Twisted postcoloniality in (South) Korea and non-Western Japanese imperialism: Examining the birth of International Relations studies in South Korea

No discipline in social sciences had emerged and evolved without specific social, historical, and local contexts.Footnote ⁹ IR studies in South Korea are no exception.Footnote ¹⁰ Regarding the trajectory of South Korean IR studies, although there are many contexts and milieus to examine, Korean colonial experiences are arguably the most critical element that influenced the birth of IR studies in South Korea. The following characterisations of Korean colonial experiences are relevant to the formation of early IR studies in South Korea.

Both Korea and Japan inhabited similar historical, cultural, and geographical space under the Chinese empire, which was the Sino-centric tributary system in East Asia. Under this Confucianism-based system that spanned centuries before the West's arrival in the Korean peninsula, Korea's Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) positioned itself below China but above Japan. Japan was seemingly located at the borderline of the traditional East Asian Confucius civilisation. This hierarchical thinking is captured well by Joseon's Confucian diplomatic practice of Sadae Jaso (serving the great, caring for the little).Footnote ¹¹ Japan was believed to be a neighbour of Jaso. In this context, Korea had been colonised by its similar-yet-inferior neighbour within the same civilisation. This subjugation by a similar civilisation somewhat differs from European colonisation of non-Europeans outside Europe. European imperial forces frequently occupied each other, especially in the process of warfare, but did not colonise each other, as colonisation was an event between ‘the civilised white’ and ‘the uncivilised coloured people’. However, from a Korean perspective, Japan's colonial occupation of Korea happened between countries adjacent to each other and within the same sphere of civilisation, even though Japan saw itself as one of the European powers at the time of colonising Korea. Thus, Koreans believed that their colonial experiences were psychologically more humiliating than colonial occupation by an unconnected, unknown, and dissimilar other.Footnote ¹²

Another related point is that Korea was colonised by not simply a familiar long-term neighbour, but also a ‘non-Western’ power (Japan) that was in the process of escaping from semi-colonial conditions.Footnote ¹³ As a non-European, peripheral imperial power, Japan's colonialism relatively lacked the formidable discursive forces of universalising and civilising missions, while it struggled to produce an alternative vision of modernity and worldview.Footnote ¹⁴ If full-fledged colonialism means that imperial universalism perspectives and categories are treated as common sense in non-white colonies,Footnote ¹⁵ Japanese modernity/colonialism was Western-masked Japanese/Asian imperialism in Korea. It was seen as an Asian betrayal against Asians.Footnote ¹⁶ For Korean intellectuals, Japan was not necessarily superior, yet it was lucky to be the earliest adopter of European modernity in Asia. On the contrary, Korea's Joseon dynasty was to blame for being blind to a gigantic change in its international environment, that is, the rise of the West and the fall of the Sino-centric tributary system in East Asia. Due partly to this ignorance, Korea was far behind Japan in terms of learning from the West, thereby becoming a colony of early modernised Japan.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the process of Japanese colonisation of the Korean peninsula was violent and repressive, successful Japanese modernisation and Westernisation deeply impressed Korean intellectuals. In particular, Japanese nation-building through and after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was admired by both anti-Japanese Korean independent activists and pro-Japanese Korean collaborators.Footnote ¹⁸ The rise of nationalism in Korea, which culminated during the March 1st Movement in 1919, gave the sense of a grave mission to Koreans, that is, overcoming colonialism by emulating the enemy, Japan. In other words, Japan was an object of both hatred and envy.

The Japanese imperial state saw its colonies, later including Manchukuo, as an extension of the empire rather than territories for exploitation.Footnote ¹⁹ Therefore, it established full-fledged state apparatuses in the colonies, accompanied by massive emigration of settler-colonialists and the elimination of indigenous elite classes. Over three quarter million Japanese settlers penetrated a population of twenty-six million Koreans while forming a ruling stratum of the society.Footnote ²⁰ The colonial state apparatus, including police stations and local administrative offices, directly and tightly controlled the colonial population through Japanese settlers in Korea, with minimal reliance upon indigenous collaborators when compared with other types of colonial rules such as those by the British Empire or the French, which utilised indigenous elites to control their colonies effectively and efficiently. Further, since the beginning of the Sino–Japanese War in 1937, the Japanese colonial government had imposed full-scale assimilation policies that banned Korean language education and Korean script, and even forced Koreans to change their names into Japanese-style ones.Footnote ²¹ It was a Japanese imperial initiative of converting Koreans into ‘near’ Japanese.Footnote ²² It is undeniable that Japanese colonialism was more comprehensive than European colonialism in terms of centralised political and economic domination in the Korean peninsula.Footnote ²³ The colonial state apparatus later became the foundation for the new independent government, resulting in an ‘overdeveloped state’ in which the repressive state apparatus overwhelmed the premature and ‘underdeveloped civil society’.Footnote ²⁴ Statism appeared as the most powerful ideology in South Korea, intellectually and institutionally.

Through gradual colonisation, Western modernity, including Christianity, was embraced by Korean intellectuals who saw the West as the only possible protector against the Japanese coloniser.Footnote ²⁵ Partly for this reason, (South) Koreans do not identify Christianity with imperialism. In particular, Christian missionaries from America were proactive in building educational institutions in the Korean peninsula. Private educational institutions that emerged at the end of the Joseon dynasty were all equipped with Westernised and modernised curricula, largely owing to Western missionaries and Korean intellectuals educated at overseas universities. The early higher educational institutions founded by American missionaries were Yonsei University (1885), Ewha Women's University (1886), and Sungsil University (1897). As Seo notes, ‘those institutions created intellectual lineages in Korean society through the import of the Western disciplinary academic system and creating a small group of intellectuals who eventually spent [a] significant amount of time in the United States’.Footnote ²⁶ Syngman Rhee, the first president of South Korea, who received a PhD from Princeton University in 1910, can be considered exemplary.

During the colonial period, Korean nationalists competed with the Japanese colonial government in the field of education. The colonial government's public education system introduced local cities and townships to a new concept of ‘cultural policy’ (bunka seiji) that was based on the gradualist notion of assimilation of Korean colonial subjects to the Japanese Empire.Footnote ²⁷ Meanwhile, Korean intellectuals under the colonial rule were eager to expand private educational institutions based on either nationalism or Christianity. Nationalism and Christianity were viewed as complementary to each other; both were against Japanese imperialism.

Under the colonial rule, only one academic institution, Keijo Imperial University (京城帝國大學; KIU), performed both functions of education and research. KIU was founded in 1926 as the sixth imperial university in the Japanese Empire to meet the demands of the Japanese colonial settlers in Korea. As the only academic institution that gained the status of ‘university’ (other higher educational institutions ran by missionaries and Korean nationalists were called ‘professional schools’), it was supposed to be the most comprehensive research institute in Korea. Nevertheless, it excluded ethnic Koreans from the process of knowledge production. By the end of the colonial rule, KIU had hired only one Korean faculty member, an assistant professor in the medical school. The KIU faculty was, by and large, populated by graduates from Tokyo and Kyoto imperial universities, who regarded KIU as a temporary workplace before moving on to teaching positions at major universities in Japan.Footnote ²⁸

The Faculty of Law at KIU comprised of four departments – law, philosophy, history, and literature. Of these, the Department of Law offered four political science-related courses, ‘Political Science’, ‘History of Political Science’, ‘Political History’, and ‘Diplomatic History’. These courses played an important role in introducing the concepts of democracy (Minshushugi) and state at KIU, which indirectly influenced the discourses of statism of colonial intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ²⁹ The concept (or subject) of ‘International Relations’ was entirely missing. A few Korean students in the Department of Law at KIU later became professors and lecturers of political history, constitution, and political studies at Seoul National University, which was established under the United States Military Government in Korea (1945–8).Footnote ³⁰

For Korea, like any other former colony, (Japanese) colonialism was a deeply humiliating experience. This painful experience made Korean colonial and postcolonial intellectuals rethink about themselves, their country, and the international environment. The first thing that they realised was that international politics – not civilisational politics – mattered. Under the Sino-centric tributary system, Korea was diplomatic towards China and its neighbours according to Confucian rituals; this exemplified civilisational politics, and Korea barely thought about the possible demise of the system in which it was embedded. Korean intellectuals came to realise that they should pay heed to how the international environment was evolving – not to civilisational politics but rather, to international politics as the norm in a new world.

Second, against Japanese imperialism/colonialism, nationalism and state-building became ever more important than other values in Korea. Both concepts, imported from Europe via Japan, were essential to becoming an independent, equal actor in the Westphalian system and to replacing the Sino-centric tributary system. Many post/colonial Korean intellectuals put great effort into making the Korean nation and state coextensive, believing that it was the only way to secure Korean identity and autonomy in the Westphalian system. In this respect, the Japanese colonial state's centralised control of Korea for 35 years also provided a solid foundation for statism in South Korea. Related to this, an overdeveloped state and an underdeveloped civil society were the main institutional features of South Korean polity before its democratisation in 1987. Academically, statism was central to the local intellectuals’ epistemological, ontological, and ethical underpinnings of conducting IR studies in South Korea.

Lastly, the Japanese colonial state in Korea was hegemonic, yet unable to monopolise the regime of truthFootnote ³¹ in the colonial society because of the peculiar nature of non-Western Japanese imperialism. Japan had to distinguish itself from Western imperialism for its own peculiar identity while insisting that Japan's moral superiority had a universal value that other Asian people should follow and learn. Yet, the weak status of the Japanese empire vis-à-vis Western imperial powers in real world politics and the relative lack of universality of Japanese imperial discourse allowed its colonial subjects, especially Korean intellectuals, to seek alternative, and presumably better, sources of modernity such as Christianity and Western knowledge. Importing and mimicking Western modernity was imperative for post/colonial Korean intellectuals with regard to their country's coming into being in the Westphalian system. The West was more than welcome – for Korea to resist the non-Western imperial Japan: to expel the ‘Other’ (the coloniser, Japan), the ‘Self’ (the colonised, Korea) needed and used a different hegemonic tool of ‘Another’ (Western modernity). This is the result of the above-mentioned peculiar nature of Japanese imperialism. In other words, what makes the postcoloniality of South Korea different from other postcolonial countries worldwide is the absence – or weakness – of colonial legacies in knowledge production and systems in IR studies and beyond. In South Korea's case, this is like twisted postcoloniality in IR, as further discussed in the following section.

The quest of South Korean International Relations studies for a Western/American future while discontinuing its traditional and colonial past

Because of Japan's defeat in the Second World War in 1945, Korea was liberated, which was considered sudden by most Koreans living in the peninsula. Instantly after its liberation, Korea was put under the control of the United States and the Soviet Union under a trusteeship (1945–8) that divided the Korean peninsula. South and North Korea were both founded in 1948. This was largely a by-product of great power politics at a time when the Cold War was brewing. Korean ‘liberation’ involved national division at the behest of two world powers. In 1950, the Korean War (1950–3) broke out. It was a civil war between the South and the North, and was the first proxy war under the budding Cold War in world politics. For a few decades after the war, South Korea was too poor to survive against North Korea without American support. It was widely accepted that South Korea had no choice but to join the free world bloc in the Cold War to ensure its national survival and state-building.Footnote ³²

During the final phase of the colonial rule, Japanese authorities downgraded all indigenous institutions for higher education from colleges (daigaku) to specialised/professional schools (senmongakko), leaving KIU as the only college-level research/educational institution in the colony. Upon Korea's liberation, KIU was reorganised as Seoul National University (SNU). SNU's political science department was formed in 1946, and it started to offer the course ‘Introduction to International Politics’. Soon after, the offered courses on international politics were extended to ‘Diplomatic History’, ‘Joseon Diplomatic History’, ‘International Organisation’, ‘Colonial Studies’, ‘International Law’, ‘International Relations’, ‘Foreign Policy’, and ‘Eastern–Western Diplomatic History’.Footnote ³³ Professional schools, including Yonsei and Korea, regained the status of ‘college’ in 1946. They also offered courses on international politics from 1946.

The discipline of political science until the mid-1950s was dominated by the colonial legacy: Korean scholars educated in Japanese imperial universities. The colonial legacy of political science education at KIU is evident in the curricula during the early phase of political science in postcolonial Korea. As shown in the popular college textbook of political science published in 1953,Footnote ³⁴ politics was defined as ‘governance to maintain social order’, or ‘the establishment of the rule–obedience relations to eliminate the divisive elements of society’.Footnote ³⁵ Basically, the educators tended to teach what they learnt from Japanese universities during the colonial period. Of the first seven faculty members of SNU's political science department, four had graduated from KIU and three from imperial universities in Japan. At Yonsei's political science department, all faculty members, both full and part time, had graduated from Japanese imperial and Keio universities. In the mid-1940s and 1950s, there were very few teachers who specialised in political science, let alone International Relations. Hence, it was necessary to invite faculty members from neighbouring disciplines, especially from history and law. SNU's first political scientists were all history majors, and those from Korea University were law majors. In Yonsei, among the first political scientists, one was a political science major, and all others had majored in law.Footnote ³⁶ Political science was usually placed under the discipline of law in Japanese universities. Education on International Relations exclusively covered diplomatic history and did not include key IR concepts such as national interest and foreign policy. In a decade, the subfield of diplomatic history in political science was marginalised, and the majority of its teaching and research areas were transferred to the history department of major universities.Footnote ³⁷

The very first transformation of Korean IR stemmed from the publication of two books in the 1950s: Hyowon Cho's International Politics Footnote ³⁸ and Yonghui Lee's Principles of International Politics. Footnote ³⁹ When the Korean Association of International Studies (KAIS) was formed in 1956, Yonghui Lee was elected the first president, and Hyowon Cho, the vice president. It is worth noting how differently the two authors approached international politics/IR as an academic discipline. At that time, compared with his peer scholars in South Korea, Hyowon Cho was a rare political scientist who had received a PhD from an American university – Ohio State University. Hyowon Cho's International Politics Footnote ⁴⁰ comprised excerpts of his coursework readings in America. He regarded the academic field of international politics as a universal science in advanced countries and positioned himself as a trustworthy translator. Conceptual universalism was the most important virtue in his writing and teaching of international politics. For him, mastering universal principles and laws of International Relations was a prerequisite for the foreign policy of a newly born nation such as South Korea, whose primary target was to survive in a hostile world.Footnote ⁴¹

On the contrary, Yonghui Lee's Principles of International Politics,Footnote ⁴² which has a nationalistic tone, is sceptical and critical of conceptual universalism; instead, it emphasises the unique experiences of Korea and East Asia. For him, international politics until the 1950s was the extension of Euro-American regional politics. Hence, the inquiry of International Relations in Korea should have an indigenous motivation. Because general International Relations theories have the hidden agenda of sustaining the ideology and interests of Euro-American hegemonic powers, it was, according to Lee, imperative to develop Korean theories of International Relations.Footnote ⁴³ As shown in the following section, the two scholars set a long-lasting framework for building a Korean School of IR.

Around the time when these two important publications appeared, numerous Western classics on International Relations were translated into Korean such as E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, George Kennan's American Diplomacy, W. Freedman's An Introduction to World Politics; Harold Nicolson's The Evolution of Diplomatic Method; Dexter Perkins’ The American Approach to Foreign Policy; Hans J. Morgenthau's American Foreign Policy: A Critical Examination; and H. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Indigenous works on international politics also started to come out in the mid-1950s such as Modern Diplomatic History;Footnote ⁴⁴ Introduction to the United Nations;Footnote ⁴⁵ and Introduction to International Organizations. Footnote ⁴⁶ In the early postcolonial period, translation was the most efficient method of acquiring, collecting, circulating, and consuming knowledge in South Korea.

Wonwoo Lee, a professor at Kyung Hee University, was a noteworthy translator during this period. Nicknamed ‘Mr Carr’ by his students, he translated virtually all of Carr's writings, in addition to key publications in Anglo-American International Relation theories by Harold Nicholson, W. Friedmann, and Hans Morgenthau.Footnote ⁴⁷ His career is somewhat exemplary in that he was a prominent translator but did not write his own theories. At the time of Park Chung-hee's successful military coup in the early 1960s, he became a policymaker in real-life politics, serving as the Minister of Public Relations, the Korean Representative to the United Nations, and a member of the National Assembly. Indeed, Hyowon Cho and Yonghui Lee, as mentioned above, also took up senior positions in South Korean government at some point in their careers. A revolving door between academia and government has been common in South Korea until now.

Since Korea's liberation in 1945, America, a guardian of South Korea's national security against the communist bloc, had been the knowledge epicentre and dreamland where South Korean students were eager to go and study. From the early 1960s, Korean academia witnessed a sudden surge of Korean students entering American academic institutions. For instance, the East-West Centre in Honolulu actively recruited the brightest students from Korea with special scholarship programmes, aiming to create pro-American elite groups through education amid the intensifying Cold War.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political science departments in Korea's major universities were quickly filled up with America-trained scholars, while IR as a subfield of political science increased its relative size in the field of political science. In 1965, 18 per cent of political scientists (who were registered in the Korean Political Science Association) claimed that they were IR-specialised political scientists. The figure increased to 28 per cent in 1978.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1963, the inauguration of the Korean Journal of International Studies, a flagship journal of the Korean Association of International Studies, also signalled consolidation of the status of the field of IR in Korean academia. Political science departments in Korean universities had so far been populated by scholars educated in America or other Western educational institutions.

Yet, for Korean scholars of International Relations, the 1960s and 1970s were ‘the age of citations’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The problem with expanding and deepening IR studies in South Korea was not the lack of scholars who mastered Euro-American International Relations theories, but the absence of shared points of concerns among Korean scholars.

The poverty or discontinuity of indigenous IR intellectual traditions and the asymmetrical knowledge production gap between South Korea and America made unconditional and uncritical knowledge import from the West/America possible and even inevitable. The imported Western theories were often decontextualised and fragmentised to be utilised for the state's developmentalist purposes.Footnote ⁵¹ The academic inquiry about International Relations that had been unavailable for colonial subjects in the Korean peninsula was directly imported from the United States, as it was regarded as a prerequisite for a new sovereign state. Imported IR knowledge was received as universal knowledge without reflecting on the Western-centric nature of the IR discipline, with the rare exception of Yonghui Lee. The earlier generation of Korean IR scholars/political scientists faithfully functioned as ardent translators and importers of the mainstream IR theories from the United States.Footnote ⁵² In the 1980s, Marxist thoughts spread in Korean campuses among students who were ideologically armed with democratisation, anti-Americanism, and a rejection of unconditional reception of mainstream social sciences. It was an import of critical-yet-still-Western knowledge. The hidden teleology of importing Western knowledge was that Korean IR scholarship must serve national security, South Korea's state-building, and Korean nation-building. Since the hegemonic West as an ideal model was seen as the most powerful tool for achieving South Korean developmentalist goals, there was a lack of interest in the critical consumption of imported knowledge from the West. Moreover, America-educated scholars strategically attempted to secure their social status and vested interest in the academia/society, with utmost admiration for the West, by importing and circulating ‘pure’ Western knowledge at home as quickly as possible. In short, the expansion of IR studies in political science at that time can be characterised as quantitative growth without qualitative development.

In a postcolonial society, leaders and intellectuals consciously craft narratives and make judgements considering their local context to decide how they should engage colonial legacies.Footnote ⁵³ As mentioned earlier, in experiencing Japanese colonialism, great power trusteeship, the Korean War, and the budding Cold War, the question of ‘why is our country so weak’?Footnote ⁵⁴ pronounced by Yonghui Lee,Footnote ⁵⁵ struck most postcolonial intellectuals deeply. Arguably, this question necessitated IR studies as an academic sub/discipline in a newly born South Korea. ‘Why’ easily led to ‘how’, as in: how can our country be autonomous and prosperous? Statism is central to this line of thinking.

The only plausible answer for early postcolonial South Korea was to fully embrace the hegemonic West, particularly America. Although there had been a short time span of imperial Japanese-style political science education in a liberated Korea, the incomplete hegemony of the Japanese regime of knowledge was soon replaced by American intellectual hegemony. In the decade since the liberation, non-Western Japanese intellectual legacies were regarded as irrelevant, unorthodox, or heretic in the field of IR and social sciences in South Korea. Furthermore, although Seoul National University was built based on Keijo Imperial University, its institutional system copied not the Japanese but the American university system. All South Korean universities copied the American institutional model after the liberation. This reveals South Korea's twisted postcoloniality, which is characterised by the absence – or weakness – of colonial legacies in knowledge and institutional systems, especially in social sciences, compared with other postcolonial countries.

In addition, the radical shift from Japanese to American knowledge systems showed that Korean academia neither praised Korean traditions nor employed anti-Western rhetoric. Nativism, which is a handy choice in postcolonial countries for national restoration, was not an option for South Korea, since traditional Korean knowledge on diplomacy under the Sino-centric tributary system was regarded as humiliating, backward, and irrelevant for sovereign South Korea. Thus, in South Korean IR, the (early) postcolonial period implies that South Korea went Westphalian and became Western/American for the sake of its security, development, and unification, while rejecting both the Japanese and the traditional knowledge systems. In a broader sense, it signifies a discontinuity of the traditional and colonial past and a quest for a Western/American future in the social science knowledge system. Indeed, South Korea, on the whole, ideologically became seriously dependent – if not colonial – on the West/America after Japanese colonialism: non-Western, physical Japanese colonialism had ended, while Western coloniality had just begun. This strategic move of becoming colonial again was believed to be imperative in South Korea, as the Cold War began just after the Korean War and thus, Seoul felt that it had no choice but to take the side of America for national survival against North Korea and the communist bloc. As Kuan-Hsing Chen keenly observes, ‘[t]he cold war mediated old colonialism and new imperialism’ in Northeast Asia.Footnote ⁵⁶

Along with the above-mentioned postcolonial scholarly development, IR studies, as an academic subject, emerged and was formed in South Korea. Unlike the positivist mainstream IR that sought more of a scientific answer to describe how the world ‘really’ works, IR studies in South Korea emerged as more of an art of navigating and living in the colonial matrix of the Cold War. This type of knowledge production is more way-seeking than truth-seeking, which appears to continue until today. It seems clear in South Korea that IR scholarship is inseparable from statecraft; perhaps the IR scholarship itself is a performative mode of statecraft.

Neoliberal institutional turn and the search for a distinctively Korean International Relations theory with universalism

The financial crises in 1997 and 2008 initiated and accelerated a neoliberal institutional change in many sectors of the South Korean society, including education from the top. Going global, backed by neoliberal developmentalism, has been a national motto of South Korea since the end of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, universities are increasingly seen as commercial goods in domestic and global marketplaces, and have become ‘profit-seeking companies’ consisting of different departments and centres. Almost all universities in South Korea have become obsessed with the university ranking evaluation by the government, domestic news agencies, and global commercial ranking companies.Footnote ⁵⁷

Under the neoliberal institutional system, the number of Social Science Citation Indexed (SSCI) journal publication is the most important factor in evaluating a scholar's academic performance and thus, affects his/her job security. Moreover, quantity matters more than quality: the greater the number of published articles, the higher the ranking.Footnote ⁵⁸ Without SSCI publications, the odds of getting a tenure-track position and promotion for tenure are extremely slim in the political science and IR departments of major South Korean universities. As Jungmin Seo and Hwanbi Lee note, ‘The current IR scholars in Korea and abroad have different class backgrounds than the previous scholars, with far fewer belongs to the upper class. Additionally, their research is focused within the scope of prospective jobs and research trends of Western academia, so as to ensure their survival by publishing more articles in prominent [SSCI] English journal.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Consequently, the neoliberal institutional system has immensely affected the topics and ways of research in the local IR academia. Particularly, young IR scholars are more inclined to search for topics and methods that are easily acceptable in the mainstream IR to increase the odds of SSCI publication, for job security. Mimicking of the mainstream IR, and not innovative research, is considered safe and desirable. This trend is also harmful to conducting IR research in Korean, because American PhDs are preferred to domestic PhDs who are less familiar with English writing. As a result, the institutional impact originating from outside the academia on South Korean IR studies has made already West-dependent IR studies more colonial and dependent on the West, in terms of academic content. South Korean IR and social science have become an integral part of the Anglo-American academic world.Footnote ⁶⁰ In spite of this deepening Western dependency, South Korean IR's craving for SSCI publication has engendered a liberating effect on the scholarly culture of the South Korean IR community. As the sheer number of SSCI publications has become the ultimate criterion for hiring, promotion, and tenure in most Korean universities, the underdogs who did not do their BA in top-tier Korean universities and MA/PhD in American universities, now have a leverage against the rampant nepotism in the faculty hiring process in Korean universities, as long as they can publish enough SSCI articles.Footnote ⁶¹ In this sense, the institutional obsession with SSCI brought about a certain level of transparency in South Korean universities and the local IR community.Footnote ⁶²

With the institutional change discussed above, as Seo and Lee observes, academically, the generation of IR ‘scholars who explored their academic career after the liberalising study abroad policy … in 1988 engaged with American academia quite differently from their predecessors’.Footnote ⁶³ Along with democratisation at home, they proactively applied American IR theories to Korean and East Asian circumstances. They also formulated ‘country-specific and region-specific research that obviously went beyond the simple translations … They have arduously interpreted the meanings and implications of realism, liberalism, and constructivism and tried to apply those to both the past and current international affairs of East Asia.’Footnote ⁶⁴ In addition, Western dependency and Western-centrism in South Korean social sciences were substantially problematised. According to Jung In Kang, a political scientist well known for his research on Western-centrism, the excessive Western dependency in South Korean political science had damaging effects on its scholarly community as follows:

In line with this critical awareness, there has been a persistent call to construct a Korean School of IR (a distinctively Korean-style IR theory). This call has been intensifying with South Korea's rapid economic and political development in the post-Cold War age of globalisation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similar calls can also be found in many non-Western areas (for example, a Chinese school of IR, a Japanese school of IR, etc.).Footnote ⁶⁷ The South Korean call presumes that its current IR academic field is still very colonial under the hegemonic influence of the West, specifically, mainstream American IR. It is argued that, to overcome this colonial situation – to normalise IR studies in South Korea – a Korean School of IR should be constructed to speak to global audiences on behalf of South Korean scholars and South Korea as a nation-state. Doing so might enable Korea to achieve equal status in relation to the West, in IR studies as well as in real-life politics.Footnote ⁶⁸

In seeking a distinctively Korean IR theory, there appears to be some tension between two approaches: the universality- and particularity-focused approaches.Footnote ⁶⁹ The universality-focused approach is in line with Hyowon Cho's notion of IR studies as a universal science. According to Hyowon Cho, the close interplay between strong powers seeking domination and weak powers showing resistance inevitably requires an analysis of International Relations. ‘Doing so gave rise to efforts to extract the laws or organising principles of International Relations, and thus international politics as an academic discipline was born here’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This universality-focused approach thus aims to manufacture so-called scientific knowledge that is globally applicable and empirically testable. In other words, seeing IR as a modernist social science, future Korean IR theory should be universally applicable while incorporating its unique experiences, history, and tradition.

Meanwhile, the particularity-focused approach is pursuant to Yonghui Lee'sFootnote ⁷¹ emphasis on the unique experiences of Korea and East Asia in understanding international politics. For Yonghui Lee, the academic field of international politics ‘cannot be disconnected with the village I live and the fate of a country in which I live. Yet, knowing and changing the fate of my country is impossible without exploring European modes of politics which dominate the East.’Footnote ⁷² The particularity-focused approach thus stresses ‘the importance of identifying Korea's unique historical experience from its own historical perspectives’.Footnote ⁷³ At the same time, this approach insists on making a significant contribution to world politics from the Korean perspective, believing that the political phenomena found in Korea share a universal nature with those of other countries.Footnote ⁷⁴

Despite the apparent tension between these two approaches, they are more alike than opposite. First, content-wise, both seriously take into account Korea's unique political experience in theorisation. Many South Korean political scientists and IR scholars believe that Korea's certain political experiences, such as national division and the Korean War, are unique. Yet, as Seo and Lee note, the ‘only way to ensure the uniqueness of certain political experiences is to accept the notion of universal experiences. In other words, as much as the notion of “international” is the outcome of “national” … to claim uniqueness one should take “the universal”.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Second, both approaches see universality as an essential core of their theorising, explicitly or implicitly. They are both universalists. Thus, both have the same objective: a Korean-style IR theory that is welcomed, recognised, and used by the local and global/Western academia. Universality – making the ‘Korean School’ of IR marketable worldwide – is required. Broadly speaking, the two approaches suggest two strategies for achieving universality. One is to acquire recognition from the West as an equal IR enterprise (most of all, from American IR based on rationalist/positivist epistemology); the other is to export made-in-Korea or made-by-Koreans IR theories to both Western and non-Western IR audiences.Footnote ⁷⁶

Regarding the first strategy for recognition, apparently, many South Korean IR intellectuals look to American IR as the global standard for evaluating their academic work while concurrently competing with it.Footnote ⁷⁷ The point is that, to (appear to) be universally applicable in International Relations, in practice, future Korean-style IR theories should receive general recognition as an equal scientific IR enterprise from mainstream American IR scholarship. Towards this end, what South Korean IR scholarship appears to do is adopt a positivist epistemology, which is the minimum essential requirement to be accepted by the mainstream rationalists as an ‘equal’ and ‘legitimate’ scholarly enterprise in the field of IR.Footnote ⁷⁸ Good examples of this are the debates between rationalism/positivism and reflectivism/post-positivism, and the debate ‘via media’ on Wendtian constructivism.Footnote ⁷⁹ Byoung Won Min argues that, starting from the revision of existing Western theories to suit Korean realities, the South Korea IR community should produce Korean IR theories that are ‘communicable’ and ‘compatible’ with international standards in the existing global/Western IR scholarship.Footnote ⁸⁰ Kim also argues that South Korean IR scholars should produce a new type of ‘positivistic, universal’ IR theories and try to revise and improve the existing positivist IR theories along with their peers in the West.Footnote ⁸¹ In his article, titled ‘Theorizing East Asian International Relations in Korea’, Jong Kun Choi claims that ‘[a]lthough Korean IR should strive to explain the country's unique historical experience, it will be judged by strict measurements of scientific universalism, which will contribute to globalization of Korean IR in return.’Footnote ⁸²

However, this strategy seems to bring about a paradox. The South Korean IR academia has sought to overcome excessive Western dependency (intellectual colonialism) in their IR studies by building an independent, self-reliant Korean School of IR. However, by adopting the positivist epistemology for achieving universality at par with the West, the local IR scholarship is unable to become ‘self-reliant’ and ‘independent’. The reality is that achieving the universalists’ desire for independence against intellectual colonialism rests not on South Korean IR's efforts, but on the long-term benevolence of the academic coloniser. South Korean IR needs American IR's favourable endorsement. Thus, it is difficult for South Koreans to normalise by themselves, the so-called colonised IR studies.

South Korean IR universalists are like players playing a game with rules laid down by the mainstream American IR. These universalists want recognition so strongly that they fixate on American IR and thus, are unable to see themselves except ‘through the revelation of the other world [American hegemony]’.Footnote ⁸³ Their sense of subjectivity and dignity does not rest on themselves alone. They are enslaved by their inferiority.Footnote ⁸⁴ This insinuates that the universalists have internalised American IR so much that it prevents them from seeing their subconscious Western-centrism, while criticising apparent Western-centrism. They seem to be the ‘subliminal Eurocentric[s]’Footnote ⁸⁵ who are critical of the West; yet, they are no less Western-centric. This is ingrained ‘Westoxification’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Alternatively, South Korean IR universalists may lack the energy to discern and alter their Westoxification; they would rather not be bothered with it as long as they can be universalist like the hegemonic West. This call to produce universally applicable Korean IR theories with a distinctive identity still operates under a colonial mentality sustained by the hegemony of Western IR. The more South Korean IR universalists are obsessed with the universality of mainstream rationalist/positivist IR, the greater their dependency on American IR.

Moreover, in producing a universalist Korean-style IR theory, South Korea's IR community will, in practice, reinforce the hegemony of American IR's meta-theory in South Korea and make American IR appear truly universal. This may also relegate Korean IR to being little more than a provider of ‘unique regional independent variables’Footnote ⁸⁷ to the mainstream positivist IR theories. For South Korean IR universalists, it is hard to accept that the West is just one of the many possibilities rather than the universal idea, and that the universal applicability of Western ideas is largely due to their scholarly mimicking.Footnote ⁸⁸ Future universalist Korean-style IR theories, albeit successfully produced, would at best occupy a small, compartmentalised space within the mainstream rationalist IR of America.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rather than pursuing equality, South Korean IR is unwittingly working within a hierarchical system. Perhaps South Korean IR universalists will end up similar, but unequal to American IR.

Regarding the second strategy, it is likely that future Korean-style IR theories will be rooted in Korean history, traditions, thoughts, ideologies, and practices in a state-centric sense. Indeed, such theories will be seen as particular and Korean-centric, pretending to be universal, to enhance and secure their own claims and national interests.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the field of international political economy, Hyung Kook Kim and Yun Young Cho maintain that ‘It could be a good opportunity to extend the Korean way of development to Africa and the Asia-Pacific region in the global context.’Footnote ⁹¹ In his chapter titled, ‘Knowledge and International Politics: Democratization of Korea and Task of Scholarship’, Hong also pronounces that ‘[South] Korea should be a theory-export country’, adding that South Korea should actively provide students from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America with scholarships and invite them to attend Korean universities and research centres.Footnote ⁹² Exporting knowledge should be recognised as a crucial aspect of diplomacy, and Korean academia and government should take serious measures to promote it. All of these arguments appear to be state-centred.

Given this, as argued by Cho, roughly speaking, South Korean IR universalists ‘may well respond to Western theoretical claims of universality dressed up in the garb of ethnocentrism by putting forth an ethnocentric paradigm, disguised with universalism, of their own making’.Footnote ⁹³ Furthermore, there appears to be insufficient room for taking account of how other non-Westerns perceive the universalist Korean-style IR theory and South Korea's unquestioned drive to export its Korean-style theory under the name of universalism. If this concern is not properly addressed during its theorisation, future Korean-style IR theory may be in danger of projecting an ethnocentric undertone of imperialism to non-Western countries while becoming controversial and self-serving. As such, this future universalist Korean-style IR theory could be regarded as would-be hegemonic, rather than post-hegemonic.Footnote ⁹⁴ In their search for an intellectual, diplomatic colony, seemingly Western-dependent South Korean IR studies strive to be ‘independent’, like mainstream IR. In other words, South Korean IR may replicate hegemonic relations by subjugating other non-Westerns to itself in the same way the West had subjugated it.Footnote ⁹⁵

Nonetheless, it is almost impossible for South Korean IR studies to be ‘true’ independent actors at par with Western mainstream IR. As mentioned, (meta)-theoretically, because the universality of future Korean-style IR theory is likely to be based on rationalist epistemology, the South Korean universalist expansion may be a proxy-hegemony on behalf of mainstream American IR. As Cho argues, ‘[d]espite the long-term outcry over its American-centric intellectual dependency/colonialism within South Korean IR academia, South Korea would appear to be seeking its own colonies to vindicate the universal fit of its national school of IR in practice while consolidating the epistemological hegemony of American rationalism in theory.’Footnote ⁹⁶ This reveals the colonial/imperial nexus of hierarchical and unequal relations among American IR as the centre, Korean IR as the semi-periphery, and IR of the Global South as the periphery. South Korean IR could become a ruler of the non-West, yet it is a colonised ruler under the epistemological control of a hegemonic ruler. In this structure (the West/America above South Korea and South Korea above the non-Western countries) South Korean IR will possibly do what it chastises the West for, specifically, inflicting symbolic and epistemological violence towards the weaker: South Korea is likely to subject non-Western countries to Orientalism, even though it is concurrently subject to orientalism from the West. In this process, South Korea becomes not the West, but a ‘Western collaborator’, while (re)producing the white gaze of hegemonic IR that it wants to overcome.