Korea’s Fascist Moment: Liberation, War, and the Ideology of South Korean Authoritarianism, 1945–1979

Abstract

This dissertation examines the political culture of Cold War South Korea, arguing for the existence of a hegemonic discourse of “transcendent nationalism” that lasted from liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 until the end of the Park Chung Hee era in 1979. This transcendent nationalism was fascistic in espousing the supremacy of the ethnic nation and a view of individual-society relations that subordinated the individual to the collective nation. I show how transcendent nationalism pervaded political and social discourse through a conceptual history, focusing on the concepts of nation, capitalism, the individual, liberty, and democracy, and how popular understandings of each concept reflected broad societal agreement on the primacy of ethnic national identity and a rejection of the Western liberal frameworks of capitalism and individualism.

This dissertation makes the following contributions to the literature on Korean and global history. It first examines the nature of “anticommunist” ideology in South Korea, which diverged from Western anticommunism in not offering a defense of capitalism and liberalism. Rather, Korean anticommunism coexisted alongside (or was even framed by) other intellectual currents including anti-capitalism and anti-Western liberalism centered on the individual. Anticommunism in South Korea gained its power mainly as a defense of the Korean nation against a North Korean regime characterized as anti-national in being controlled by Soviet imperialism and spilling Korean blood during the Korean War.

Second, examining sources ranging from school textbooks, military education materials, newspapers, and magazines, I complicate the paradigm of contentious relations between state and society prevalent in the scholarship on South Korean history by showing how political discourses crafted at both the state and unofficial public levels converged in their content, reflecting the ideological hegemony that a fascistic combination of anticommunism, ethnic nationalism, and anti-Western liberalism achieved in society. This ideological convergence, in addition to economic growth as well as violent coercion, mitigated the resentment felt against state authoritarianism, helping to maintain state legitimacy amidst the Cold War during the conflict against communist North Korea.

Third, the existence of a fascistic ideology circulating in South Korea also adds to the literature on the global history of fascism which has previously been Eurocentric in delimiting the bounds of fascism to an interwar European context. The case of Korea is significant, showing the presence of fascism not only outside the West but also in postcolonial contexts, demonstrating the fascist potential in nationalism whether aggressively expansionist or anticolonial in nature.