Organizer and Chair: Michael Robinson, Indiana University

Sungmoon Kim, University of Maryland, College Park

Recently, the National Assembly in Korea roundly rejected a draft law that would strip those who abandoned their Korean citizenship to avoid the draft of their status as overseas Koreans and deprive them of all their rights as Korean. Upon this decision, most Koreans were in uproar because the revision to the Act on the Immigration and Legal Status of Overseas Koreans (AILOK) had been deemed as a due follow-up of a revision to the National Law that bars duel citizens from giving up their Korean citizenship unless they complete mandatory military service.

From a legal standpoint of Western/modern provenance, the public movements to revamp the laws on the legal status of overseas Koreans would commit a serious violation of an individual’s right to happiness and other private rights. Moreover, the public conception that sees dual citizenship and its justification on private rights as a social privilege would seem only to signal "ultra-nationalism," as some Korean liberals have claimed, not to mention the lack of legal sensibility among Koreans. Is Korean civil society letting itself fall a victim to hyper-emotionalism and ultra-nationalism? Is Korean civil society an oxymoron given its plethora of emotions but remarkable absence of modern rationality? This essay, thus, explores what would qualify the Korean citizenship and what could be a practicable model of civil society relevant to the Koreans’ affective sentiments. It concludes by suggesting an "affective model" of citizenship and civil society as opposed to its liberal counterpart as most practicable for Korean democracy.

Chulwoo Lee, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul

In 1999 the Republic of Korea enacted the Overseas Koreans Act. The law accords a special visa status to former Korean nationals living in other countries, with which they can enjoy preferential treatment vis-à-vis other foreigners with regard to entry into Korea, economic activity and social benefits within Korea. I will explore the background of the Overseas Koreans Act, its rationales and characteristics, and the political intricacies it has involved. In so doing, I will compare the Overseas Koreans Act with the legal strategies of some other countries, mainly with two different approaches in dealing with émigrés, diasporas and "kin-minorities" living abroad: the recognition of plural nationality and the preferential treatment without conferring nationality respectively.

The Overseas Koreans Act reflects the same kind of preoccupations that underpins many cases of "transnationalism from above," but it differs from the model cases of "deterritorialized" or "transnational" nation-states, such as Mexico, in that it treats the targets of the law as a special category of foreigners instead of recognizing their plural nationality. This paper will uncover the rationales behind that approach, with reference to hostile public opinion in Korea towards plural nationality. It also compares the Korean legislation with the laws of some Central and Eastern European states, including the Hungarian Status Law of 2001, which provide for special kin-minority statuses other than nationality in an attempt to reproduce cross-border ethnic ties. The comparison will focus on the ways in which those strategies are challenged in both legal discourse and international politics.

Mary Lee, University of Hawaii, Manoa

This paper examines the debate on migrant worker rights in South Korea as a site for examining the workings of a post-colonial, national politics that attempts to manage the paradoxical demands of economic globalization within the context of the post 9-11 "war on terror". It is particularly interested in the ways in which state discourses have and continue to produce racial tensions to re-secure the concept of national security/homogeneity against the idea of foreign incursion. How and why does the South Korean government frame the conflict between migrant workers, the state, and public as a matter of national security? How does the racialized construction of the migrant worker play upon an already pervasive social xenophobia that is rooted in anti-colonial/imperial resistance and nationalist myths of "racial purity"? How does the racialized construction of the migrant worker popularized fear of the "foreigner" (particularly "third-world" foreigner) by framing the migrant worker debate within the context of the post 9-11 need for anti-terrorism measures? This paper is concerned with the South Korean state’s recent attempts to recast the concept of "national in/security" within the political context of the threat of "international" terror.

Kevin Gray, University of Durham, England

The neoliberal restructuring that has taken place in Korea in the past decade has posed a particular challenge to the Korean labour movement. Flexibilisation of the labour market is destroying the objective basis for labour organisation. When the economic and financial crisis broke out in late 1997, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) gave its consent to further flexiblisation in return for government promises to improve social welfare programmes. The KCTU believed this new social partnership was a more effective means by which to protect Korean workers against the effects of neoliberalism rather than through a defensive struggle against layoffs. Thus, the Kim Dae-Jung government reformed and expanded the main social welfare schemes, reforms which have been interpreted by some as a ‘Keynesian’ initiative. I argue, however, that these reforms have been directed towards the construction of a neoliberal ‘workfare’ state. They are neoliberal in the sense that they take the form of insurance schemes that require continuous contributions over long periods of times. As such, they are based upon the norms of regular employment, at a time when such employment has ceased to be the norm in the Korean labour market. Labour’s ‘social partnership’ has aided the government’s construction of a commodifying welfare state that legitimises and facilitates further neoliberal restructuring. It is doubtful therefore that the KCTU’s emphasis on social reform through participation in policy-making as opposed to outright resistance to restructuring based on mass-mobilisation amounts to a more effective means of resistance to neoliberalism.

Suk-Young Kim, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

This paper addresses two conflicting modes of national performance in recent North Korea, namely tourism and hunger, in relation to the nation’s violent regulation of its people. After the 1994 death of the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, North Korea reinforced isolationist politics, but at the same time, it partially complied with the world market economy for survival. Consequently gaps and fissures started to appear within the tightly controlled regime, ensuing in gradual transformation of the North Korean society. This paper looks at how the global flow of finance and media shapes the North Korean regime’s desire to stage ideal national image for tourists by showcasing Potemkin village-like attractions in Keumkangsan while the regime makes brutal but futile efforts to hide epidemic hunger by hunting down the escapees and regulating the mobility of foreign aid workers. The disjunctive modes of national performance manifested via tourism and hunger, as oxymoronic as it may sound, reveal half-a-century old principles of North Korean propaganda involving the regime’s desire to display or conceal its people on an international stage. Violence becomes North Korean regime’s major mode of regulating its people not only in its brutal punishment of the refugees, but also in its astringent discipline of stage performers and tourist guides who incessantly display happiness of living in a socialist paradise to visitors. This paper concludes that North Korea’s recent efforts to attract tourists, which seem to evidence the transformation of that country, unfortunately reveal the same old manipilative theatrical practice of North Korea.