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An Old Right in New Bottles: State without Nation in South Korean New Right Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2021

Sungik Yang Open the ORCID record for Sungik Yang [Opens in a new window]
Sungik Yang*
Affiliation:
Sungik Yang (sungikyang@g.harvard.edu) is a PhD Candidate in History and East Asian Languages in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.
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Abstract

The New Right movement that arose in the early 2000s in South Korea was a response to a change in ownership of Korean nationalist discourse during the preceding decades. Although nationalism was the preserve of the South Korean right wing from the trusteeship crisis in 1945 through the end of the Park Chung Hee regime, a historiographical revolt in the 1980s that emphasized the historical illegitimacy of the South Korean state allowed the Left to appropriate nationalism. With the loss of nationalism from its arsenal, the Right turned to postnationalist neoliberal discourse to blunt the effectiveness of leftist nationalist rhetoric. An examination of New Right historiography on the colonial and postliberation periods, however, shows that despite the recent change in conservatives’ stance on nationalism, a preoccupation with the legitimacy of the South Korean state remains at the center of right-wing historical narratives. The New Right represents old wine in new bottles.

Keywords

conservatismKoreaKorean historiographyKorean nationalismNew Rightright wingSouth KoreaSouth Korean politicsstatism
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 889 - 909
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2021

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