ABSTRACT
In Chapter 8, Ki-Jung Kim makes an in-depth exploration of the history of South Korea’s foreign and national security policy. Since its integration into the modern international system, South Korea has experienced many turbulent episodes including victimization by imperialist competition, colonization, division of the peninsula, war, ideological conflict, and economic success. Over the last century, South Korea pursued foreign policy strategies of balancing diplomacy, neutrality, struggle for independence, and alliance. The modern history of South Korea’s foreign policy strategies is also a history of Koreans’ struggles for survival. After the Korean War, a survival strategy was well achieved via a US-centered foreign policy. That success has fostered competing desires for dependence and autonomy. At the same time, South Korea has struggled to deal with two contrasting views of inter-Korean relations, the state-centric and nation-centric perspectives, arising from the long-term division of the Korean peninsula. Moreover, the ROK’s foreign policy is mandated to manage unification and defense policies in a harmonized way. The current Moon Jae-in administration seeks to transcend these over-politicized dichotomies by pursuing a new market-centric perspective and strategy. A market-centric approach promises a peaceful and co-prosperous alternative for inter-Korean relations as well as relations in the Northeast Asian region. Viewed from the unchanged geopolitical position of the peninsula in Northeast Asia, it seems unclear whether the Moon government will succeed in materializing a ‘nuclear weapon-free, peaceful, and prosperous Korean peninsula’ through the market-centric approach.
