National Identity under Transformation: New Challenges to South Korea

Abstract

Eleven years ago, observers of South Korea were stunned as they witnessed two critical events unfold in central Seoul. The first was one of reverie as the plaza of City Hall literally became a sea of red. People wearing red devil t-shirts, the mascot of the Korean national soccer team, gathered to root for the Korean national soccer team in the 2002 World Cup, cohosted by South Korea and Japan. The second was one of protest. In the same plaza, a huge mass again assembled in the winter to hold a candlelight vigil mourning the deaths of two junior high school girls killed by a US armored vehicle. The series of candlelight vigils generated public uproar against the perceived unfairness of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and sparked a wave of anti-Americanism. The incident created serious concerns about the ROK-US alliance and among the political elite of both countries. There was no shortage of scholarship depicting these two incidents as epitomizing the ethnic nationalism of Korea. They became prominent examples in a growing literature on Korean national identity.