¹ The present essay partially draws on my keynote speech, “The Historical Significance and Remaining Challenges of the Candlelight Movement,” at the Candlelight International Forum on Plaza Democracy and Prospects of Social Change, Seoul Global Center, Seoul, Korea, 24 May 2018, and on three similar talks given subsequently at the University of Virginia (UVA Symposium on Korea, September 28), Harvard University (Korea Institute Kim Koo Forum, October 4) and the University of Chicago (Center for East Asian Studies Special Lecture, October 8).

² Actual work on reconnection is at present subject to UN sanctions. In fact, the joint survey was initially blocked by the UN Command in Korea (i.e., by the United States), but another milestone was passed when the UN Security Council on November 23, 2018 granted exemption by a unanimous vote.

³ For my notion of the division system, see Paik Nak-chung, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea, tr. Kim Myung-hwan et al., University of California Press, 2011, especially the Foreword by Bruce Cumings and Author's Preface to the English-Language Edition; also Paik Nak-chung, “Toward Overcoming Korea's Division System through Civic Participation,” Critical Asian Studies vol. 45 no. 2 (June 2013), 279-290.

⁴ E.g., Kim Chongyŏp (Kim Jong-yup), “Toward a New Stage of the Candlelight Revolution [촛불혁명의 새로운 단계를 향하여], The Changbi Quarterly [창작과비평] 176, Summer 2017, 2-5. It must be noted, however, that the same author later somewhat revised his position, suggesting that the candlelight citizens may have had an intuitive insight into the revolutionary nature of their actions and may indeed have realized the ‘utopia of revolution’, i.e., the dream within revolutions of becoming a festive occurrence free of violence. (Kim Chongyŏp, The Division System and the 1987 Regime [분단체제와87년체제], Changbi Publishers 2017, 469.)

⁵ See my “The Historical Significance and Remaining Challenges of the Candlelight Movement.”

⁶ Paek Nakch' ŏng (Paik Nak-chung), “Let Us Not Keep Still in the New Year, Either” [새해에도 가만있지 맙시다], Changbi Weekly Commentary, 28 December 2016.

⁷ The phrase was used by Hŏ Chŏng, head of the transition government, to define one of his basic policy objectives in May 1960 after consultation with U.S. Ambassador Walter McConaughy.

⁸ “The type, according to Marx and Engels, is not the abstract type of classical tragedy, nor the idealized universality as in Schiller, still less what Zola and post-Zola literature and literary theory made of it: the average. What characterizes the type is the convergence and intersection of all the dominant aspects of that dynamic unity through which genuine literature reflects life in a vital and contradictory unity—all the most important social, moral and spiritual contradictions of a time.” Georg Lukács, “Marx and Engels on Aesthetics,” Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. & tr. A. Kahn, Merlin Press 1970, 78.

⁹ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963], Penguin Classics 2006, 133 et passim.

¹⁰ I wish, however, to note in passing what seems to me a serious lacuna in her reflections. When she cites—in addition to the difference in the character of preceding monarchies (146)—as a major difference between the two eighteenth century revolutions the “natural abundance” (209) of pre-revolutionary America that exempted the American Revolution from the necessity represented by the large presence of the poor (as in France and later Russia), she recognizes the contribution of the black laborer and black slavery, but nowhere notes the earlier wholesale dispossession of Native Americans' land and resources. That violence of settler colonialism must be counted the single most important factor giving white settlers relative immunity from Arendt's ‘necessity’.

¹¹ As Sŏ Chaechŏng (J. J. Suh) persuasively argues in his on-line column, “The Warmth of Candlelight, the Spring Winds of Peace” [촛불의 따뜻함, 평화의 봄바람], Changbi Weekly Commentary, March 21, 2018.

¹² Perhaps a legacy of settler colonialism for which perfidy belongs exclusively to the Indians. Trump no doubt shares the mentality, except that he seems to have picked Kim Jong Un as a candidate for the ‘good Indian’.

¹³ For a recent example see the front page lead article in The New York Times by David Sanger and William Broad, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception” (November 12, 2018), and Leon Sigal's commentary the following day in 38 North, “The New York Times' Misleading Story on North Korean Missiles”.

¹⁴ Naturally, limits on autonomy work in different ways north and south: fairly obvious military and diplomatic subservience to the U.S. in South Korea, and in the north, the DPRK's inability in the international arena to obtain what it needs, such as diplomatic recognition, trade openings and benefits of international aid, and reparation and compensation from Japan for its colonial rule.

¹⁵ Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History, Random House 2010, 207.

¹⁶ This is a literal rendering of the Korean ‘najŭn tangye ŭi yŏnbangje’, as the dictionary meaning of yŏnbang is federation. But Pyongyang has always translated Kim Il Sung's proposal for a Koryŏ Yŏnbang Konghwaguk as ‘Korean Confederal Republic’, so that with the qualifier ‘low-stage’ added, Kim Jong Il would not have been stretching the point too much when he assured Kim Dae-jung, in response to the latter's and his aide's argument why yŏnbangje would not do at the present stage, that he saw no real difference between the President's idea and his own. See the eye-witness account by the same aide, Lim Dong-won, Peacemaker: Twenty Years of Inter-Korean Relations and the North Korean Nuclear Issue. A Memoir, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, 2012, 46-47. The South Korean idea of yŏnhap is often rendered as ‘confederation’, but as it postulates two sovereign states and no single government, not even a confederal one, the term commonwealth or association would be more appropriate.

¹⁷ In this regard I have serious problems with those intellectuals (generally classified as ‘progressives’) who, with prospects for peace becoming brighter this year, have begun calling for ‘peace without unification’, legitimately criticizing calls for immediate and/or full reunification as counterproductive to peace but going further to imagine a permanent (and presumably amicable) coexistence of two divided states in a denuclearized peninsula—without providing any roadmap toward denuclearization or amicable separation. This is not the place to fully address the issue, but I have tried to do so in Korean on several occasions. See, inter alia, Paek Nakch'ŏng, “Reunification with Civic Participation and Peace in the Korean Peninsula” [시민참여형 통일과 한반도 평화], Tonghyang kwa chŏnmang [동향과 전망] 104, Autumn-Winter 2018, Pak Yŏngryul Publishers, 9-54, and “What Kind of North-South Association Shall We Make?” [어떤 남북연합을 만들 것인가] The Changbi Quarterly 181, 17-34, also available in Japanese: Peku Nakuchong [白樂晴], “What Kind of North-South Association Shall We Make?” [いかなる南北連合をつくるのか], tr. Aoyagi Junichi, Sekai [世界], October 2018, 219-228.

¹⁸ For my thoughts on the incident, see my The Division System in Crisis, chapter 13 “Reflections on Korea in 2010,” 187-92.