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Radioactive Nationalism
Christopher
Morris/VII/Time
By
Peter Maass
In a classic Mexican standoff, two men point guns at each other’s
heads. Neither wants to shoot, but each knows the downside of
not pulling the trigger first. It is an inherently gripping situation,
and Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” offers
one of the most memorable examples: in a climactic scene that
takes place in a warehouse, three men aim guns at one another,
with catastrophe (for macabre laughs) just a twitch away.
We can now thank North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, who
is credited with directing several movies, for creating a Mexican
standoff that outdoes Tarantino but is no postmodern parody; it
takes place in the real world. Earlier this month, North Korea
announced that it had exploded an atomic bomb, thus becoming the
newest and scariest nuclear power in the world. This set off alarms
in South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States; all
have good reasons to fear North Korea and one another. We now
have a Mexican standoff that involves a) as many as six participants,
including b) countries that are threatening one another with c)
nuclear weapons. Tarantino couldn’t invent it.
Yet
something — someone — is missing from this semi-apocalyptic
drama. Warming his hands over a fire in north Waziristan or wherever,
Osama bin Laden, the embodiment of evil in our times, is no more
a factor than John Dillinger. True, there are fears that North
Korea might try to sell a nuke to Al Qaeda or other terrorist
groups. But diplomats are just as concerned that Japan might choose
to build a nuclear weapon or two, that South Korea would be tempted
to do the same, that China, Russia and the United States will
shove against one another and that in the Middle East, Iran will
accelerate its nuclear program, leading Saudi Arabia and Egypt
to Google “how to build the bomb.” 
What’s
happening, in other words, is an old-fashioned clash of nations
and national interests, exacerbated, as often happens, by the
imperatives of regime survival. The suspicions and alliances date
back a century or more, though the weaponry, instead of muskets
and catapults, is nuclear. After 9/11, we came to believe that
the menace that mattered most was the wrath of religious terror,
and our geopolitical lingua franca embraced a new vocabulary to
define it — jihad, suicide bombers, asymmetric warfare,
nonstate actors. Whatever happened to nationalism and the risky
maneuverings of states? Nothing, actually. Kim Jong Il, entering
from stage far-left, reminds us that new threats, like Islamic
extremism, do not replace old ones.
The Korean
peninsula is an ancient hothouse for nationalism and its offshoots;
it is also a brilliant example of the uses, abuses and durability
of national esteem. The peninsula is sandwiched between China
and Japan, which are two of the great powers of modern and not-so-modern
history; without their pride and willingness to sacrifice for
a common goal, Koreans would speak Japanese or Chinese today.
Defiantly, through a millennium or two of attack and occupation,
they held on to their language and even their gene pool. When
I lived in Seoul in the 1980’s, intermarriage, to a Japanese
or an American or whomever, was rare and an occasion for scorn
or, at best, pity. The taboos are lessening — earlier this
year, the government lifted a ban against mixed-race Koreans serving
in the military — but as a recent article in The Asia Times
noted, “A foreigner, even another Asian, stands out.”
More so on the other side of the DMZ: not long ago, a North Korean
general chastised South Korea for even allowing intermarriage.
The Korean
peninsula was divided into American and Russian zones after World
War II — Japan had ruled Korea brutally for nearly a half-century
— and was then reduced to cinders by the Korean War. The
resurrection of North and South was stunning because they started
from utter scratch and without a blueprint or Marshall Plan. Both
governments drummed into their people that unless they worked
hard and prepared to fight hard, they would be overrun and subjugated
by their brother enemies. Each side wanted to prove itself as
the true carrier of the Korean torch. The peninsula’s division
and war was akin to the splitting of a highly charged nationalist
atom that unleashed an explosion of directed energy.
The
cross-border rivalry provided material not just for political
experts but also for Freudian analysts. In addition to postwar
spasms of violence — like several attempts by northern assassins
to kill South Korea’s leaders — the one-upmanship
reached the absurd. American soldiers at Panmunjom, the truce
village, entertain visitors with a story of how, at the outset
of armistice talks in the 1950’s, delegations from North
and South brought in larger and larger national flags —
each side wanted its totem to be the biggest. Eventually, the
flags were too large to fit through the doors; physics rather
than good sense forced them to agree to modest and identically
sized flags.
My three-year
sojourn in South Korea was punctuated with iterations of nationalist
fervor, some of them charming. There was, in those days, a club
that supported Koreans training for stunts that would get them
into The Guinness Book of World Records; if memory serves, one
hopeful was a man who walked up mountains on his hands. The club’s
aim wasn’t just to help zealous citizens get into the holy
book, but to have South Korea itself inscribed as the country
with the most world records. This wasn’t entirely removed,
in its linking of nationalist glory and athletic achievement,
from East Germany’s effort to legitimize itself, and trump
its brother state, by becoming an Olympic power, even if that
required doping a generation of athletes (which it did).
Today, even
though it has a highly advanced economy — more than 80 percent
of South Koreans have broadband Internet access at home, the highest
rate in the world — the country has a nearly provincial
relationship to its local heroes, like Ban Ki-moon, the foreign
minister who will be the next U.N. secretary general. The most
famous South Korean of recent times was Hwang Woo Suk, a scientist
who in 2004 and 2005 announced breakthroughs in cloning. At home,
he was worshiped, a hybrid of Einstein and Madonna. The government
awarded him the title Supreme Scientist and gave him millions
of dollars. The embrace was so intense that when a television
news program reported on unethical conduct in Hwang’s lab,
the program’s sponsors withdrew their ads and the show was
temporarily taken off the air. The reporting was accurate —
Hwang faked his research. The awards were withdrawn, prosecutors
charged him with embezzlement — yet even so, supporters
staged rallies, and a Web site in his honor pleads, “Please
come back, Dr. Hwang.”
In North Korea,
nationalism has taken a different course and been put to different
uses by a tyranny that exports counterfeit dollars and has been
described, with amusing accuracy, as a “Soprano state,”
after the Mafia family in the HBO series. But until the 1970’s,
when it began to be hollowed out because of the inherent contradictions
of command economics, North Korea was more industrialized and
prosperous than South Korea. It has always, and proudly, had the
upper hand in a key nationalistic category — foreign troops
are not based on its soil. When I visited Pyongyang in 1989 (a
long time ago, but North Korea’s cryonic rhetoric has changed
little in half a century), officials I met were obsessed by two
things: the threat posed by American troops on their doorstep
and South Korea’s cowardly acceptance of these foreigners.
It was not unlike, I now realize, the religious fervor with which
Islamic conservatives criticized the presence of American troops
in Saudi Arabia and the cowardly royal family that welcomed them
(when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990).
The decades-long
rotting of North Korea’s economy, and thus the erosion of
its military power, was a key reason to develop nuclear weapons:
nukes are a poor man’s defense, cheaper to build and maintain
than an army, and a guarantee that you will not be invaded because
the stakes are cataclysmic. North Korea’s million-man army
is poorly equipped and poorly trained, and no match for the smaller
but more sophisticated South Korean military, which is augmented
by 28,000 G.I.’s on the ground and additional U.S. forces
that would come to South Korea’s aid if attacked. Nukes
are also a great way, if you lead a small, hopelessly poor and
violently repressed nation, to get the attention of the rest of
the world; rather than being treated like Albania, North Korea
will be treated like Albania with nukes. The government’s
English-language announcement boasted that its test came “at
a stirring time when all the people of the country are making
a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous powerful
socialist nation.” This nationalist, and deluded, phrase
was in the first sentence.
Because
nationalism is more of a collective belief than a particular policy,
the positions adopted in its name can evolve, even rotate. Inter-Korean
hostility subsided as a result of the “sunshine policy”
initiated by former President Kim Dae-jung, who dropped the stance
of utter hostility taken by the conservative generals who ruled
South Korea from the 1960’s until the 1990’s. The
same national pride that set North and South against each other
can also create common ties. Now, instead of regarding the North
as a violently psychotic regime, the southern attitude is more
along the indulgent yet exasperated lines of “Oh, no, what’s
our nutty brother done today?” Particularly among South
Koreans with no memories of the Korean War — that’s
now most of the country — yearnings for peace and good relations,
as well as anti-Americanism, are stronger than the hostile anti-Communist
intent of their fathers and grandfathers. And in the wake of Germany’s
costly unification, policy makers in Seoul realize that the collapse
of the North, which an older generation wished for, would create
a high degree of political instability and an enormous financial
burden that should perhaps be avoided. This helps explain why
Seoul has limited its antinuclear criticism of the North, and
why South Koreans aren’t rushing for bomb shelters quite
yet.
One factor
bringing the Koreas together is their shared enmity for Japan.
North Korea’s tirades against Tokyo are nearly unprintable;
the South Koreans are more polite but fervently resolute whenever
their prestige is challenged by Japan. In the mid-1990’s,
when FIFA, the international soccer organization, decided to hold
the 2002 World Cup in Asia for the first time, the host-country
finalists were South Korea and Japan. The competition was intense
beyond belief; among other extravagances, Buddhist monks in Seoul
prayed three times a day that their homeland would get the nod.
In the end, recognizing that the humiliation of losing to an ancient
rival would be too much for either side to bear, FIFA took the
unusual step of splitting hosting duties between the two countries.
Even then, naming the event was problematic; FIFA called it “World
Cup 2002 KoreaJapan,” but when Japan printed its tickets,
the geographic reference was deleted because Korea came first.
More than
any other country, Japan feels threatened by North Korea’s
nuclear capacities. The brutality of the Japanese occupation of
parts of China and all of Korea has not been forgotten in the
region nor fully apologized for. The sexual slavery of Korean
women during World War II remains an issue the Japanese avoid
rather than accept full responsibility for. Of course Japan is
linked to China and South Korea in good ways — they are
major trading partners, and Japan has been an important source
of loans and investment. None want to go to war, and one triumph
of the nation-state system is that it is not a suicide pact, though
neither is it a foolproof way to keep the peace.
If this sounds
familiar — history shaped by the rivalries, interests and
missteps of nations rather than terrorists dashing from hideout
to hideout — it should. It’s the way the world has
been ordered and disordered since the emergence of the nation-state
and even before, and it did not vanish on Sept. 11, 2001. If anything,
traditional powers that kept to themselves in past years are asserting
themselves in new ways. Because of an influx of funds for its
oil and gas, the Russia of Vladimir Putin is far more aggressive
than the shipwreck presided over by Boris Yeltsin. The fast growth
of China’s economy has increased its appetites for not just
greater political clout but also for resources with which to feed
its bustling industries. And of course there is Iran, which has
not forgotten its Persian history and would not mind recapturing,
by becoming a nuclear state, the influence it once had.
In the 19th
century, Britain and Russia struggled for control of Central Asia
in what was called “the Great Game.” In the 21st century,
the great game is far more complex, taking place across the globe
between an expanding number of actors with a multiplicity of interests
and a variety of weapons. Yet certain basic facts — war
is an extension of politics, politics are often driven by a need
for resources as well as collective feelings of pride or shame
— remain much the same in the wake of Sept. 11. We are obliged
to focus on Islamism and the terrorist threat it has produced,
to study Arabic and the work of Sayyid Qutb, but we should not
fail to consult Kennan, Clausewitz or Thucydides either.
Peter
Maass,
a New York Times contributing writer, formerly reported from South
Korea for The Washington Post. Petroleumworld not necessarily
share these views.
Editor's
Note: This commentary was originally published in The New York
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News 10/22/06
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