Ethnic and Civic Nationalism on the Peninsula: Implications for North-South Relations

Brian Myers has focused on the racialist strands in North Korean ideology. But at the launch of UCSD’s Transnational Korean Studies program this week, Katherine Moon from Wellesley presented an interesting paper reminding us that North Korea is not alone. Scholars including Andre Schmid (Korea Between Empires 1895-1919), Henry Em (The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea) and Gi-Wook Shin (Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Geneology, Politics and Legacy) have reconstructed the origins and traced the persistence of ethnonationalism in Korea, including the long-standing emphasis on the Korean minjok, or nation, and a homogenous—and “pure”--Korean bloodline.

The difference is that South Korea is changing. Moon pointed us to a fascinaing new study from the Asan Institute by Jiyoon Kim called “National Identity under Transformation: New Challenges to South Korea.” In an Asan poll done in November and December 2012, Ms. Kim sought to distinguish the “civic” and “ethnic” components of South Korean national identity. The data, reproduced in part below, tells a story of dramatic attitudinal change with respect to ethnic conceptions of Korean-ness. The share believing that being Korean is attached to a mythic bloodline remains surprisingly high to outsiders but has fallen swiftly.  At the same time, commitments to the Korean political and legal system have risen. The reason for the change is clearly generational. Ms. Kim shows that racialist conceptions of nationality have fallen off sharply among Koreans in their 20s—although 55 percent still find the bloodline important—while all groups have seen an increase in commitment to civic conceptions of nationality as the foreign presence—now estimated at over 3 percent of the population—has exploded.

There are interesting implications in Ms. Kim’s study for South Korean perceptions of North Korea, a topic we have covered in a number of posts. The Asan survey asked respondents for their perception of North Korea, allowing four mutually-exclusive responses: “one of us,” “neighbor,” “stranger” and “enemy.” The findings are reproduced below. Despite their conservatism, the oldest cohort—those over 60—were more likely to view North Koreans as “one of us” and a “neighbor” than those in their 20s; those in their 20s were not only likely to see North Korea as a “stranger” but were more likely than those in their 30s and 40s to see it as an “enemy” as well. Over time, these findings suggest that civic as opposed to ethnic nationalism and stronger commitment to democratic values will push the Koreas apart rather than together over time.