Preparing to Fail: Growing North–South Divisions during the Period of Recess in the Joint Commission Meetings

Abstract

The United States and Soviet Union delegations to the Joint Commission talks ended the initial round of their efforts in May 1946 after but two months of talks designed to guide the creation of a unified Korean government through a process of trusteeship that would last at most five years beyond their helping Koreans form a unified provisional government. At the center of their differences were those over the concept of democracy. Without a shared understanding of this concept, selection of which Korean “democratic political parties and social organizations” to consult proved to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. The two delegations would return to the conference table in July 1947, over a year later. But in the interval between meetings, the two Koreas had distanced themselves to such an extent that, even if the Joint Commission had realized success, the odds of their being able to agree on a framework to build a unified Korean government were greater than when they had first met. Examining the rhetoric from the northern Korean media, but also to a lesser extent that from southern Korean media, this paper attempts to flesh out some of the differences. While trusteeship proved to divide extreme left and right forces, two issues emphasized on the left were the superiority of its bottom-up democracy that focused on granting basic rights to a society (emphasized in the south) over building a level society from the bottom up (as emphasized in the north). The north also emphasized a second issue, that of the actions of “reactionaries” in the south to disrupt the development of this democratic society in Korea. In the end, both sides failed to form democratic societies that matched their rhetoric.