Between Communitarian & Grassroot Citizenship: Historiography of "Min" in Korea

• In Event: Migration and Citizenship in East Asia

Abstract

The idea of citizenship as a solely Western, liberal concept has been challenged for over a decade now. Meso-level citizenship, authoritarian citizenship, and citizenship as practice are just some of the ideas that have been developed and studied in recent years. However, in contrast to the extensive citizenship literature that traces back to Greece and Rome, then to Europe and the US, the historiography of citizenship in other parts of the world is very much lacking. This has resulted in the continued misconception that the western ideas of citizenship were directly adopted elsewhere. Yet, transcontinental trade in the pre-modern era and colonization has meant that non-Western countries have come in contact with citizenship concepts much earlier than many scholars recognize. That is, these countries often came into contact with citizenship concepts independently of Western discussions, leading to 1) a relatively independent initial envisioning of citizenship to fit their own contexts and 2) the evolution of citizenship ideas based on their colonial, authoritarian, and developmental histories. Against this backdrop, this paper outlines the historiography of citizenship in the Republic of Korea and proposes a way of combining historical and linguistic elements to compare and understand citizenship in East Asia.
The paper starts by outlining the existing concepts of citizenship. I focus on two differences between the anglophone discussion of citizenship and the East Asian concepts of citizenship. The first difference I find is whether the emphasis is put on rights or duties. Secondly, I find that there is a linguistic difference arising from the translation of citizenship to min(the people)-based vocabulary. The findings point to the East Asian understanding of citizenship as an interaction between communitarian--duties over rights--citizenship and bottom-up ideas of min. I then go on to outline the historiography of citizenship in Korea by examining primary literature during the pre-Japanese annexation on modern state-making, the Japanese annexation period of freedom fighters, and the developmental period of military dictatorship under Park Chung-hee. The historiography ends with how the communitarian citizenship concepts and grassroots movement ideas interacted to result in and be challenged by the vocabulary of citizenship used in Korea today.
This study is meaningful to the field of citizenship studies in three ways. Firstly, it is an attempt to give an outline of how the Korean concept of citizenship has developed. Second, it creates a model through which citizenship regimes of Chinese-character-based languages can be compared. Finally, it is meant to be a response to Wegner’s call for global historiography of citizenship.

Author

• Boyun Kim, University of California, Irvine