Two Koreas—One Future? A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee (review)

190BOOK REVIEWS Two Koreas—One Future? A Report Preparedfor the American Friends Service Committee, edited by John Sullivan and Roberta Foss. Lanham, Maryland, and London: University Press of America, 1987. Pp. 167. Cloth, $22.50. Paper, $11.50. One can usually count on the American Friends Service Committee to offer fresh and at times controversial perspectives on current issues. This volume on Korea is no exception. Aside from a brief introduction and conclusion by the editors, the volume consists of six contributions on history, economics, politics, the military, major power perspectives, and a personal Korean view. Most of the contributors are scholars well known not only for their expertise in Korean studies but also for their independence of judgment. The first contribution is by Bruce Cumings and deals with the division of Korea in 1945. His "revisionist" view of the immediate postwar period is that it is the United States that should shoulder most of the blame for Korea's division. An American policy that saw a separate noncommunist state in South Korea— the position advanced successfully by "nationalists" as opposed to "internationalists " in the military government and the Department of State—prevailed during the period through the Korean War. I place the word revisionist in quotation marks because by now it is this view, taken from his longer work, The Origins of the Korean War, which has become the standard treatment of the period. This short piece essentially captures the main arguments he makes in that work. Jon Halliday next compares the North and South Korean economies. In an account that exhibits considerable sympathy for the economic policies of the DPRK, he notes that the highly industrial and largely self-sufficient (the Korean word chuch'e is used to describe this policy of autarky) nation suffers from a number of problems, most notably a difficult-to-calculate external debt. He gives a grudging nod to the economic success of the South, but also points out its external dependence on capital and markets. His chapter represents a counterweight to the highly hagiographie accounts of the South's economy and the often facile assumptions concerning that of the North. The debunking of conventional wisdom on Korea continues unabated in the third selection by Stephen Goose on the military situation on the peninsula. His argument is that the threat from the North is greatly exaggerated and that the South could quite easily defeat an attack because of its defensive posture, greater defense spending, superior weaponry, larger population, and more advanced industrial base. Following this logic, Goose proceeds to argue that the U.S. troop presence is superfluous and that the removal of U.S. troops would defuse antiAmerican feelings among South Korean students and foster the growth of democracy. In one of his last contributions to the Korean debate before his untimely demise, Gregory Henderson attributes much of the postwar political landscape to the Japanese colonial legacy that replaced Confucianism with military and anticommunist values. He then gives a brief political history of both North and BOOK REVIEWS191 South Korea, concluding with an adroit discussion of indoctrination efforts in the South. In the North there was less dissent, not because of superior policies, but rather because most of the dissenters had fled south before and during the Korean War. Predictably Henderson is critical, but he also suggests that the future for the South is bright, since at the time of his writing there was a trend toward liberalization. One suspects that recent events in South Korea would not substantially revise his overall assessment. Ilpyong Kim's chapter on the role of the major powers begins with the assumption, somewhat overdrawn, that it is the four major powers (China, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union) which will largely determine the success or failure of inter-Korea dialogue. His contribution is a relatively straightforward account organized around the "Northern Triangle" (North Korea, China, and the USSR) and the "Southern Triangle" (South Korea, the U.S., and Japan). The only real "revisionism" comes in his conclusion that the U.S. hard-line policy toward North Korea must change before peace and stability can be assured on the peninsula. The final chapter by Kyungmo...