Subaltern South Korea's Anti-Communist Asian Cooperation in the Mid-1950s

This article considers the 1950s postcolonial period in Korea after Japanese colonialism and the international context of the Cold War from the standpoint of the ROK and examines how the subaltern South Korean state (re)appropriated and (re)formulated the Cold War discourse of anti-communism in Asia. During that period, South Korea, along with other East Asian states, formed an international association called the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League (APACL). During the 1950s, the subaltern ROK thus joined a new, nuanced, Western-centric (if not colonial) structure—the Cold War—and proactively and strategically appropriated anti-communism to ensure its national survival. Carving out a place at the bottom of the Western-centric Cold War hierarchy became part of state building for non-Western South Korea. Moreover, the Cold War was a context in which ideology (anti-communism) mixed with blood (war and violence) on a daily basis. Subaltern South Korea was constitutive of the Cold War in Asia and beyond. Indeed, this article illustrates that the Cold War itself was a co-construction between the hegemonic powers and subalterns.