2015, Vol.30, No.2

The Journal of Northeast Asia Research 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.75

pISSN : 2005-4432
https://journal.kci.go.kr/inas

Korea’s policy toward the United States during Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations has been often depicted as an anti-US or anti-alliance model of autonomy – to improve the inter-Korean relations at the expense of the ROK-US alliance. The main purpose of this article is to argue that such characterization wrongly places the government in a policy spectrum between autonomy and alliance. Put differently, this kind of generalization overlooks how the 10 years of the progressive governments also continued to value the ROK-US alliance. To establish the argument, this proposes a model of autonomy-utility nexus to describe the policies. In the context of the post-Cold War security environments, the two progressive governments sought to increase its autonomy in the inter-Korean relations, while readjusting yet clearly maintaining the ROK-US alliance, as the alliance continues to be central to the security of ROK. On the basis of the framework, this article also observes and compares how the debate on Korea’s US policies have become polarized into the misleading ideology-laden dichotomy between autonomy and alliance during the conservative Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-Hye administrations.

This study sets out to examine the China-DPRK research institutions in China and their research outcomes. This study finds that China, as the “No. 1 ally” of North Korea, has no special research institutions on China-DPRK relations. Most studies in this field are focused on the comments of popular news topics. In addition, most researchers share the same education background―most of them majored in International Politics. They all conducted their researches under the framework of relations among great powers. As a result, the researches are not systematic enough. This study also finds out that only several papers talked about the status quo of China-DPRK research institutions in China. Those papers focused on the national research institutions located in Beijing and Shanghai, and neglected the potential of Yanbian University, which boasts ‘global and local’ advantages because of its location and languages. This study suggests that in the future, researchers should conduct overall research on China-DPRK relations in order to avoid getting one-sided views. This study is of pragmatic and academic values and hopefully it will usher in better and in-depth academic exchanges between China’s DPRK research institutions and ROK’s counterparts.

On December 19, 2014, the Constitutional Court of South Korea, broke up the United Progressive Party based on militant democracy. Militant democracy suggest that principles and fundamental rights of democracy need to be withheld or constrained in order to protect democracy and the core means among these kinds of system is a institution of party dissolution. Some countries dissolve a parties to exercise a substantial violence or threaten democracy directly. In this case, it can be called as a ‘passive and ex post militant democracy.’ On the contrary, some countries include the goals and mission statement of party as dissolution criteria. In this case, such militant democracy is active and ex ante. The Constitutional Court of Korea had been relatively ex post and passive about party regulations. But in this case, it regarded the goals and mission statements of the party as a potential threat to Korean democracy although there are no obvious and urgent violence or behavior. The dissolution decree was very ex ante and active. This means that there had been a change in the position of the Constitutional Court of Korea, which had regarded a political party dissolution system as protecting means of them. The reasons of that change are Korean’s growing sense of crisis against North Korea. Since the 2008, North Korea–South Korea relations has changed from cooperative to conflict. As a result, Koreans regarded North Korea as the enemy has increased. But The United Progressive Party is friendly to North Korea, sometimes gave the impression that obedience to North Korea. Eventually, active and ex ante militant democracy against the North Korean was able to dissolve the United Progressive Party.