Repositioning South Korea’s Collaborator Issue as a Global Cold War History

The failure to purge former pro-Japanese collaborators, and the central place of former collaborators within the anti-communist ruling elite lie at the center of discussions over historical memory and transitional justice in contemporary South Korea. On the one hand, this history is a failure, an “original sin,” and its “correction” constitutes the utmost historical task Koreans are faced with. On the other, collaborators were a necessary evil in the process of nation-building, a pool of educated labor crucial for the country’s successful economic development. Since democratization in 1987, the political and mnemonic fault lines regarding the collaborator issue have hardened. Advocates for coming to terms with the past have repeatedly cited the cases of France or Germany as successful counterexamples. From this discourse, one may get the impression that South Korea’s continuity was a unique development. But was it?

This presentation aims to reposition South Korea’s collaborator issue as a global history of the Cold War. Unlike France, post-WWII Korea did not immediately re-gain its sovereignty, but faced a three-year US-Soviet occupation that resulted in division and civil war. As an Allied-occupied territory heavily affected by the course of events in the early Cold War (1945–55), this presentation contrasts South Korea with the cases of West Germany, Japan, and Austria. Drawing on extensive bodies of previous research in respective national histories, the presentation juxtaposes South Korea’s failure to purge former collaborators with the history and memory of denazification (West Germany, Austria) and democratization (Japan). The presentation argues that perpetrator/collaborator continuity was not unique to South Korea, but needs to be understood in the context of the Cold War. What differs, then, to some degree, was the process of how this history was eventually re-discovered and discussed in the following decades.