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Home  Contemporary Issues
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Contemporary Issues
The contemporary issues project promotes cross-cultural understanding through public lectures, panel discussions, symposia and workshops that present the rich diversity of Korea and U.S.-Korea relations in historical and contemporary contexts. These programs feature authors, scholars, artists, practitioners from the nonprofit sector, politicians, business leaders and others who are willing to share with the American public their unique expertise on Korea and U.S.-Korea relations.
The focus of this project area is an in-depth exploration of the social, cultural, economic, political, historical and security dimensions of the U.S.-Korea relationship. The objective is to foster a greater awareness, appreciation and understanding of the complexity of these underlying factors, which fuels the power of imagination that is the indispensable wellspring of the capacity for empathy. While divergences of perspectives between Americans and Koreans on many fundamental issues may be inevitable, it is equally inevitable that these divergences must be brought within the realm of imagination to be channeled toward productive engagement based on mutual respect.
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Evans J.R. Revere, a Northeast Asia specialist with the State Department and the current Cyrus Vance Fellow in Diplomatic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, posed a question that has been popping up in policy circles in Seoul and Washington lately. After all the United States and South Korea have accomplished together, why don’t both sides feel better about their relationship?
Then he suggested several possible answers. Generational changes in South Korea have seen the old political establishment give way to new actors and new thinking. The sense of U.S.-Korea solidarity, forged during the Korean War, has faded and the days when Seoul reflexively looked to Washington for leadership are gone. In the defense sphere, while U.S. forces continue to weigh heavily on the strategic scales, South Korea is assuming more and more responsibility for its own security. Additionally, Korea’s rise from “economic basket case” to economic powerhouse has imbued the body politic with new confidence. From this more self-assured outlook, South Koreans regard North Korea as an object of pity, not of danger. The U.S. assessment of North Korea has stayed static. That difference has undermined the shared threat perception that has been the foundation of the alliance for five decades.
Paradoxically, as their self-confidence has risen, South Koreans have grown more ambivalent about their relationship with the U.S. Many feel that there has never been a better time to lay the groundwork for Korean reunification, making them especially sensitive to any U.S. words or deeds that seem unfriendly to the process.
The U.S. has already taken some positive steps to assuage South Korean sensibilities, such as committing to the withdrawal of the headquarters of USFK from central Seoul, where it has become a lightening rod for critics of the U.S. presence in South Korea. And presidents Bush and Roh have made progress in drawing the two nations closer, vowing at the November 2005 APEC summit in Pusan to begin a new strategic dialog.
For the alliance to continue to thrive, however, Revere said that the U.S. has to affirm its support for Korean unification in ever clearer terms, and both parties need to find a justification for their partnership that’s not based on what they have done together in the past, but on what they can do together in the future.
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South Korea was the featured country in this year's annual Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, a preview of what's up next for global publishers. But as Bruce Fulton, the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia and Youngmin Kwon, professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University, know only too well, the current international attention wasn't always so easy to come by. The pair spoke in a VOICES program about the process through which Korean letters, and their own recently released anthology, Modern Korean Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005), came to be known to the outside world. Kwon set the scene by recounting his first experience teaching Korean literature at Harvard 20 years ago. Two students showed up for the class, he said, and the second student was the first student's girlfriend. This disappointing experience led him to realize the great importance of making Korean literature more accessible in English translation. After returning to Seoul, Kwon made the decision to enlist Bruce Fulton, who was one of his graduate students at Soul National University, as his collaborator in this effort. Their collaboration eventually led to the publication of Modern Korean Fiction. Kwon went on to describe how this seminal work was designed to be comprehensive. It includes pieces written from the 1920s through the 1990s; works from male and female writers; works from writers who wanted their writing to address the burning questions of their day, and those who wanted their writing to be timeless. Space in the book was reserved for fiction by North Korean writers as well, much of which previously had been banned in South Korea. Following this introduction, the program continued with two bilingual readings from the anthology. The first, a story about a group of North Korean laborers, driven to Pusan by the war, nostalgic and guilt-riven by memories of home, is typical of mid-century Korean fiction, which focused on the sense of mournful division that pervaded the country. The second, titled "Lizard", was read by its author Kim Yongha. This story typifies what Kwon says are the sensibilities of contemporary South Korean writers: the plots are fast-moving and the characters are young, urban residents of Seoul.
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The Korea Society was a cosponsor of a two-day conference held at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas on the issues surrounding Korea's eventual unification. The participants-who included a diverse mix of academics, diplomats, business leaders and officials from both the U.S. and South Korea-explored the long-term demographic and economic trends against which unification may occur. Presentations were delivered on Korea's post-war history, current North-South relations and potential paths to pre-unification economic development in North Korea. A follow-up panel discussion was held on the role that the international community can play in rehabilitating the North's economy and infrastructure. Keynote addresses were given by Suchan Chae, a former member of Rice University's economics faculty and current member of the ROKs National Assembly as well as Donald P. Gregg, president and chairman of The Korea Society and a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea.
November 5-6, 2005
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The ongoing Six-Party Talks in Beijing are poised to settle many questions, but one question looms over all others. Are the negotiations an earnest attempt by all parties to achieve denuclearization? Or are they simply a stage for insincere, ultimately empty, political theater? James Walsh, the then executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, attempted to tackle this question by drawing on his impressions gleaned from recent meetings with officials in the DPRK. Walsh began by reporting that the officials with whom he met had made numerous, sometimes surprising, remarks on the negotiations. For example, they asserted that denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula had been Kim Il-Sung's "dying wish," as a way of suggesting just how ardently they are committed to the achievement of this goal. Walsh also reported that the officials also seemed to be committed to engagement with the outside world. Noting that both military and trade officials cited increased foreign direct investment as one of their top priorities, he was surprised when they asked him if Harvard could send them marketing and accounting textbooks. Still, he noted, the road is still far from clear of obstacles as both sides are at loggerheads over the North's demand for a light water reactor. And though pro-engagement figures are steering policy on both sides, forces that favor confrontation are watching them closely and warily. What's vital at this point, Walsh added, was that the negotiators work towards building a "fault tolerant" relationship. During protracted talks it's inevitable that events will strain the participants' mutual trust, but such strains shouldn't be allowed to derail the diplomatic process. In a closing assessment of the talks currently underway, Walsh said "I think there's a 30-percent chance [the talks] are meaningful, and that in five years we'll be somewhere."
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