South Korean Trends

Another situational factor which needs to be mentioned in connection with the 2002 presidential election is the recent visible rise in anti-Americanism. I would like to deal with this topic in a bit more detail before coming back to the 2002 election. The first thing we can note here is that anti-Americanism is nothing new in South Korean society. It has risen and ebbed before. It peaked in the 1980s before the democratic opening. Back then, not just radical student and opposition figures attacked the US, rightly or wrongly, for propping up the authoritarian regime of the time. After South Korea's democratic opening, popular anti-Americanism abated again and at the level of the governing elite, relations with the US were relatively smooth anyway.

In their policies towards North Korea, Washington and Seoul pulled in the same direction, the main aim being the containment and possible collapse of the North by means of applying diplomatic and economic pressure on Pyongyang. As Victor Cha has put it, the US played the role of a "co-container" vis-à-vis the DPRK during the Cold War when North-South tensions were at their height. Underlying the US-ROK alliance was an implicit understanding between the two allies: the US would provide the stability and security that enabled South Korea to prosper economically, while South Korea would allow the US to maintain a large military presence in the ROK and to project power in the East Asian region. To paraphrase the dictum of Lord Ismay, NATO's first secretary-general, the US-ROK alliance served to keep the Americans in, the North Koreans out and South Korean revanchism down.

A number of developments and incidents in more recent times, however, have not only begun to put the US role on the Korean peninsula into question but have also helped to shore up anti-Americanism in South Korea again. The first and arguably most important development in this context has been the new phase of inter-Korean dialogue and - however limited - co-operation that followed the Pyongyang summit in mid-2000. In the euphoria after the summit, some Koreans, especially younger ones, wondered whether in this climate of seeming re-conciliation, there was any longer a need for the military alliance with the US. Later on, with the hard-line approach of the new Bush administration vis-à-vis North Korea, Seoul's and Washington's approaches towards Pyongyang seemed to be out of sync, if not outright contradictory.In any case, it became ever clearer that South Korea's and the United States' security interests were not identical. While for South Korea, the primary concern rests with the security of the peninsula, for the US the main concerns relates to dangers of nuclear and missile proliferation. While the US government sees North Korea nuclear weapons - if there is such a thing - as a profound challenge to regional and international security, quite a few South Koreans seem to be more nonchalant about such weapons which they see as targeting the US or maybe Japan but certainly not Korean soil. Not surprisingly, the North Korean government has been only too happy to make the most out of these cognitive dissonances between the South and the US.

When inter-Koreans relations finally came to a halt after the first foray, a substantial number of South Koreans blamed the US government for the lack of progress. The US, to quote Cha again, was increasingly seen as the "spoiler" in inter-Korean détente. Finally, in the aftermath of 9.11 and the harsh rhetoric of George W. Bush - brandishing North Korea as part of some ill-conceived "axis of evil" - many South Koreans began to wonder whether a new war on the Korean peninsula was in the offing.

That's, however, not the whole story. Anti-American sentiments in South Korea have also been stoked but a number of other controversial issues and incidents. Without going into details here, we can note in this context

1. the alleged "inequity" of the US-South Korean Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA)
2. the social and other problems connected to the large US base in downtown Seoul
3. the role of US troops in the infamous Nogun-ri massacre during the Korean War
4. the refusal of the US to close or relocate its bombing range at Maehyang-ri
5. environmental damage and pollution caused by US forces in South Korea
6. the incident at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in which a South Korean ice-skater got disqualified for obstructing an American competitor who in his place received the gold medal, and finally
7. the acquittal of two US servicemen who caused the vehicular death of two Korean girls.

All these issues and incidents, combined with the before-mentioned tensions, helped to propel anti-Americanism into the mainstream of political opinion in South Korea. Otherwise, separate groups, namely
1.) "ideological" anti-Americanists at universities and in journalism,
2.) more moderate NGOs concerned about specific problems of the US military presence in South Korea,
3.) highly-educated Koreans frustrated about the dominance of the US-trained elite in academia and elsewhere, and finally
4.) populist anti-Americanists moved on common ground in the run-up to last year's presidential election.