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Reviewed by:
  • Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy
  • Robert M. Hathaway
Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 328 pp. $45.00.

Viewed from the perspective of Washington, DC, the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a rare breed: a successful example of nation building. Among the dozens of countries to emerge from colonialism since the end of World War II, the ROK is one of a select few to achieve both economic prosperity and political democracy. How the ROK made the transition from indigence and despotism to pluralism and plenty—and what role the United States played in this journey—is the subject of Gregg Brazinsky’s Nation Building in South Korea, a welcome addition to the New Cold War History series edited by John Lewis Gaddis.

The success of the Korean experiment was not preordained. Brazinsky cites Odd Arne Westad, who has found that of the more than 30 postcolonial countries in which the United States has intervened since 1945, only South Korea and Taiwan achieved both economic growth and stable democracy. As Brazinsky portrays it, U.S. nation-building and South Korean agency worked in tandem to foster the ROK’s postwar evolution. Both elements were key. But South Korean actions and the manner in which South Koreans accepted, rejected, and modified American ideas were the most crucial factors in shaping the country’s transformation. South Koreans adapted to U.S. influence “with the same flexibility and creativity that had long marked their dealings with other stronger powers” (p. 7).

Nation Building in South Korea covers the period from the collapse of Japanese colonialism in Korea in 1945 to the end of military rule in 1987 but focuses most heavily on the 1945–1972 period. Throughout these years, U.S. officials attempted to balance their desire for political liberalization in South Korea with their concerns about security and stability and their determination to promote the ROK’s economic development. Frequently, when a choice had to be made, security and stability trumped all else. On at least three occasions—1945–1948, 1960–1961, and 1979–1980—U.S. actions “proved vital to the assumption of power by autocrats at the expense of governments or political leaders who enjoyed stronger popular support” (p. 251). Yet, Brazinsky argues, on the first two of these occasions, U.S. support for Syngman Rhee and, later, Park Chung Hee prevented outcomes that would have been even less happy for the ROK.

Some will conclude that Brazinsky is rather too forgiving of U.S. policies that sustained military strongmen in Korea for 40 years. Brazinsky readily concedes that building an anti-Communist bastion on the southern half of the Korean peninsula exacted “an enormous cost” not only from the South Korean people but also from the U.S. architects. “Americans sacrificed not only their lives and resources but also their ideals” in their Korean nation-building project, Brazinsky concludes (p. 40). Still, he adds, “some of the long-term consequences of U.S. actions in South Korea were better than the intentions behind them” (p. 253). [End Page 168]

As Brazinsky reminds us, the United States tended to attribute an importance to Korea out of all proportion to its actual size or strength. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that to “lose” South Korea “would run the risk of the loss of our entire position in the Far East” (p. 31). In essence, and for neither the first nor the last time, the world’s mightiest power defined its interests in such a manner as to render it vulnerable to the machinations of small countries and petty autocrats. Rhee, Park, Ngo Dinh Diem, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, Pervez Musharraf, and others. The list is nearly endless.

Yet for Brazinsky, the ledger has two sides. Although U.S. policies “sometimes inhibited democracy from the top down, American influence worked in other ways to encourage democratization from the bottom up” (p. 255). Some of Brazinsky’s most original work appears in his extensive treatment of U.S. programs, official...

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