The Rise and Fall of the New Right Movement and the Historical Wars in 2000s South Korea

The present article deals with one of the attempts by South Korea’s privileged stratum to undermine the very basis for any criticisms against the colonial-age behaviour of its institutional—and in many cases familial—forefathers, namely the so-called New Right movement. Simultaneously an academic and political movement, it was launched in 2004 and had been acting as advocates of a new, post-nationalist neo-conservatism until its recent decline, more or less concurrent with the demise of Park Geun-hye (Pak Kûnhye) regime amidst the candlelight vigils and million-strong demonstrations in downtown Seoul in 2016–2017. On the academic plane, New Right aimed at shifting the axiological basis of South Korean nationalism from ethno-nation (minjok) discriminated and oppressed by the Japanese colonialists, to the capitalist ‘civilization’ which colonialism had supposedly helped to transplant onto Korean soil, and the South Korean statehood which allowed so many former members of the colonial-period elites to maintain their socio-economic positions. If the new order of priorities, with the market game rules, industrial growth and modern capitalist statehood put ahead of the traditional shibboleth of the ethno-nation (encompassing the majority of population which might not necessarily benefit, at least, immediately, from all these developments), was to be established, the defence of colonial-age collaboration would no longer be an onerous task. On the contrary, collaborators could be, in such a way, re-interpreted as patriots who had acted out of Korea’s long-term interest in ‘civilizing’ itself with the Japanese ‘help’ rather than pure opportunism. However, New Right never succeeded in putting the conventional South Korean historical paradigm—based, eventually, on the vision of Korea ‘under-developed’ by the colonial capitalism and heavily influenced by various left-nationalistic interpretations of Marxism—upside down. The present article aims at exploring how the movement proceeded and finding out what could have been the decisive factors in its failure. Moreover, it will shed the light on the general tendencies in the development of South Korean historiography in the neo-liberal age, in an attempt to understand to which extent the elite interests may be still influencing the historiographical trends, even despite the downfall of the New Right movement.