David Ekbladh: We Should Remember that Nation-Building in Korea Took 52 Years

David Ekbladh, in the Wilson Quarterly (April 2005):

[David Ekbladh is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is currently completing a history of modernization as an instrument of U.S. foreign relations during the 20th century.]

... American involvement in Korea began in the backwash of World War II, but it took on increasing significance as the global Cold War evolved. Success in Korea would allow the United States to prove to the world the superiority of its approach to development. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, American and Soviet troops rushed into the power vacuum that had been created in northeastern Asia. Korea was abruptly freed from the colonial rule to which it had been subject since annexation by Japan in 1910. A hasty decision in August 1945 split the peninsula into a Soviet sphere of influence in the North and an American zone in the South. In a late-night meeting at the State Department, Americans suggested the 38th parallel as the boundary between the two—and were surprised when the Soviets accepted. They should not have been. The demarcation resembled an agreement made some 50 years earlier between Japan and tsarist Russia when both were vying for dominance in Korea....

For the Americans, stability in the South was essential to counter a communist-controlled North and to carry out the larger U.S. strategy in East Asia at a time of uncertainty and peril in the region. In the view of Secretary of the Army William Draper, a stable Korea could provide an indispensable, even “natural” market and source of raw materials for Japan, the region’s economic powerhouse. Though that had been Korea’s erstwhile role in the Japanese Empire, influential policymakers such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson thought it necessary still, and all the more important after the Communist victory in China in 1949 denied Japan another traditional outlet for trade. Acheson and his boss, President Harry S. Truman, were convinced that the United States could not afford to let one of its proxies founder, especially one that abutted a Communist competitor. So the need to mold South Korea into a viable state—preferably but not necessarily democratic—with a modern economy insinuated itself into wider American policy goals in the late 1940s.

At first, the agent of modernization in Korea was the U.S. Army. The occupation rested on an assumption that had been articulated at the Cairo Conference in 1943. The wartime Allies took for granted that, after liberation from Japanese rule, Koreans would require a period of trusteeship, and that they would be granted independence “in due course.” With this predisposition toward tutelage, the army saw South Korea as a developmental problem. Near the top of the army’s list of concerns was the impact of the country’s sudden division at the 38th parallel. Breaking Korea in two left the bulk of the heavy industry—chemicals, steel, mining, and electricity production—in the North. The South, with an economy dominated by textiles and agriculture, seemed ill suited to standing on its own.

But the geographical division often took second place as a source of anxiety to the effects of Korea’s colonial history. Yes, the Japanese had rapidly expanded Korea’s industrial capacity, but the Americans believed that the colonial government had purposely stunted Korean society. Koreans had been allowed to attend primary schools, but there were rigid limits on more advanced education, especially in the technical arts. Postcolonial Korea was bereft of the cadre of engineers, managers, and administrators essential to the functioning of a modern industrial state.

Looking at Korean society as a whole, the Americans saw a land mired in traditional and hopelessly backward values. “Something of the corrupt medieval monarchy of old Korea, flavored with a dash of the Chinese warlord tradition, still survives,” said a 1947 army report saturated with the biases of the day. “Although the Koreans have been called the ‘Irish of the Orient,’ being sociable, fond of fun and drinking, of talking and fighting—they differ from the Irish by being afflicted with what appears to be a deeply rooted inferiority complex, doubtless engendered from the systematic and prolonged humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. The results—evident in political life—are extreme sensitivity (‘face’), instability verging on irresponsibility, proneness to mob psychology, and occasional bursts of unreasoning anti-foreign feeling.”

For a viable and stable state to emerge, the Americans concluded, Koreans needed to develop a future-oriented worldview that put its faith in material progress and modern institutions. That view drew the Americans far beyond relief into nation-building, or “modernization,” as it was called at the time. They launched programs of land reform and industrial and agricultural development. In the countryside, the stultifying grip of the yangban (local landlords) was gradually loosened. The Japanese-designed school system was subjected to wholesale revision, bringing not just new textbooks but a new philosophy. From elementary school onward, curricula that produced loyal imperial subjects were replaced by curricula that instilled a faith in progress and technological accomplishment. The occupation authorities established technical training programs to create a new generation of skilled workers, and the first Korean students, soon to become a stream of thousands, were sent to American colleges and universities to learn the latest techniques in medicine, agriculture, and engineering.

[But then came the dictatorships of Park and others.]

... By the mid-1960s, South Korea appeared to be turning the corner economically. U.S. economic aid declined as the country’s industrial and export economy began to expand. But for all of the South Koreans’ efforts, it’s unclear how successful they would have been if fortune hadn’t intervened in the form of U.S. military involvement in yet another Asian nation, South Vietnam. Park committed two divisions of troops to the struggle at a time when the United States was desperate for allies to share the burden in Vietnam, and in return he received generous rewards from President Lyndon Johnson. There was aid, of course, but also military contracts. Just as it had boosted the economy of Japan with purchases during the Korean War, the United States now lifted the South Korean economy with a deluge of war-related orders. The war effort swallowed 94 percent of South Korean steel exports, as well as significant amounts of machinery, chemicals, and other goods. Hyundai, Hanjin, and many of the other chaebol (corporate conglomerates) that now dominate the South Korean economic landscape got their first solid footing with big Vietnam-era contracts from the U.S. government.

By the late 1960s, South Korea’s economic improvement had allowed it to “graduate” (the term at the time) from the “school” of Amer­ican foreign aid. William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs from 1964 to 1969, would later recall that perceptions of South Korea shifted to the belief that, “given enough patience, and of course enough material support, but above all enough time for methods to sink in, ‘it could be done.’” South Korea would continue to receive U.S. economic favors in the form of loans and guarantees, but it ceased to be dependent on massive grants and direct assistance. No longer a “basket case” of developmental failure, South Korea by the 1970s was billed as a triumph and a model to be emulated—and all the more important as such because of the failure of American-sponsored development in South Vietnam and Iran. The world marveled at the “East Asian economic miracle,” and those looking for lessons and inspiration were referred to South Korea and its fellow “dragons.”

But economic success did not automatically translate into political progress. Delighted by the economic “takeoff” of its Asian charge and mindful of the enemy looming north of the 38th parallel, Washington was never eager to press Park and his military successors for democratic reforms, even as the regime grew more and more authoritarian and violent during the 1970s. Park himself was murdered by his own intelligence chief in 1979, only to be succeeded by leaders who were even more bloody-minded. In 1980, the regime’s brutal suppression of a protest in Kwangju, which led to wider violence and hundreds of deaths, elicited only a muted response from Jimmy Carter’s White House. Still, the South Korean pro­democracy movement gathered momentum and managed, through large strikes and protests, to force the military gradually to retreat from politics in the early 1990s. In 1997, when Kim Dae Jung, a prodemocracy activist who had been sentenced to death by the military in the 1970s, was elected president, the success story was complete.

It had taken 52 years.

The Republic of Korea today displays all the trappings of a member in good standing of the exclusive club of highly industrialized, affluent democracies. Seoul, a shattered city of 900,000 in the aftermath of the Korean War, is now a world-class metropolis of more than 10 million. South Korean steel, automobiles, and electronics flood the world’s marketplaces. The role of the United States in this story was not always something to be proud of. None­theless, Americans should take some genuine satisfaction in having helped create a modern South Korea.

The book is by no means closed on U.S. involvement in South Korea. Nearly 60 years after the first American troops came ashore in South Korea, some 37,000 are still stationed there, facing a hostile North Korean regime that stubbornly endures. Virtually nobody foresaw the scale of commitment that would be necessary to create a model nation-state in South Korea. Americans assumed that their know-how would rapidly bring change. But the easy assumptions of a half-century ago yielded to a painful reality. American aid was part of a complex mixture of contingent factors—including the extraordinary perseverance and initiative of the South Korean people—that led to the elusive goals of prosperity and freedom only after immense and protracted effort.