•"Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History," Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (December 2014), 15-34.

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History Michael KIM Abstract Recent trends that introduce transnationalism have broadened the horizons of Korean history to incorporate previously ignored elements such as ethnic diversity, the circulation of global commodities, and intellectual exchange in the modern era. Despite the inroads that the new transnational histories have made, however, there still remains a need to engage broader philosophical and ethical questions about universalism and particularism in Korean history. Transnational histories without a deep engagement with cosmopolitan values may not be able to overcome the particularistic conceptual boundaries that continue to dominate Korean historical writing. Therefore, a more nuanced reconsideration of the meaning of universalism and cosmopolitanism within the context of Korean history may help to raise important philosophical considerations for overcoming the limits of Korean nationalist historiography, while allowing for coexistence with the increasing social and cultural diversity in Korean society today. Keywords: Transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, Korean historiography, transnational history, national characteristics Michael Kim received his PhD in Korean history from Harvard University’s East Asian Lan- guages and Civilizations Department. His specialty is colonial Korean history. He is currently serving as Associate Dean of Underwood International College, Yonsei University and has published over a dozen articles and book chapters. His recent publications include: "The Lost Memories of Empire and the Korean Return from Manchuria, 1945-1950: Conceptualizing Manchuria in Modern Korean History” in the Seoul Journal of Korean Studies (December 2010), and “The Colonial Public Sphere and the Discursive Mechanism of Mindo,” in Mass Dictatorship and Modernity (eds., Michael Kim, Michael Schoenhals, and Yong Woo Kim (Palgrave, 2013). E-mail: [email protected] Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (December 2014) : 15~34 © 2014 National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, Korea A vast realm of cosmopolitan classical texts once stretched across the East Asian region to unify its intellectual world under a common set of ethical principles derived from various philosophical traditions such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The texts written in classical Chinese also spread a form of dynastic historical writing that offered a moral critique of a flawed present while urging a return to the golden age of the ancient sages. Koreans followed these East Asian historical practices, compiling massive official histories like the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty in which the actions of kings over a 500-year time period were evaluated based on a system of ethics derived from the intense study of classical texts. A universalistic world view encouraged the Korean literati to imagine a firm connection to a broader East Asian intellectual community. The Koreans hoped to perfect their present reality and base their system of governance upon principles that spread through a common scriptural tradition. The question of whether or not Koreans successfully constructed a model Confucian kingdom during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) may be debatable, but it is nevertheless true that the primary preoccupation of the Korean literati was to recover cosmopolitan ideals from the ancient past to create a more just present. The arrival of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century radically altered the world view of Koreans. Rather than return to a more perfect past, the focus of historical writing shifted towards the encouragement of a national consciousness for the construction of a modern nation-state. New imaginaries of circulation formed through the proliferation of Western gunboats and unequal trade treaties. Koreans encountered universalistic ideas of scientific progress and enlightenment, but the rise of Japan meant that they needed Japanese intermediaries to access these new ideas. The imperative to construct a modern nation was clear, yet the Korean nation itself was largely undefined when the Ganghwa Treaty of 1876 opened the country to international relations. Korean intellectuals took great interest in discovering knowledge about the Korean people or minjok as they struggled to build a nation that could provide for their collective welfare and security. But even if the nation could be articulated, there was no guarantee that its sovereignty would be guaranteed in the late nineteenth century. The window of opportunity to construct an autonomous nation proved to be brief, for a rapidly expanding Japanese empire annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. Japanese colonial subjugation extinguished Korean independence, but it did not end broader aspirations to construct a modern nation. Rather than recovering the principals from an ancient past, the ultimate goal for nationalist historians during the colonial era was to recover the independence of the nation to construct a more perfect social reality. 16 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014  Liberation from Japanese colonial rule came suddenly in 1945 as the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended Japan’s bid to become the regional imperialist power. Koreans recovered their national sovereignty, but found the task of building a modern nation-state incomplete. Decades of colonial subjugation produced an entire generation of nationalist historians who warned against the internal strife that led to the collapse of the nation. Subsequent events such as the Korean War and the division of the country intensified the nationalist rhetoric, creating a new intellectual framework of reunification that greatly restrained historical inquiry. The primary task for both North and South Korea during the post-liberation era became the construction of a powerful nation-state that could defeat the rival Korea and end the division of the country. Those who were disaffected by the predominance of state power in the Republic of Korea formed an alternative perspective that championed the people’s struggle to achieve economic and political justice. Thus in South Korea, decades of military rule and the struggle for democracy ultimately gave rise to two contrasting nationalist views: one encouraged national integration to build a powerful nation-state; the other identified conflict and oppression throughout the fabric of modern Korean society. Today, new historical perspectives are attempting to move beyond the boundaries of competing nationalist narratives that fail to capture the full dynamic range of Korean history. The nation-centered views imagine a single distinct national body that does not allow fully for issues like ethnic or gender diversity in Korean history. The differing nationalist perspectives also fail to account for the many transnational phenomena that crisscross national borders. Therefore, recent trends that introduce transnational histories have broadened the horizons of Korean history to incorporate previously ignored elements such as the migration of Chinese and Japanese to the Korean peninsula during the modern era. Despite the inroads that the new transnational histories have made in opening up the horizons of Korean history, there still remains a need to engage broader philosophical and ethical questions about universalism and particularism in Korean history. Transnational histories without a deep engagement with cosmopolitan values may not be able to overcome the particularistic conceptual boundaries that continue to dominate Korean historical writing. Thus a more nuanced reconsideration of the meaning of universalism and cosmopolitanism within the context of Korean history may help to raise important philosophical considerations for overcoming the limits of Korean nationalist historiography. KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 17 Korea between cosmopolitan and nationalism The cosmopolitan aspects of classical Chinese thought have long been the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Definitions of cosmopolitanism vary but the term itself is a Greek word that emerged from the European historical experience and suggests membership in a common polis . Despite its Western connotations, alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that imagine the world under a common moral community regardless of ethnic origins can be found in the ancient civilizations of the Chinese, Hindu, and the later Islamic and Christian worlds (Delanty 2009, 20). The classical Chinese script that transmitted ancient Chinese thought did not distinguish between ethnicities and national boundaries, which allowed the Korean literati to imagine that they held a prominent position within the East Asian civilizational order. However, in the modern era, this inherent cosmopolitan nature of Korean philosophical traditions became defined as Chinese rather than Korean. James Palais, who was one of the founders of Korean historical studies in the United States, introduced Korean historical sources to a Western audience in a short nine-page article published in May 1971 in the Journal of Asian Studies titled “Records and Record-keeping in Nineteenth- Century Korea.” In this piece, he discusses the wealth of historical materials available from the Joseon dynasty and notes the similarities between the Chinese and Korean historical traditions. Palais observes that Koreans during the Joseon period organized their historical records along a Chinese pattern because: They shared the same fundamental belief in Confucian morality and in a Confucian moral order. They saw history as a handmaiden to the Classics and as a complementary factor in the education of a truly moral man. The Classics taught the fundamentals of moral behavior and the Histories showed by example some men putting those fundamentals into practice and others failing to do so (Palais 1971, 583). W hile highlighting the cosmopolitan aspect of Korean historical texts, Palais also downplays the excessive moralizing found in Korean record-keeping practice and emphasizes their Chinese origins. Korean historians in general tend to have an ambiguous perspective towards the similarities between Chinese and Korean philosophical and historiographic traditions. However, any emphasis on the “Chinese” aspects tends to overlook the universalistic aspirations of Korean historical writing. The Korean literati hoped to assess historical figures based on a set of moral principles 18 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 found in ancient Chinese texts, because they believed in the universality of the East Asian world of thought. In this respect, it may be important to note Carter Eckert’s observation that in the Korean context Chinese culture “meant the culture of the Chinese classics, which for the Koreans transcended any particular dynasty, and in a very real sense had little if anything to do with the physical or political China per se” (Eckert 2000, 124). The desire to emulate the golden age of the Chinese past did not mean that Koreans identified themselves with each Chinese dynasty. In fact, when the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) gave way to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Koreans imagined that they had to preserve the cosmopolitan traditions with the rise of the “barbarian” Qing dynasty, which is embodied in the notion of “little China” or sojunghwa. The Korean literati believed that they had absorbed the classical Chinese traditions to such an extent that they became their sole inheritors when the China of the Ming dynasty fell under Manchu rule. The imaginaries of civilizational greatness were mostly an elite phenomenon, but it is also useful to consider John Duncan’s observation that “the sense of identification among the Korean people, both elites and commoners, with a larger collectivity represented by the state is not a twentieth-century novelty, rather it is something that dates back hundreds of years” (Duncan 1998, 220). The pre-modern Korean nation was a collectivity that believed its people were held together by a state steeped in cosmopolitan ideals, but also differed from the Chinese. Therefore, rather than viewing the cosmopolitanism of Korea’s past as an erasure of Korean identity, a far more useful approach is to consider how Koreans imagined that the legitimacy of their present order derived from their faithful rendition of key moral principles from the classical past. The importance of this cosmopolitan tradition in shaping traditional Korean thought can be illustrated through the literati response to the promulgation of the vernacular Hangeul script. Choe Malli (?-1445), in a well-known memorial (February 20, 1444), noted that even though China is internally divided into nine regions with different climates, geography, and dialects, the Chinese had not created separate vernacular scripts. Choe argued that only barbarians like the Mongols, Tanguts, Jurchen, Japanese, and Tibetans had their own separate scripts (Kang 2003, 164). If Korea’s vernacular script became widely adopted, Choe feared a parting of ways with the classical past. For Choe, the invention of Hangeul threatened a critical link that tied Korea to ancient China, and his concern that the culture of the entire nation would fall into barbarity demonstrates his strong identification as a member of a cosmopolitan community. Andre Schmid cites the example of Choe Malli in his seminal work, Korea KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 19 between Empires, to explain the lack of linguistic nationalism in the Korean past, for he argues that “in Choe’s memorial, neither the character nor the new alphabet was identified primarily through an association with a particular nation, as is frequently assumed today” (Schmid 2002, 65). The important issue for Choe Malli was not where the Chinese characters originated, but the preservation of a writing system that he believed tied him firmly to the civilized world. Schmid highlights this lack of national identification of Koreans with their script as part of his argument that Koreans shifted their world view from embracing the classical Chinese traditions to adopt a new discourse of nationalism from the West. Schmid focuses on a group of intellectuals active in the Patriotic Enlightenment Movement (1895-1910) who generated new representations of the nation primarily in late nineteenth-century newspapers like the Hwangseong sinbo, and argues that these nationalist discussions were Korea’s first consciously globalizing discourse (Schmid 2002, 5). While the practices of adopting national flags, national anthems, and creating the symbolic accoutrements of a modern nation may seem specific to each nation, such practices followed existing models of nation representation shared throughout the world. In a sense, nationalism and the construction of a modern nation-state in the late nineteenth century were the primary vehicles for participating in the globalization process, even though globalization and nationalism are often viewed in opposition. The key problem in the late nineteenth century was how to fit Korea into the same global community and historical narratives alongside the far more powerful Western nations. Within this new intellectual framework, the Korean nation was just another member among a community of nations that was judged by its (lack of) national power rather than a central participant in the cosmopolitan civilization of East Asia. Every nation in this new international order was supposed to have particularistic characteristics to establish its claims to nationhood and sovereignty. This desire for international recognition prompted Korean writers in the late nineteenth century to think about the unique elements of the Korean nation as a critical intellectual priority. Rethinking “Koreaness” ultimately meant reevaluating China, and questioning centuries of cosmopolitan cultural practices, which Schmid describes as a process of “decentering China” (Schmid 2002). The texts and customs that were once revered as sacred increasingly became defined as alien and thus not indigenous to Korea. Ultimately, many Korean intellectuals sought to eliminate all vestiges of classical Chinese thought, with the hope that this purification process would reveal a true Korean nation underneath. Instead of Chinese models, Korean historians in particular found new inspiration from the most unlikely of sources: the Japanese conquerors. 20 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 Japan’s East Asian history Japanese mediation shaped the transition to a new universal order in Korea because of the preponderate influence of the Japanese empire. Andre Schmid highlights the importance of Korean intellectuals who discussed and represented the nation at the turn of the century, when Korea was situated temporally and physically between the Chinese and Japanese empires. Koreans began to embrace a new international order dominated by the West, but they had to rely on a Japanese version of Western universalism. This Japanese influence in the formation of modern Korean historical consciousness has been emphasized by a number of scholars, mostly in terms of the pernicious influence of a colonial historiography that justified Japanese colonial rule. However, there is a need to examine an even earlier period when Japan was in a similarly weak situation vis-à-vis the Western imperialist challenge. Japanese historians during the Meiji period had to produce their own version of a national history that could compete with Western historical narratives in the global community of nations. The patterns of historical narration that emerged in Meiji Japan would have critical consequences in terms of the way East Asian histories became reinterpreted for a skeptical Western audience and ultimately impacted the way that nationalist historians in Korea viewed their past. The Social Darwinian world of the nineteenth century was not kind towards nations that could not discover characteristics defined as European in their national history. Non-Western historians had to prove that they belonged to the privileged category of historical nations that were worthy of sovereignty by finding in their nations’ pasts elements that could be connected with European successes. Yet the acceptance of the notion that a meaningful East and West division existed automatically affirmed Occidental superiority and Oriental inferiority. The only available exit for non- Western historians caught in this trap was to create contrasting images of what Lim Jie-hyun has described as “ancient glory and present misery” (Lim 2008, 302). Non- Western nations during an age of European imperialist domination could not argue for their present greatness, so they sought to establish an illustrious past. In the nineteenth century, the fruit of this historical effort nominally convinced the Western colonizers to concede that “the colonized” were once highly civilized in ancient times, even if they considered present colonial societies as hopelessly backwards and ripe for colonization. Lim points out that the first national history of Japan, A Brief History of Japan, appeared in 1877 at the request of the Paris international exposition. It was revised twice and the final 1888 version retitled View of National History was adopted KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 21 as the official history textbook in the newly created History Department of Tokyo Imperial University. As Lim emphasizes, the first Japanese national history (text)book had from the beginning “Western readers” as its primary target (Lim 2008, 293). Its main purpose was to explain to the outside world that the imperial line was the chief source of Japan’s political sovereignty and legitimacy. In other words, the first Japanese national history was externally-oriented and designed to emphasize the existence of a centralized nation-state. The early histories written after the Meiji restoration all attempted to explain that the Japanese did, in fact, have a legitimate and autonomous history of their own, which justified Japan’s political sovereignty within a hierarchical international order. Japanese historians expended considerable effort to prove that Japan’s history was the equivalent to Europe’s, while simultaneously highlighting Japan’s differences from the rest of Asia. The discovery of feudalism in the Japanese past was part of this effort to establish Japanese exceptionalism within East Asian history and find European similarities. The goal was to remove the image of Japan as part of the Orient in the minds of Westerners by capturing European elements in Japanese history and inventing their own Orient in China and Korea. Stephan Tanaka (1993) argues that by inventing Japan’s own Orient, Japanese historians could let China and Korea take the place of Japan and allow Japan to join the West. Japanese Orientalism or sub-Orientalism towards its neighboring countries can be summed up in a new geopolitical concept called “toyo,” which means, literally, “Eastern Sea,” but also reflects Japan’s own formulation of the “Orient.” The establishment of “toyoshi” or Oriental history as a separate academic field from Japanese history gave historical and scientific authenticity to the new conceptual entity which reflected Japan’s attempt to escape the East-West dichotomy without rejecting its basic assumptions. Japanese history became detached from East Asian history, which is a convention that Korean historians often follow today by creating a separate category of Korean history apart from East Asian history. Tanaka further notes that Japanese scholars wanted to engage orientalist European scholars at first and stayed within the outlines of the debates established by European historians. Over time, Japanese historians developed their own explanations for their past and no longer relied on European models. Japan was separated from China and grouped with the Ural Altaic region. Asia was viewed as the origins of Japanese civilization, but Japanese history supposedly followed a separate trajectory. The goal was to discover a progressive spirit in East Asian history that would disprove the Western notion that East Asia was a stagnant part of the world. However, historians 22 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 who championed Japanese exceptionalism largely reserved this progressive spirit for Japanese history and used the same orientalist categories to view the rest of Asia as a troubled region. When Japan became an imperialist power, Japanese historians would engage in a much more virulent form of writing East Asian history, manifesting a colonial historiography that drew a line between Japan as the civilized state and China and Korea as backwards and stagnant. The culprit was supposedly the empty moralizing and misplaced orthodoxy of East Asian intellectual traditions that hopelessly locked the region in the distant past. Even though Japanese efforts to reinvent East Asian history were focused mainly on China, the primary target for Japanese historians was Korea. While Japanese historians elaborated on the stagnation of East Asia, social scientists affiliated with the newly established Japanese imperial universities led the “colonial studies” departments that sought to reform “backwards” colonial societies. Colonial Japanese historians tended to portray Korea as a deviant case from the “normal” or European path of economic development—a country that required Japan’s direct intervention. In that sense, Korean history provided an ideal mirror for reflecting Japanese superiority into Japan’s orient (Lim 2008, 297). The “special characteristics” of Korean history Once established, Japanese historical perspectives on East Asia and Korea posed powerful challenges for establishing the legitimacy of the Korean nation. Korean historians attempted to discover an “authentic” history to rival Japanese and the Western powers, despite the fact that the Japanese formulation of East Asian history eviscerated the legitimacy of their past. In a sense, ideas of East Asian civilizational backwardness entrapped Koreans into a self-defeating discourse as they distanced themselves from their past traditions. Korean historians, like many non-Western historians elsewhere, saw their indigenous history as one of “lack” in comparison with the West, which they hoped to fill with various attempts to define an essential “Koreaness.” Knowledge about Korea, however, could not be separated from Japanese academic discourse due to Japanese domination of the colonial production of knowledge through their control of universities and research institutions. While there are difficulties in characterizing the vast academic output of Japanese scholars during this period under a single rubric, the predominant historical narratives tended to portray Korea as a stagnant society frozen hopelessly in the past. The fundamental inequalities embedded in Japanese colonialism in Korea KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 23 need to be kept in mind when discussing the colonial discourse of Korean “special characteristics” or teuksuseong. The fall of Korea into colonialism tended to affirm these negative characterizations of Korean history all the while paradoxically emphasizing the similarities with Japanese history. Taylor Atkins (2010) notes in Primitive Selves: Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 that the Japanese saw in the Koreans a primitive version of their culture which had not been tainted by the corrosive forces of modernity. The Japanese folklorists tended to believe that Koreans represented an idyllic vision of their own distant past, which explains the considerable degree of nostalgia that they attached towards the perceived “backward” elements of Korean culture. Henry Em observes in his book The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea that colonial Japanese historians saw the annexation of Korea as a “restoration” of ancient Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula and put forth theories of common ancestry, which created anxieties for both the colonizers as well as the colonized (Em 2013, 11-12). Such claims of cultural similarity were resolved with the colonial discourse on the civilizational level of Koreans or mindo (Kim 2013, 172). This term can mean “subjectivity” or “national characteristics” when Koreans identified themselves with a collective sense of backwardness (Yun 2014, 39). The Japanese colonial authorities needed to provide a rationale to exclude Koreans from educational programs and limit spending on their welfare. Mindo became a plastic term deployed by colonial officials to justify discriminatory practices against Koreans, while maintaining the rhetoric that the aim of colonial rule was to bring up the civilization level of Koreans. Under the Japanese, the Koreans could theoretically improve their mindo, but in general the colonial officials argued that the “special characteristics” of Koreans required fundamental reforms before Korea could become a modern society. Therefore, claims for respecting difference under a colonial context masked the logic of exclusion, which had negative consequences for colonized subjects with regards to the protection of their basic rights because their differences did not allow for the application of the same laws and political system as in Japan. Despite the rhetorical claims that the Japanese tried to erase Korean culture during the colonial period, there was a curious convergence in the fact that both Japanese and Korean scholars worked hard to define the “special characteristics” of the Korean people. Not all of the Japanese portrayals were negative, for they generally painted an image of a “pristine” Korean people who offered a nostalgic vision of the lost Japanese past. Ultimately, as Taylor Atkins (2010) points out, the specific objects of Japan colonial knowledge production such as Korean folk theater, dances, shamanism, music, and material heritage became the basis of national identity in post-liberation 24 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 Korea. The search for the “special characteristics” of Koreans continued despite their troubling “separate but not equal” implications during the colonial period. The impact of the colonial logic of difference to the writing of colonial history cannot be established with any certainty, but it is instructive to consider colonial Korean historians in this light. While warning against the hazards of categorizing so many diverse historians under a simplified typology, Henry Em makes the strong connection between historiographic arguments and the establishment of political sovereignty as he categorizes the historical schools of colonial Korea into the nationalist scholarship of the early twentieth century epitomized by Shin Chae-ho (1880-1936); the positivist critical-textual tradition of Yi Pyong-do (1896-1989) and the Chindan Society; and the socioeconomic Marxist approach of Paek Nam-un (1894-1979) (Em 2013, 13). All hoped to establish the sovereignty of the Korean nation through their historical works. The outlines of these three broad directions in Korean historiography (Shin Chae- ho, Yi Pyong-do and the Chindan Society, Paek Nam-un), in many ways, reflect the general understanding among Korean historians today. However, another way to view their work is in terms of a divide between those interested in discovering “special characteristics” versus those who sought to discover a “universalistic past.” In this respect, intellectuals like Shin Nam-cheol (1903-?) and Paek Nam-un emerge as important contrarians in a period when the vast majority of intellectuals attempted to affirm the “special characteristics” of the Korean past. The predominance of Japanese arguments that belittled Korean history led Korean intellectuals like Shin Chae-ho, Choe Nam-seon (1890-1957), and Jeong In-bo (1893-1950) to devise alternative historical narratives to discover the dynamism of Korean history. The movement to establish a distinct past that could reject negative Japanese portrayals in the 1930s led to the Joseonhak movement, which tried to reinterpret Korean traditions in a favorable light. The movement made major contributions towards a better understanding of Korean traditions, but it was also confined within the same logic that produced Japanese exceptionalism. The notion that Koreans were a special people with an exceptional past was rejected by Shin Nam-cheol, who was one of the first Korean graduates of the Western Philosophy Department of Keijo Imperial University. Shin equated the Korean effort to seek out “special characteristics” with the same project of Japanese ultranationalists and indirectly criticized Japanese orientalism towards East Asia (Hong 2014, 340). Shin emphasized that Koreans were no different than any other people in the world and that their history was entirely determined by biological factors which were identical among all humans: KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 25  Korean history, culture, legends, and the people have been conceptualized as ’special characteristics.’ Yet the people of Korea are not the sons of a special tradition, for they are average and normal human beings who underwent a biological evolution. Therefore, the history that distinguishes them from animals started with the production of their everyday life materials that were determined by their physiological structure (Donga Ilbo, January 1, 1934). Shin’s rejection of special characteristics was not a denial of Korean difference, but instead an argument that Korean history was subject to the same universal forces as the rest of the world. Therefore, he envisioned a scientific study of Korea based on Marxism that could discover the same universal dynamics that transformed the Korean nation. Shin took inspiration from the work of Paek Nam-un, who wrote in Japanese and published in Tokyo Joseon’s Socioeconomic History (1933) and Joseon’s Feudal Socioeconomic History (1937), in which he insisted, in both, on a universal approach to Korean history. Paek Nam-un is today remembered as a nationalist historian who established the foundations for the economic history behind the internal development school or naejejeok baljeon-ron. While not free from his own Eurocentric biases, Paek’s writings provided a strong universalistic critique against the prevailing trend to discover a spiritual “essence” in the Korean past. Paek identified the origins of the search for special characteristics with German historians who influenced the Japanese to do the same. Paek questioned the importance of national characteristics in determining the fate of national histories: According to advocates of the special characteristic perspective, we have to consider the special characteristics of the many nations and the many peoples, and there should be many approaches to the many different peoples. Yet can we really say that history has developed according to the many special characteristics of many peoples? If you look at the traditional period, then world history has common elements. The further you recede back into the primordial past, the more prominent this tendency becomes, so how can this issue be overcome by the special characteristic perspective? This is where the special characteristic perspective is ineffectual (Paek 1933, 123). Paek directed his critique at the Korean histories produced by the colonial institutions, like the Society for the Compilation of Korean History or Chosenshi henshukai, which he believed put forward empiricism to legitimate colonial rule 26 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 (Yi 2010, 79). Paek also rejected the assertion of Korean nationalist historians like Shin Chae-ho and Choe Nam-seon who sought to affirm the spiritual essence of the Korean past. Paek was a participant in the effort to reinterpret positively the Korean past, so his universalism was not a call to ignore the distinct features of Korea. However, he took issue with the notion that Korea’s particularistic traits determined its historical trajectory. Paek argued that the discourse of national characteristics implied that certain nations had the necessary qualities for success while others did not, which privileged “happenstance” or uyeonseong as the major determinant of history (Hong 1997, 78). The reliance on chance as a historical explanation did not allow for the application of Paek’s Marxist materialism, and therefore he rejected the view that Korea had “special characteristics” that distinguished it from the history of other nations. Today, Paek’s body of work is largely interpreted in nationalist and Marxist lights, but what is necessary is a further reconsideration of the significance of his universalism. Both Shin Nam-cheol and Paek Nam-un were intellectuals who hoped to apply universal models, and therefore they wanted to show that the same forces that shaped the rest of the world could be located in the Korean past. At the same time, the historical context under which Paek critiqued efforts to discover a particularistic Korean history was a world dominated by fascism and colonialism. Conquest of one nation by another was justified as a historical inevitability, because the special characteristics of the conquering powers enabled the domination of others. Paek essentially offered a critique of this central logic behind fascism and imperialism through his universalistic stance (Hong 1997, 78). Just as arguments for cultural difference enabled Japanese colonial officials to exclude Koreans from their basic human rights, arguments for historical difference allowed for the exclusion of certain nations from political sovereignty. Paek’s attempt to interpret Korean history in a way that unified it with the prevailing universal trends of world history was clearly a strategy for emphasizing the significance of the Korean past and arguing for its legitimacy in the international order. From nationalism to transnationalism in Korean history The search for “special characteristics” in Korean history continued after liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. As Henry Em explains, the positivist traditions became reconstituted under the influence of modernization theory in the path-breaking work KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 27 of Yi Ki-baek (1924-2004), while oppositionist historians like Kang Man-gil (1933–) and Kim Yong-seop (1931–) argued for two alternatives to Korean modernity: a dependent path that was dominated by elites; and an autonomous path that located the progressive forces of change among the Korean people (Em 2013, 14-15). The modernization/positivist historiography ultimately attempts to recover a non- Marxist linear progression that relies on the eighteenth-century enlightenment of the practical learning or Silhak scholars to establish Korean antecedents to a Western-led modernization. The role of Japanese colonialization in the economic development of Korea in this positivist history remains a topic of intense debate, but Western modernization with “Korean characteristics” might summarize the general approach. Regardless of how one categorizes the various postliberation historical approaches, one must keep in mind that much of the historical research output in Korea does not necessarily have any firm historical perspective, as it is highly empiricist in character. The rigorous empiricist standards among Korean historians ensure that the historical facts are well chronicled and detailed regardless of the historiographic direction. The alternative progressive nationalist view inspired by Kang Man-gil and Kim Yong- seop had many different manifestations, but in general its approaches place the people at the center of Korean history. The progressive narratives often begin in the Joseon dynasty when, as the internal development thesis argues, economic ferment was leading the nation towards an indigenous modernization. The arrival of Western imperialism and foreign domination then triggered the Eastern Learning or Donghak movement and uibyeong or righteous anti-Japanese resistance as well as the March First Movement. Liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 produced division, war, and persistent inequality, which led to the April Student Revolution of 1960, the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, and the 1987 Democracy Movement. This trajectory affirms the claim of the Korean people being active agents of history during Korea’s tumultuous modern period. To understand the assumptions behind this form of historical writing, the concept of autonomy or jajuseong looms large, as the term means one is the master of one’s own fate. A postcolonial reading may reveal that the term jaju stems from a desire to reject the foreign and assert the importance of the minjok as the primary autonomous agent of history over externally determined heteronomous forces or tayulseong. The autonomy of the Korean people is expressed against all the forces that oppressed them. These forces of oppression may be the Korean elites or the foreign elements that exploited the people. Postliberation nationalist histories have produced great contributions towards our understanding of Korean history, but their tendency to limit historical inquiry 28 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 within the national framework has become the target of increasing criticism. Cha Ha-sun identified the following problematic issues: 1) Nationalist historiographical tradition; 2) Elimination of the legacies of Japanese historiography; and 3) Narrow borrowing from European historical methodology (Cha 2007, 18-23). These issues are revealing, since they point to the incomplete task of untangling Korean history from the nineteenth-century historical methodologies first introduced by Japanese historians. While the calls to reject Japanese colonial historiography have been present since Yi Ki-baek brought them to light in A New History of Korea (1961), the focus has primarily been on the stagnation thesis rather than the overall empiricist framework and the search for national characteristics. The selective borrowing of historical methodologies is also a legacy of Japanese colonial historiography, because Rankean empiricism and Marxist materialism from the West became orthodox approaches due to their acceptance by Japanese scholars. Korean historians often deemed later historical approaches as Western and therefore not compatible with the exceptional nature of the Korean past. The selective rejection of more recent theoretical and methodological approaches as Western in origin reflects an underlying belief in the “special characteristics” of the Korean past. Therefore, further debate is now necessary to diversify the Korean historian’s toolkit. Those who call for new directions in Korean history have proposed numerous alternatives, such as the history of everyday life, gender histories, and transnational histories as potential remedies to the conceptual limitations of postliberation historiography. Among these various approaches, transnational histories may have particularly valuable insights for Korean nationalist historiography. Yun Hae-dong suggests that the transnational perspective can greatly aid in understanding the colonial period since it views violence and oppression as part of broader imperialist structures that were global in scale (Yun 2008, 36). Another application of transnational perspectives is Lim Jie-hyun’s “mass dictatorship” thesis that argues for the strong convergence of twentieth-century dictatorships among certain political practices in Korea and elsewhere, which represent transnational formations of modernity (Lim 2013, 13). These transnational attempts open new grounds for comparison and suggest pathways for including Korean history within a broader global context. A transnational Korean history, however, can seem somewhat ambiguous in its ultimate aims and goals. Transnational histories are often interchangeable with world history and global history, and do not necessarily represent a new theoretical formulation, although the term does tend to connote the movement of groups, goods, technology or people across national borders (Bayly et al. 2006, 1443). Since transnationalism is KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 29 associated with the migration of people, goods, and ideas, Yun Hae-dong, for example, calls for colonial Korean historians to expand their range of inquiry to topics that crisscross the borders of East Asia, including such topics as population migration, the circulation of commodities, and the intellectual exchanges behind the pan-Asianist discourse of the 1930s and 1940s (Yun 2014, 79). However, if the new transnational histories only focus on the movement of objects and ideas across borders rather than consider more universal questions, then they may fall short of providing a viable alternative to the existing nationalist historiography. Discovering an ethical basis for a new transnational history is a task that will require considerable interdisciplinary effort to achieve. Intellectuals like Kwame Appiah (2006) and others have formulated different versions of contemporary cosmopolitan theory that attempt to recognize cultural differences and still engage with the tension behind the meanings of global and national citizenship. Therefore, there may be a need to raise broader cosmopolitanism questions in an age of increasing global interconnections, yet transnationalism by itself does not necessarily lead towards cosmopolitan perspectives (Roudometof 2005, 113). Antipathy rather than openness to change can emerge as transnational interactions intensify. If a transnational Korean history simply produces “transnationalism with Korean characteristics,” then Korean historiography may remain in the same rigid ethnocentric narratives of the colonial era scholarship. Conclusion Ultimately, a more cosmopolitan transnational history would require a fundamental reconfiguration of the basic narrative structure and audience awareness of Korean historians. The intended audience for Korean history has always been somewhat ambiguous in the modern era. As Lim Jie-hyun points out, the first Japanese history text of the modern era, A Brief History of Japan, was written for a foreign audience to argue for Japan’s historical legitimacy, and nationalist Korean historians often have a similar externally-oriented approach. The narrative perspective of nationalist histories generally assumes two separate audiences composed of Koreans and foreigners who have fundamentally clashing perspectives and incompatible identities. The constant emphasis on the exploitative nature of colonialism is an example. Korean audiences generally do not need to be convinced that Japanese colonialism was highly exploitative, but this point is mentioned repeatedly in nationalist studies of 30 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014 the colonial period. This is because the narrative structure of nationalist scholarship often assumes that the historian represents a monolithic Korean perspective before both a sympathetic Korean audience and a potentially hostile foreign audience. While there is no doubt certain commonalities in Korean perspectives exist, the generalized notion that the historian represents a unified Korean view to teach foreigners about the “special characteristics” and legitimacy of the Korean past is a narrative device that may no longer be appropriate for the contemporary age. There is now a greater need to consider what a universal and cosmopolitan Korean history written for a global audience may look like. The emphasis on what distinguishes Korea from other parts of the world can be a productive endeavor to introduce Korean culture and history. In this respect, the efforts of nationalist historians to identify the particularly interesting elements of Korean history and share them with the world need not be abandoned. Foreign audiences can benefit greatly from the wealth of knowledge that we now have about the richness of Korean culture and history. However, rather than posit a separate historical trajectory based on essentialist differences, there is a need to contextualize Korean history alongside the same universalistic forces for a global audience. Cultural proximity arguments are generally more effective for producing mutual understanding than cultural difference when addressing people from diverse backgrounds. Korean cultural elements need to be compared in terms of how similar they are to the rest of the world along with a discussion of their differences. Joseon dynasty intellectuals had a simple answer to the question of cosmopolitanism: they rarely interjected “Koreaness” into their universal discourse as they believed in addressing an audience composed of the entire civilized world. Rather than emphasize their “special characteristics,” the Korean literati saw their links and shared values with other cosmopolitan cultures as having much higher priority. Today we live in a transnational age where diverse life-worlds formed by diasporic communities and new media technologies can coexist within the same national borders. A cosmopolitanism perspective that can help integrate these dynamic changes is needed as the nation- state gradually fractures into multiple transnational social spaces formed by migration and mediated via technology. 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Special Terms A Brief History of Japan 일본사략 日本史略 Chindan Society 진단학회 震檀學會 Chosenshi henshukai 조선사편수회 朝鮮史編修會 Hwangseong sinbo 황성신보 皇城新報 Jajuseong 자주성 自主性 Joseon’s Feudal Socioeconomic History Chosen hoken shakai keizaishi 朝鮮封建社會經濟史 Joseon’s Socioeconomic History Chosen shakai keizaishi 朝鮮社會經濟史 Joseonhak 조선학 朝鮮學 mindo 민도 民度 minjok 민족 民族 naejejeok baljeon-ron 내재적 발전론 內在的發展論 Patriotic Enlightenment Movement 애국계몽운동 愛國啓蒙運動 sojunghwa 소중화 小中華 tayulseong 타율성 他律性 KIM · Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism in Korean History 33 teuksuseong 특수성 特殊性 toyo 東洋 toyoshi 東洋史 uyeonseong 우연성 偶然性 Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty 조선왕조실록 朝鮮王朝實錄 View of National History 국사안 國史眼 34 Journal of Contemporary Korean Studies 1(1) · 2014