[Paik Nak-chung] The Idea of East Asian Community and Korea’s Division System
* The following paper was presented at the Third East Asian Critical Journals Conference on ‘The Historical Culture of the Cold War’ held at Kinmen (Jinmen Island), Taiwan, October 27-28, 2010. It was intended to lead of the panel discussion on the Korean Peninsula on the second day.
Paik Nak-chung
Professor Emeritus, Seoul National University; Editor, The Quarterly Changbi
1
Instead of a regular paper, I propose to add some scattered remarks to the two texts of mine already circulated: “The Idea of ‘East Asian Community’ and the Korean Peninsula” (first published in Japanese translation in Sekai, May 2010; a slightly expanded Korean version printed in Yôksa Pip’yông, Autumn 2010) and “Overcoming Statism and the Korean Peninsula Project of Restructuring the State” (a paper presented at the Third East Asia Peace Forum, Seoul, November 4, 2010). The former takes up the then Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama’s proposal for an East Asian Community, and points out the crucial importance of resolving the problem of the Korean Peninsula if the design is to produce any concrete results. (Domestically, the issue of Okinawa bases was of course even more crucial, but the two are not unrelated, as I shall stress again later.) The article then goes on to explore possibilities for a regional framework suited to peculiarly East Asian realities. The latter paper supports the overcoming of statism as a long-term goal, but stresses the need for various mid-term projects at the regional and national (as well as global and local) levels, and cites as one such example the task of building a new type of confederal state in the course of overcoming Korea’s division system.
2
I focus on the Korean Peninsula partly because it is the part of the world I know best, but in any event not to claim for it an inherently privileged status. I grant the primacy of the goal we at this conference all share of building East Asian regional solidarity and, further, of overcoming statism as such. But statism cannot be eliminated so long as there are states, and if we accept Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis that the ‘inter-state system’ comprises an integral part of the capitalist world-system, states cannot be abolished so long as capitalism persists. In the meantime, we can only, and must perforce, endeavor to build regional solidarities that weaken statism and, within individual states, to reform the state structure in a way conducive to such regional solidarity and the eventual transformation of the inter-state system.
3
East Asia, both because of the continuing division between Japan and the rest and the huge disparity in size and population between China and the rest, cannot hope for regional integration in the manner of the European Union, that is, through a union of nation-states for its basic framework. But this should prompt the people of East Asia to try the harder for regional solidarity in a less state-oriented, i.e., more people-oriented way. This is not to deny the absolute need for cooperation among concerned states, including bilateral or multilateral treaties and agreements and various international frameworks of collaboration. But, lacking a tighter inter-state structure like the European Union, regional integration will have to proceed on the strength of the actual movements of people, goods and culture as these occur under given circumstances. Thus, unlike the European Union {or North American Free Trade Area for that matter}, the contours of ‘East Asia’ will be flexible and indeterminate, not entirely coinciding with territories of the states involved. It will also fluctuate depending on the specific field of regional solidarity one works in. Thus, ‘East Asia’ will cover different areas when it comes to economic cooperation or transnational civic movements—and again, when it is a question of military security, in which case any regional framework will have to be defined in terms of states and include the United States and Russia among major ‘East Asian’ players. Then, in (say) literature, if anything like ‘East Asian regional literature’ is to emerge, it will involve those literatures of East Asian peoples that are best suited to form a common regional literature on account of shared cultural legacy, relative ease of mutual translation, and other factors facilitating actual exchanges and collaboration among writers, intellectuals, publishers and readers. All these delimitations naturally will also vary over time as conditions in each field change, whether for good or for worse.
4
In this context, Okinawa, Kinmen (Jinmen Island) and the Korean Peninsula, each in its singular fashion, represent special possibilities. The Korean case differs from either of the others in that North and South Korea are both members of the United Nations, that is, recognized by the international community as sovereign states, while agreeing between themselves that theirs is “not a relation between states but a special relation temporarily formed in the progress toward the reunification” (Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation between North and South Korea, 1992, commonly known as the North-South Basic Agreement). Then in June 2000, the top leaders met and agreed (in Article 2 of the June 15 Joint Declaration) that reunification process should include an intermediate stage of confederation (or ‘low-level federation’, the North’s alternative term). This has not only excluded any unilateral action on the part of either government, but opened up a space for participation by non-state actors. In other words, the power of the states will be significantly circumscribed and relativized in this crucial task of creating a new state-structure. To what extent and with what end results will of course depend on both the quantity and quality of popular input that the population of the peninsula and concerned citizens throughout the world manage to bring to the reunification process.
5
Okinawa, if I may speak under correction, represents quite a different problem. First of all, today’s Okinawa is not a sovereign state, and the chief goal of its people, as far as I know, is not to build an independent state or even a confederal state. The main issue appears to be one of justice and equality, and greater local autonomy to guarantee just and equal treatment by the central government. For Tokyo and the Japanese people to grant this, however, would entail a more fundamental change in the Japanese state than giving a little more leeway to one prefecture. The Okinawan people seem to be already exercising a de facto veto power over the implementation of the U.S.-Japan agreement on the relocation of American military bases within Okinawa, and if such power becomes de jure through some new arrangement between Tokyo and Naha, it may amount to a virtually federal status for Okinawa and signify the beginning of the evolution of the Japanese state into a more people-oriented structure.
6
I know even less about Kinmen than about Okinawa, so I shall speak of the more general problem of the relation between Taiwan and mainland China. Taiwan has a functioning state, but here too a confederal solution seems out of the question because not only Peking but Taipei as well claims there is only one China (without even a federal system). Evolution of China into a federal state may or may not occur in future, but not in any foreseeable future and certainly not to accommodate Taipei. At the same time, even unification allowing for different political systems (‘one country, two systems’ as in the case of Hong Kong) would strike many Taiwanese as too threatening and restrictive. A settlement between Peking and Taipei that could allay such fears and guarantee the survival of Taiwan’s quasi-national identity (including the special status of Kinmen as a former battleground now turned into a favored site of peaceful cross-Straits intercourse) would produce many benign effects for all parties concerned: not only for the people of Taiwan (or a preponderant majority of them at any rate), but for China, which would then firmly embark on a course toward a more humane and democratic governance, and for neighboring countries whose suspicion of China’s nationalism and ‘great power chauvinism’ would be reduced as well.
7
One of the great merits of a confederal solution in the Korean Peninsula would be to encourage such developments in both Japan and China. The presence of two divided and confrontational states, that is, by definition strongly statist national security states, in Korea would tend to reinforce statism among Korea’s neighbors, and how such a tendency could work to the detriment of civic and popular causes was dramatically illustrated by the U.S. and Japanese governments’ use of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan’s sinking in March this year to engineer Tokyo’s surrender to Washington on Okinawa bases. But a united Korea per se would not necessarily create a fundamentally different regional climate—witness the war between China and Vietnam after the latter’s unification in 1975—unless it emerges out of a process of gradual weakening of state power vis-à-vis its people and lowering of barriers vis-à-vis other countries and peoples. The road to such an outcome in Korea has been open since June 2000. The question is whether we can actually traverse it.