Formation of North Korea and South Korea: a geopolitical quest of the Cold War Era

Historical Background

• Korea’s recorded history dates back to 57 BCE, dominated by periods of subservience to the Chinese Empire. However, this changed in dramatic form at the end of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–5 when both Japan and China recognized Korea’s complete independence.
• In the wake of Japan’s victory, conflicting Japanese and Russian interests in Korea led to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. Japan’s victory stunned the Western world, where dominant racist ideology had made an Asian victory over a European state unthinkable.
• The final settlement to end the war was brokered with the aid of the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.
• Japan was permitted to occupy Korea through the Treaty of Portsmouth of September 1905. By 1910, Korea was forcibly annexed and incorporated into the Japanese empire. Japan justified its occupation by portraying it as a “civilizing mission” of modernization. Korea was administered as a colony within the Japanese Empire between August 22, 1910 and September 6, 1945.

Geopolitical code for Korea

• Korea was a key part of Japan’s expansion into mainland Asia. In a quid pro quo between global and regional geopolitical codes, the United States and Britain were willing to give Japan free reign in Korea in exchange for Japanese recognition of their interests in Asia and the Pacific.

National Self-determination of Korea

• The occupation was brutal, fostering an animosity toward Japan that remains, to some extent, today. The animosity bred a nationalist geopolitical code of resistance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, camps were established to train a military force to resist the Japanese occupation, while other groups tried to gain assistance for the independence of Korea in a more diplomatic way, lobbying foreign governments. For example, Syngman Rhee, later to be the first president of South Korea, established the Korean National Association in Hawaii in 1909.
• In the wake of World War I, the United States began to disseminate a global program of national self-determination. Koreans interpreted the context as one in which the major powers would be sympathetic to their own goals of ending the Japanese occupation.
• On March 1, 1919, a peaceful uprising burst out when a Declaration of Independence, prepared primarily by religious groups, was read out in Seoul. In the wake of fierce suppression, many Korean nationalists fled to China. A Korean provisional government was established in Shanghai in April 1919. However, the Korean exiles were very scattered and divided politically. These divisions were reflections of different perspectives on how to bring the Japanese domination of Korea to an end, as well as various ideologies. In other words, though the geopolitical goal of the groups was common, the means to achieve it were disputed.
• The establishment of the Soviet Union had promoted the diffusion of social revolutionary thought. Socialism spread first among Korean exiles in the Russian Far East, Siberia, and China, and then among Korean students in Japan, attracted by its combination of social change and national liberation. The different groups of exiles continued to clash, sometimes violently, over ideological differences. The Korean nationalist movement was too weak to end Japanese occupation.
• Instead, Japan was driven out of Korea in the wake of its defeat in World War II and the dissolution of its empire.

Formation of North and South Korea

• Differences among Koreans remained unresolved. Almost immediately efforts were made to form a Korean government with its headquarters in Seoul. Initially named the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, on September 6, 1945 the government changed its name to the Korean People’s Republic.
• Soviet troops had been fighting the Japanese in Korea since August 8, 1945. They gave “permission” for US troops to enter Korea further south than Seoul, while supporting the Korean People’s Republic.

• As part of the redefinition of the US geopolitical code at the beginning of what came to be known as the Cold War, it did not recognize the republic the Soviet Union had helped create. In a move that presaged the division of Korea, the US chose instead to support the nationalist exiles and the few conservative politicians within Korea who comprised the Korean Democratic Party (KDP).
• Within a context of competition between two external powers, Koreans made political choices and within a matter of months Korea was divided into socialist and capitalist political allegiances with, virtually, a North and South geographic expression respectively.
• The subsequent division of Korea had no historical or political basis.
• For Koreans, the thirty-eighth parallel that was originally chosen to divide Korea had no prior meaning for Korean’s, but now is central to their lives. Instead, the demarcation of the boundary was a product of the geopolitical codes of the Soviet Union and US.
• The thirty-eighth parallel was first established as the dividing line of Korea on August 10, 1945 by Dean Rusk and Charles H. Bonesteel, two American colonels who had been instructed to do so by John J. McCloy of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). Their rationale was to include Seoul, the capital city, within the American Zone. Surprisingly, the Soviets accepted the division.
• Unbeknown to the Americans, the Soviets and the Japanese had themselves discussed dividing Korea into spheres of influence at the thirty-eighth parallel.
• The decision was made without consulting any Koreans.
• On August 15, 1948, the US-backed Republic of Korea was officially proclaimed and on September 9 the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed in the North.
• The Soviet Union chose Kim Il Sung (born Kim Song Ju), a 33-year-old Korean guerrilla commander who had initially fought the Japanese in China in North Korea. In the South, the US chose 70-year-old Syngman Rhee as the first Korean president. Both leaders felt they were destined to reunite their country.

Korean War (1950-53)

• After the creation of these regimes both Soviet and US troops left the peninsula in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Just a matter of weeks after the US troop withdrawal, civil war broke out in the peninsula.
• On June 25, 1950, North Korea, with the support of the Soviet Union and China, invaded the South in an effort to reunify the country by force. The invasion was challenged and repulsed by the forces of the United States, South Korea, and 15 other states under the flag of the United Nations.
• The United States pledged support for South Korea against North Korea and sought legitimacy through the UN. In resolution 83 of June 27, 1950, the UN Security Council recommended that the member states of the UN should provide assistance to South Korea. The UN created a “unified command”, and asked the US to name a commander.
• The invasion came after Kim Il Sung had repeatedly requested authorization from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader. Stalin eventually approved the war plan due to what he called the “changed international situation.” What this means remains debated.
• Possible reasons are the victory of Mao’s Communist Party in China, the development of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb, the withdrawal of US forces from South Korea, or a statement by Secretary of State Dean Acheson excluding South Korea from the US defense perimeter; all of which occurred in 1949 or early.
• The Korean War was a proxy war, a war fought between the superpowers through their allies rather than direct conflict between the Soviet Union and the US.
• The war lasted from 1950 to 1953, and fortunes swung back and forth until an armistice agreement between the two Koreas was signed on July 27, 1953. The nature of the agreement means that the war is still unresolved; no final treaty has been signed.
• The end of the fighting resulted in the demarcation of a boundary close to the thirty eighth parallel, a process initiated and defined by foreign countries.
• To this day the very limited flows across the boundary are controlled with the assistance of US soldiers stationed in South Korea, and the boundary is highly militarized. On the South Korean side, minefields line the roads, bridges are fortified, and checkpoints and gun emplacements are visible. The North Korean border is inaccessible.

Conclusion

The nature of the Korean boundary is very much a product of geopolitics operating at the global scale, making any intermittent agency by the two Korean states toward a more open boundary problematic