This panel considers the ways in which modern Korean ethnonationalism has continued to be reshaped in relation to Marxist internationalisms, global dissemination of European fascisms, and transnational capitalism in colonial Korea and post-Liberation South Korea. First, it examines the particularities of fascism in colonial Korea at rapidly shifting historical junctures between 1930s and 1945. Second, it explores the ways in which peripheral and semi-peripheral internationalisms and ethnonationalisms have mutually structured each other in 1930s, during the Cold War and social movements between 1950s and 1980s, and in contemporary South Korea. Vladimir Tikhonov inquires into the construction of peripheral fascism in the early 1930s when bourgeois nationalists embraced such elements as developmentalism, cult of "self-sacrificial" religiosity and "strong leadership" from European fascisms, a position contested by the leftists, who later succumbed to fascistic dogmas during the Pacific War. Naoki Watanabe examines Marxist writers who, leaving their earlier ethnonationalist/internationalist works behind, turned their attention, in the late 1930s, to representation of colonized Korean peasantry as subimperial subjects in the new frontiers of Japanese empire, Manchuria. Won-dam Paik focuses on alternative internationalisms—socialist coalitions, the Non-Aligned movement, and the Third World alliances—that both North/South Korean states and dissident South Korean political/social movements cultivated and their impact on re-formulations of ethnonationalisms in the Korean peninsula. Jin-kyung Lee explores the contradictory (simultaneously progressive and recuperative) potential of "re-internationalization" of the left in the context of South Korea’s transnationalization of its workforce and its new position as a semi-periphery.

Vladimir Tikhonov, University of Oslo

"Fascism" became an important keyword for the intellectuals of colonial Korea since the early 1930s, as democracy was on the wane in continental Europe, and Japan was launching from 1931 an open aggression against northeastern China. Even before this, in the late 1920, the Italian fascism was accepted as a successful model of "national development" by the ideologues of the regional bourgeois groups in Korea – Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950), who led the northwestern (Pyongyang-centered) Suyang Tongmaenghoe (Moral Self-Cultivation Society), and Sin Hungu (1883-1959), who, being a Syngman Rhee’s trusted follower, led the Seoul- and metropolitan region-based Hungop Kurakpu (The Club for Enterprise Encouragement). Both ideologues, despite the religious differences between them (Yi was becoming a Buddhist by mid-1930s, while Sin was a Methodist) and complex regional rivalries, enthusiastically accepted the German fascism as well by 1934-35, and struggled to give it a religious expression – a development, which alarmed more moderate Protestant leaders, like Yun Ch’iho (1865-1945). Principled and thoroughly internationalist opposition to the pro-fascist trends in the colonial intellectual world was offered by Communist theoreticians, for example, Kim Myongsik (1891-1943), who characterized Yi Kwangsu’s panegyrics to "strong, lofty and self-sacrificing leaders" as "fascistic" as early as in September 1931. But he himself, as well as many other former Communist authors, succumbed in the end to the pressures and adopted a "realistic", that is, pro-fascist and pro-militarist position by the beginning of the 1940s.

Naoki Watanabe, Musashi University

Under the leadership of KAPF (Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio), the proletarian literature of colonial Korea presents us with a number of unique historical nexuses. Yi Ki-yong’s "Kohyang" (Hometown, 1933-34), which is considered a masterpiece of KAPF literary work, describes the impoverishment of a rural community in colonial Korea as it faces the intrusion of Japanese corporate enterprise. But Yi soon went on to publish works like "Shingaeji" (Reclaimed Land, 1938) and "Daeji e Adeul" (A Son of the Earth, 1939) which vividly sketch the figure of the Korean farmer in the push to exploit the Manchurian frontier. Han So-rya handled the same subject in "Daeryuk" (Continent, 1939), written in Japanese. An issue these stories raise is how Korean peasant ethnonationalism, formerly constructed as resistant and anti-Japanese, might have adapted to another time and place, namely Manchuria. This transference of ethnonationalism to Manchurian development can be seen in other places also, such as the phrase "Jaeman dongpo boho" (Protect the Korean People of Manchuria), which became a rallying cry among Korean ethnonationalists following the Manbosan Incident and the Manchurian Incident. I would like to consider this moment of ethnonationalism, which played out in a complicated place between two empires, Japan and Manchuria.

Won Dam Paik, Sung Kong Hoe University

This paper seeks to define the particular characteristics of ethnonationalisms and internationalisms that emerged in the Korean peninsula between the 1950s and 1980s in the global context. Both North and South Korean states responded to the regional and global order by asserting different but equally intensified and overlapping forms of ethnonationalism, while simultaneously searching for international alliances. North Korea in the post-Korean War era attempted to find an alternative path through the Non-Aligned movement and its active engagement with the Third World movement before the North Korean state ethnonationalism gave way to "self-reliance" (chuch’e) ethnonationalism. Through the period of the Cold War developmentalist era in South Korea, Park Chung Hee’s "Korean-style" ethnonationalism and anti-communist Asianism—the formation of ethnonationalism and internationalism that aligned itself with the US-led global capitalist domination— were countered by a dissident ethnonationalism that characterized the populist democratization movement in the 1970s and 80s. In understanding the divided Korean peninsula as a concentrated point of regional and global contradictions in the post-1945 era, the paper explores the mutual co-figurations of the two Koreas’ ethnonationalisms and internationalisms at various historical junctures. It also traces the connections between oppositional ethnonationalism from the 70s, 80s and the Non-Aligned movement and the Third World movement of the earlier era in South Korea. The paper aims at illuminating the ways in which ethnonationalist and internationalist endeavors in the Korean peninsula have related themselves to those of other former colonized nations that have sought to build an alternative world order.

Jin Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

Suppressing its earlier internationalist tendency in the colonial period, the leftist ideology in South Korea underwent a process of ethnonationalization in the context of the authoritarian states’ mobilization of ethnonationalism for their developmentalist and anti-communist nation-building through the decades of 60s, 70s, and 80s. With the influx of im/migrant workers from overseas since the 1990s, a sector of the South Korean labor movement began to turn their attention to organizing the racialized workforce. This paper examines re-internationalization of the South Korean left and its labor activism in the context of transnationalization of its workforce. Keeping in mind, first, the history of Marxist internationalism as a stratified phenomenon and, second, the specificities of leftist internationalism arising out of a semi-peripheral context, the paper inquires into the ways which the legacy of South Korean labor activism from the 70s and 80s can become a "universalist," thus, "(sub-)imperialist" internationalism in the process of its "export" and "transmission" to im/migrant workers. The paper further explores the ways in which re-internationalization of the South Korean left may dovetail transnationalization of the Korean capital, while contesting the same. As South Korea’s new position compels re-consideration of the concept of ethnonation in relation to the emergent multi-culturalism, multi-ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and pan-Koreanism, the paper asks if South Korean leftist internationalism could have the unintended effect of bolstering the ethnonational/subimperial interests in the similar ways that assimilationist and multi-cultural policies have been deployed by other empires.