Danger, Development and Legitimacy in East Asian Maritime Politics: Securing the Seas, Securing the State by Christian Wirth

Author:Christian Wirth [Wirth, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General, World, Asian, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351606363
Google: mbA-DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36912803
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bordering South Korea

Facing military threats from all around, South Korea seems most endangered. This intricate situation results from the continued entanglement of national with civilizational politics on the Korean Peninsula. Apparently, the division of Korea makes even greater the already formidable challenge for official nationalism to forge unity between nation and state. Since it is the South Korean state that is to be preserved, it is not only the North Korean but, perhaps more importantly, third alternate imaginations of post-division political orders that need to be excluded from public reflection. The single imaginable order is to be one where South Korea – in one form or another – incorporates the North. Conversely, whereas the South Korean state is able to bolster its legitimacy in opposition to the North, the idea of a unified Korea requires an outside border, an outside ‘other’, to be constructed against if it is to remain alive. Hence, the continuing impossibility of uniting the Korean nation under either of the two existing states means that Korean nationalism retains its strong ethnic component.62 Ethnic nationalism, especially in its anti-Japanese expression, serves as a means for creating a basic imagined unity among the Korean people that transcends the division along the 38th parallel. At the same time, the North Korean threat supports the South Korean state and its pertaining political, bureaucratic and economic institutions.

The bordering practices surrounding maritime disputes are indicative of how the image of the Korean nation as it undergirds the South Korean state is contested and reasserted. Contrary to what mainstream theories of international relations suggest, South Korean concerns with the delimitation of EEZ with China in the Yellow/West Sea are dwarfed by both the threat of Japan to the Dokdo/Takeshima islets in the Sea of Japan/East Sea and the North Korean belligerence along the NLL in the West Sea. The case of the submerged Ieo/Suyanjiao rock, situated southwest off the Korean Peninsula in waters that the Chinese government sees as part of its EEZ can serve as an indicator for the role that China plays in Korean nationalism in comparison to North Korea and Japan. In conjunction with both the EEZ demarcation dispute in the Yellow Sea and the Gando/Jiandao territorial dispute between North Korea and China, the Ieodo case reveals that the South Korean nation is mainly defined in opposition to Japan rather than to China. Despite its smallness, Ieodo has become imbued with considerable political value. Ieodo has been fortified in a scientific, ideational and legal sense as a means to assert Korea’s jurisdiction over the surrounding waters. By 2003, the South Korean government replaced the navigational buoy that had marked the spot since 1987 with a formidable multi-storied research platform, including a helipad.63 Seoul also sought to bolster its claim by promoting mythical tales about the rock that have, allegedly, long been told among fishermen of nearby Jeju Island.64 To be sure, Ieodo is not a sovereignty dispute; neither legally nor in official and popular Korean perceptions.65 Yet, the South Korean

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