Contentious Activism & Inter-Korean Relations by Danielle L. Chubb

Author:Danielle L. Chubb [Chubb, Danielle L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Korea, Political Science, Asia, History, General
ISBN: 9780231161367
Google: 3mesAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17938801
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

A NEW ERA OF INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS, 1998–2007

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.

They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

The North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt.

Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.

And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.

—“The North Wind and the Sun,” Aesop’s Fables

Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” came to symbolize the new Kim Dae Jung government’s policy toward North Korea, which, advocating gentle persuasion over brute force, became known as the “Sunshine policy.” Whereas in the past South Korean governments had been reluctant to associate themselves too closely with the bellicose and unpredictable left-wing regimes of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il, President Kim Dae Jung declared that the best approach toward North Korea was one of patient conciliation: cooperation and economic interaction became the main tools through which the government would endeavor to decrease tensions on the Korean peninsula. This chapter discusses the evolution of political activism in this new environment, with a special focus on the undertakings of those activists who advocated around the cause of North Korean human rights. The chapter thus provides the final building block of the argument presented in this book about the historically constituted, negotiated nature of debate over inter-Korean relations and the role played by political activists in its evolution. Through their dissident discourses, political activists have over the years engaged in processes of norm negotiation around the three central beliefs of unification, human rights, and democracy. The interrelationship among these beliefs has had important consequences for domestic political debate over inter-Korean relations, witnessed most clearly in discourse on North Korean human rights today.

Previous chapters have revealed a series of political activist developments. In chapter 2, which examined activism leading up to the 1980 Kwangju uprising, two clear trends were identified: the beginnings of the radicalization of dissident discourses among some elements of the democracy, human rights, and unification movement, as well as the start of greater cooperation between disparate political activist elements, such as the church, students, and labor. Chapter 3, focusing on 1980s activism taking place between two key critical juncture events (the Kwangju uprising and the June 1987 uprising), noted the continued radicalization of the movement. This took place in conjunction with a move toward the transnationalization of the Korean democracy effort as a result of Kim Dae Jung’s exile in the United States. While these two trends were contradictory in many ways and resulted in the partial fragmentation of the movement, the work of activists during the 1980s

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