politics since the state's founding.

Critical histories of the late 1970s and 1980s such as Insik thus located the answer to the puzzle of continuous authoritarianism in South Korea's founding in 1948, arguing that Korea had never broken free from its colonial status, but merely transitioned from Japanese to American hegemony. In particular, the underground publication and distribution of Korean translations of the first volume of American historian Bruce Cumings's The Origins of the Korean War (Reference Cumings1981) fanned the flames of anti-American sentiment among activists and intellectuals, who lamented the loss of South Korean independence and agency (Park Reference Park2005, 273). Although the first volume of Insik, published two years before the English edition of Origins, already contained arguments about the American role in the formation of the South Korean regime (Song Reference Song and Kŏn-ho2015, 27–31), Cumings's book gained fame because it appeared to offer irrefutable evidence, gathered from previously inaccessible American documents, that U.S. occupation policies deliberately blocked social revolution in Korea (and by extension, a united Korean nation-state) through its maintenance and utilization of a powerful and coercive state apparatus from colonial Japanese foundations and its installation of right-wing collaborationist figures into key positions of power (Cumings Reference Cumings1981). The conviction arose among intellectuals and activists that South Korea was, and had been, an American neo-colony, held back and controlled by American national interests for decades. In fact, South Korea was unfavorably compared to North Korea, which seemed to have achieved true autonomy after liberation (Lee Reference Lee2007, 109–44). Leftist intellectuals concluded that only social revolution led by the masses could drive out foreign rule in South Korea and grant genuine autonomy to Koreans (Park Reference Park2005, 271–72).

A key consequence of leftist nationalist historiography was the severance of the bond between state and nation to which De Ceuster (Reference De Ceuster2010, 16) refers. The renewed scrutiny of the postliberation era damaged the right wing's—and, by extension, the South Korean state's—nationalist credentials by highlighting the close association of conservative elites with the Japanese and the Americans. The Right's collaborationist history with the Japanese was already well known; the revelations about the American military occupation and its intervention in Korean politics proved even more explosive, for they appeared to confirm to leftist intellectuals how the South Korean government had been dominated by American neocolonial power from the beginning. Given the state's historical lack of nationalist legitimacy, it could no longer be considered the embodiment of the nation; in fact, the state existed in opposition to the nation.Footnote ¹² For instance, the historian Kang Man-gil (Reference Kang and Man-gil2015, 20), in his introduction to the second volume of Insik, contended that the central task of a national history was to “overcome division” (pundan kŭkpok) by transitioning from a “division statist perspective” (pundan kukkajuŭijŏk sigak) to a “unified nationalist stage” (t'ongil minjokchuŭijŏk tan'gye). To Kang, a true national history moved beyond a focus on a state that was the product of division; the Korean nation transcended South Korea. The question of who lay at the core of the nation also mattered to leftist historians; it was not the state or political elites, but the minjung who should stand front and center of national history. Only through the participation of a powerful minjung as a historical subject would the nation attain autonomy (Song Reference Song and Kŏn-ho2015, 20).

In short, according to leftist historiography, South Korea had never possessed nationalist legitimacy because it was established as a right-wing state through foreign intervention, filled with leaders with questionable or explicitly anti-nationalist credentials. In leftist narratives, the state could not claim that it was the primary representative, defender, and promoter of the nation. Indeed, the South Korean state's oppressive actions against society, including outright murder of civilians, was a testament to this fact. The legacies of leftist nationalist historiography that delegitimized the state persisted well into the 2000s despite mainstream historiography's growing embrace of postnationalist and postmodernist paradigms in the twenty-first century. While the minjung movement lost momentum after the 1987 democratization reforms and was removed to the margins of political discourse in South Korea by the 1990s, ethnic nationalism remained a powerful force (Shin Reference Shin2006, 175–81). Moreover, the loss of nationalist credentials by the South Korean state was something from which it struggled to recover. The New Right's main motivation since then has been the restoration of the South Korean state's historical legitimacy.

New Right Historiography and Criticisms of the Nationalist Paradigm

The success of leftist historiography in detaching the nation from the state did not cause conservatives, or the state itself, to completely abandon nationalist beliefs; many conservatives continued to identify with nationalism, and the military continued to produce moral education lessons identifying South Korea as the legitimate representative of the Korean nation even into the 2000s.Footnote ¹³ However, it was no longer viable to rely on nationalism to prop up the state and Korean conservatives, who searched for ideological support for their politics. Moreover, with the successive political victories by progressives in the late 1990s and early 2000s, conservatives grew anxious to salvage their political legitimacy. Conservatives were angered not only by leftist scholarship but also the progressive presidential administrations’ attempts at “settling the past” (kwagŏ ch’ŏngsan). This included a series of Truth Commissions on authoritarian and anti-communist violence, further diminishing the state's legitimacy, alongside investigations into Korean colonial collaborators, many of whom possessed inconvenient ties to conservatives (De Ceuster Reference De Ceuster2010, 18–22; Em Reference Em2013, 157; Ha Reference Ha2007).

At this juncture, the imperatives of conservative politics soon converged with the anti-nationalist offensive in historiography. What distinguished the various strands of right-wing scholarship that would eventually amalgamate into New Right historiography was the tacit acceptance of the separation of nation and state. But in opposition to the Left's elevation of the former at the expense of the latter, conservative scholars pursued the reverse in identifying with the South Korean state and made its defense their primary objective.

In the academic sphere, the main salvo of the counteroffensive on leftist historiography was the two-volume series Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi chaeinsik (hereafter Chaeinsik), translated as A Reinterpretation of History before and after Liberation, which was published in 2006 (Pak Chi-hyang et al. Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, Reference Pak, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006c). The series covered topics about the colonial period in the first volume and the postliberation era and the 1950s in the second volume. While other publications by New Right–affiliated intellectuals have covered similar topics, Chaeinsik was central to the New Right's attempt to directly shape scholarly and public discourse, and its core arguments and frameworks have maintained prominence in more recent New Right publications.

As its title indicated, Chaeinsik was a direct counter to the Insik series and signaled the editors’ intention to tear down the leftist narratives about the postliberation period that had become dominant in the literature while upholding state legitimacy. The series was ostensibly a collaborative work of scholars of all political stripes who sought to push Korean historiography beyond the tired nationalist framework (Tikhonov Reference Tikhonov2019, 18–19).Footnote ¹⁴ The individual chapters were commended for their academic value and postnationalist or postmodern premises. But the editorial framing possessed clear political intent, particularly in the contributions of two of the four editors, Pak Chi-hyang (b. 1953), a professor of Western history, and economic historian Yi Yŏng-hun (b. 1951).Footnote ¹⁵ The editors explicitly stated that their goal was to counteract the historical views expressed by Insik, the so-called 386 generation, and the progressive Roh Moo-hyun administration (Pak Chi-hyang Reference Pak2006a; Pak Chi-hyang Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 11; Pak Chi-hyang et al. Reference Pak2006a, 616–17).Footnote ¹⁶ In addition, the editors’ discussions of objectivity, balance, and presentism in historical views were transparent political attacks on previous leftist historiography. According to Pak (Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 14–16), the editors merely sought to move away from a biased and narrow-minded historiography toward a “balanced view of history” (kyunhyŏng chaphin yŏksagwan) that reflected the complexity of historical events and figures and acknowledged both the positive and negative aspects of life in the colony, implying that academics had only focused on the latter. Yi Yŏng-hun emphasized empiricism and objectivity as constituting the core of the “professional” historian's approach, criticizing the contributors to Insik and leftist nationalist historians in general for their biased, politicized readings of the past—although critics of the series were quick to note Yi's own politicized uses of history (An Hyŏn-hyo Reference An2010, 203–4; Yi Yŏng-hun Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 32–47). Furthermore, Pak and Yi's rhetoric mirrored American conservative think tanks’ deployment of the vocabulary of “balance” and the “marketplace” of ideas to fight back against a perceived liberal hegemony in policy formulation (Stahl Reference Stahl2016, 4).

The editors also directly attacked the concept of nationalism itself, which by this time was associated with the Left. Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 56–57) argued that nationalism was “dangerous” because, being fundamentally derived from the clannish and barbaric—that is, uncivilized—criteria of blood, it innately generated mutual suspicion, antagonism, and eventually violence among nations. In his companion piece to Chaeinsik, Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi2007, 34, 45–47) criticized nationalism as a “fundamentalist” concept for Koreans that had become too politically strong relative to democracy and liberalism, making sinister connections between nationalism and the tyranny of Nazi Germany, Japanese imperialism, and North Korea. In her preface to Chaeinsik, Pak Chi-hyang strongly condemned the hegemony of the nationalist paradigm, which she claimed had stifled any true understanding of Korea's past. In her view, nationalism was an exclusive (paet'ajŏk) and violent (p'ongnyŏkchŏk) ideology that sought to prove the superiority of one's nation to the detriment of other nations. She added that nationalist history consequently distorted proper historical understanding due to the sole focus on the nation at the expense of other concepts, subordinating other values, such as liberty and human rights, to the nation (Pak Chi-hyang Reference Pak, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 13–14). Despite potential sympathy with these criticisms of nationalism's distortion of history, postmodern scholars distanced themselves from Chaeinsik, contending that the editors’ beliefs in capitalism and the priority of economic growth fundamentally contradicted postmodernism's task of deconstructing and overcoming capitalist modernity and modernist consciousness (An Hyŏn-hyo Reference An2010, 224; Yun et al. Reference Yun, Chŏng-hwan, Su, Pyŏng-ju, Yong-gi and Tae-sŏk2006, 15).

Notably, despite their condemnation of nationalism, the editors continued to express support for a “patriotism” toward the state, which represented the pinnacle of civilization. In the editors’ roundtable discussion in the second volume, Pak stressed the difference between nationalism and patriotism, declaring that a “healthy patriotism” (kŏnjŏnhan ŭimi ŭi aeguksim) and “a love of one's country” were desirable (Pak Chi-hyang et al. Reference Pak, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng, Yŏng-hun, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006a, 681), indicating a clear separation in her perspective between the problematic and narrow-minded Korean nationalism and undervalued South Korean patriotism.

Moreover, Yi Yŏng-hun's (Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 55–63) emphasis on “civilizational history” (munmyŏngsa) as the true topic of modern Korean history reflected his statist concerns. Although Yi claimed that the starting point of civilizational history was the self-interested economic man, homo economicus, because the state acted as the mechanism that united diverse humans and their divergent interests into one peaceful order, allowing them to escape “barbarism” (yaman), Yi (Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 56) declared that “the state is the symbol of civilization.” In short, the civilizational history that Yi preferred was equivalent to the history of the state. Yi's civilizational discourse thus paradoxically subsumed the ostensible protagonist—the neoliberal conception of the self-interested individual—under the state, which emerged as the true historical subject (De Ceuster Reference De Ceuster2010, 16–17).

Meanwhile, the narrative strategy of upholding statism at the expense of nationalism was reflected in the framing of topics in Chaeinsik. Because the South Korean state possessed strong continuities with the colonial period, in terms of policies, personnel, and structures, New Right historiography aimed at addressing several of the features of colonial rule commonly portrayed in a negative light such as economic exploitation and collaboration. The political implications were clear: countering nationalist historians’ wholly negative portrayal of the colonial era protected the South Korean state that had inherited its modernizing legacies.

Analysis of the colonial economy, in fact, was arguably the origin and core of New Right historiography, the roots of which lay in the disillusionment among leftist scholars with nationalist frameworks for the Korean economy. Influenced by the materialist analysis of Marxist economic historian Paek Nam-un (1894–1979), who had searched for internal sources of Korea's historical development, leftist nationalist historians beginning with Kim Yong-sŏp (1931–2020) and Kang Man-gil (b. 1933) argued that colonial rule interrupted the economic modernization that had begun in the 19th century during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (Em Reference Em2013, 133, 151). The resulting historical framework, called “internal development theory” (naejaejŏk palchŏnnon) or the “sprouts theory” (maengaron), posited that the sprouts of capitalism were in place by the late Chosŏn, only for authentic capitalist growth in Korea to be blocked and distorted by Japanese colonial exploitation (sut'al). This theory stood as a counter to Japanese colonial historiography which argued that Korea was “stagnant” until colonization and could never have modernized and industrialized on its own (Em Reference Em2013, 12; Miller Reference Miller2010).

But with South Korea's economic growth, many intellectuals grew dissatisfied with this nationalist understanding of the Korean economy. One of the most important converts from the Left was An Pyŏng-jik (b. 1936), a former Marxist economic historian.Footnote ¹⁷ An had originally contended that South Korea could not be considered capitalist, for Koreans had never advanced to an autonomous capitalist stage because of their subordination to the Japanese and Americans. To unlock its economic potential and achieve a true capitalist development stage, South Korea had to escape its neocolonial relationship with the United States and become fully independent. Otherwise, South Korea's economy would eventually implode. However, South Korea's continued economic growth in the 1980s even after the collapse of the Park regime caused An to change his views on the possibility of autonomous capitalist growth in Korea, abandon his leftist politics, and join Japanese economic historians in declaring South Korea a successful “middle-developed” (chungjin) capitalist country (An Pyŏng-jik Reference An2007, 49–69; Tikhonov Reference Tikhonov2019, 15).

Consequently, An and his disciples, including Yi Yŏng-hun, led the charge from the 1980s onward in countering existing nationalist paradigms about the Chosŏn and colonial economy, proposing a new framework called “colonial modernization theory” (singminji kŭndaehwaron). The premise of subordinate Korean colonial capital carried over from leftist scholarship, but, with the benefit of hindsight, rather than explaining the causes of a dependent South Korean economy, the colonial economy was viewed as the beginning of Koreans’ path to attaining capitalist civilization. Proponents of colonial modernization theory denied the existence of pre-colonial “sprouts” of capitalism, characterizing late Chosŏn as stagnant and lacking in modernity in a similar vein to colonial historiography (Miller Reference Miller2010, 8–10). Moreover, these scholars, including in Chaeinsik, downplayed the narrative of Japanese exploitation of Korea and instead emphasized how the Korean colonial economy underwent sustained growth and significant structural transformation, while Koreans experienced higher standards of living, laying the material, institutional, and human capital foundations for future South Korean economic takeoff (Chu Reference Chu, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006; Kim Nang-nyŏn Reference Kim, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006). In short, the New Right asserted that the origins of South Korea's high-growth economy and modernity lay in the colonial era, implying that there were benefits to Koreans of colonial management of the Korean economy—a deeply unpopular claim among the mainstream of Korean society and academia—while also helping to “establish the legitimacy of subsequent South Korean governments” that were seen “as the inheritors of that colonial modernity” (Miller Reference Miller2010, 11).

Problematizing the previously dichotomous representation of colonial-era collaboration and resistance became another focus of New Right revisionism. The field of collaboration studies in Korea had previously expanded the scope of notable collaborators to much of the ruling elite and contributed to delegitimizing the postwar South Korean regime (De Ceuster Reference De Ceuster2001, 230). To mitigate this effect, New Right scholars questioned the very concept of collaboration. Both Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi2007, 102) and Pak Chi-hyang (Reference Pak2006a; Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 17) asserted the futility of clear differentiation between the concepts of “resistance” and “collaboration,” while Yi (Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 50–51) likened the fervor with which Korean nationalists attacked collaborators to religious fanaticism. These criticisms of the Manichaean portrayals of collaboration and resistance converged with Korean postmodern scholars’ emphasis on the “gray zone” between the two (Yun et al. Reference Yun, Chŏng-hwan, Su, Pyŏng-ju, Yong-gi and Tae-sŏk2006, 39), but the Chaeinsik editors retained a political agenda behind their reasoning. If the definition of and criteria for “collaboration,” “resistance,” and “nationalist” became unclear, the stigma from the historical figures, usually right wing, long suspected of collaborative activities would be removed. Acting in concert with the Japanese was unavoidable for the vast majority of the colonized if they were to maintain their livelihoods; thus, the argument went, political and economic leaders had no choice but to work with their colonial overlords. To support this contention, Pak and Yi interpreted Yi Hye-ryŏng's (Reference Yi, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006) contribution to Chaeinsik on the han'gŭl movement's complex relationship with the colonial state as arguing that even a venerated symbol of nationalist resistance was susceptible to collaborative activity, even though that was not the author's main claim (Pak Chi-hyang Reference Pak2006a; Yi Yŏng-hun Reference Yi2007, 101–2).

The editors also questioned whether collaboration was necessarily a betrayal of the Korean nation at all. First, they asserted that collaborators made their choices for the benefit of Koreans as a whole, that they were nationalist in their own way. Citing Cho Kwan-ja's (Reference Cho, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006) labeling of the notorious nationalist-turned-collaborator Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) as a “pro-Japanese nationalist” (ch'inil naesyŏnŏllisŭt’ŭ) in her chapter in Chaeinsik, Pak Chi-hyang (Reference Pak2006a) contended that many Koreans turned to collaboration to further the interests of the Korean nation for a lack of better options.Footnote ¹⁸ Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi2007, 104–5) argued that other nationalist intellectuals were in a similar position in making the painful, paradoxical choice of collaboration to advance Koreans to the higher level of civilization that Japanese enjoyed. Second, the editors maintained that the eventual fruits of collaboration consisted of the successes of South Korea. Pak (Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 18) wrote that “unlike the upper-strata of pro-Japanese collaborators, technocratic collaborators contributed greatly to the construction of the state after liberation.” Thus, she argued that the “collaboration” of Koreans, particularly bureaucrats and technocrats, should not take away from their positive roles in the South Korean state. The hoped-for result by the New Right of questioning the concept of collaboration, while simultaneously expanding and partially erasing the category of “collaborator,” was the restoration of legitimacy to the South Korean state by removing the stain of collaboration from its early leaders and administrators.

Ultimately, the New Right's rejection of nationalist frameworks in analyzing the colonial past, as seen in Chaeinsik, was meant to weaken leftist nationalist historiography by rejecting its core premise of internal development, justify the South Korean state's economic links with the colonial regime by underlining the colonial economic foundations of South Korea's impending industrialization drive, and diminish the impact of collaboration as a factor in determining legitimacy by relativizing it and denying its analytical value.

Reconsideration of the Founding of the South Korean State and Syngman Rhee

In addition to the critique of nationalist paradigms of the colonial past, New Right scholars attempted to reverse the negative characterizations of the formation of South Korea in 1948. Noting that August 15 was the day of both national liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 as well as South Korea's founding three years later, New Right intellectuals lamented that the public only cared for the former. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of South Korea's establishment, several New Right scholars, in a series of lectures (Kim Yŏng-ho Reference Kim2008a), proclaimed that South Korea's creation in 1948 was of “revolutionary” significance as the first modern, liberal democratic nation-state in Korean history (No Reference No and Yŏng-ho2008, 13) and signified “true liberation” (chinjŏnghan Kwangbok) because it was through the state that the Korean nation attained its success (Kim Yŏng-ho Reference Kim and Yŏng-ho2008b, 79). Moreover, New Rightists viewed the founding of South Korea as the fruit of Koreans’ decades-long search for a modern state and liberal democracy (Kim Yŏng-ho Reference Kim and Yŏng-ho2008b, 94). The debate over how to remember August 15 turned into a public controversy after conservative politicians, including the Lee Myung-bak administration, sought to change the official designation of the August 15 national holiday from Liberation Day, or Kwangbokchŏl (literally translated as Day of the Restoration of Light), to Kŏn'gukchŏl (literally translated as State Foundation Day). Although the move to rename the holiday failed, the debate about which event to commemorate continued. As Patrick Vierthaler (Reference Vierthaler2018, 167) argues, the heart of the controversy was not about whether South Korea was founded in 1948, but a clash between two uncompromising interpretations of Korean history, one centered on the ethnic nation and one on the state. The “Kŏn'gukchŏl Dispute” and New Rightists’ emphasis on South Korea's historical significance firmly established modern Korean conservatism's adherence to the latter.

Intertwined with this effort to alter public perceptions of South Korea's early history was the rehabilitation of the image of Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first president. Long unpopular and widely remembered as an authoritarian, hard-line anti-communist under whose rule democracy and the economy both floundered while corruption flourished, the New Right recast Rhee a patriot who, through his wily moves, steered South Korea on the right path when at its weakest and most vulnerable. According to Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi2007, 234–35, 239), Rhee was a “realistic” (hyŏnsilchŏk) and “pragmatic” (sillijŏk) politician who faced the daunting task of state building (nara seugi) during a time of turmoil and stark political polarization. While effusive in their praise for Rhee's firm belief in and institutionalization of liberal values and liberal democracy during both his lifetime and presidency, New Rightists simultaneously wrote that it was both inevitable and warranted that certain liberal democratic norms would be contravened to ensure the survival of the republic given the communist threat (Yi Chu-yŏng Reference Yi2011, 224). Authoritarian practices such as the closure of the opposition-affiliated newspaper Kyŏnghyang sinmun and the execution of progressive politician Cho Pong-am, both in 1959, were downplayed (Yi Chu-yŏng Reference Yi2011, 226). Meanwhile, the 1952 Pusan Political Crisis, during which Rhee coerced lawmakers to enact a constitutional amendment that allowed for direct presidential elections to ensure his victory (Ra Reference Ra1992), was justified because Rhee was the only viable, politically competent leader in a time of crisis who possessed a vision and goal beyond his own self-preservation and self-aggrandizement (Kim Il-yŏng Reference Kim, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006a). New Right scholars depicted Rhee as the resolute, Machiavellian leader that South Korea needed during the early period of internal instability and external threat (Kim Yŏng-ho Reference Kim and Yŏng-ho2008b, 91–92; No Reference No and Yŏng-ho2008, 21–27).

Rhee was also credited for laying the groundwork for future industrialization and democratization. Political scientist Kim Il-yŏng (Reference Kim, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b) asserted that the land reforms implemented under Rhee, previously downplayed by leftist scholars, broke the economic and political power of the landlords and opened the door for new capitalists to replace them in the transitioning economy, and second, the reforms redistributed political power downward and facilitated the development of democracy in Korea. Rhee was also praised for his development of the social infrastructure such as education that facilitated South Korea's transition to high-speed growth (Pak Chi-hyang Reference Pak, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006b, 20; Yu Reference Yu, Chi-hyang, Ch’ŏl, Il-yŏng and Yŏng-hun2006, 452–60). Yi Yŏng-hun (Reference Yi2007, 247–48) argued that the future prosperity of South Korea was achievable thanks to the state-building process Rhee began, while An Pyŏng-jik (Reference An2007, 162) contended that the 1950s were a transition period in which Koreans fine-tuned the developmental model that served as the blueprint for growth in the 1960s.

Alongside its critiques of nationalism, by salvaging Syngman Rhee's reputation and emphasizing the historical significance of South Korea's founding in 1948, the New Right sought to mitigate the leftist attack of the illegitimate origins of the South Korean state. Highlighting the basis for economic growth and liberal democracy that were ostensibly laid during the early years of South Korea, New Right scholars sought to shift the terms of the state legitimacy debate away from nationalism. These defenses of Rhee and the early South Korean state despite their authoritarian actions lay bare the statist core of New Right narratives.