North Korea and South Korea: Monopolizing Nationalism in a Divided Peninsula

The autocratic regimes in both North Korea and South Korea attempted to legitimize their rule through efforts in nation-building but achieved different results. North Korea and South Korea: Monopolizing Nationalism in a Divided Peninsula seeks to answer: How did these regimes’ nation-building strategies through a variety of tools and venues differ in the process of regime development? How was nationalism utilized to construct a regime-legitimizing founding myth? What implications did these varied efforts have on authoritarian legitimacy and state-society relations under authoritarian rule?
Focusing on the period from the end of the Second World War and the start of the Korean War to South Korea’s democratic transitions in the 1980s and North Korea’s crises in the 1990s, Qingming Huang examines the authoritarian regimes’ efforts in monopolizing the narratives of nationalism and constructing the founding myths of the regimes through textbooks and other myth-making venues. Huang argues that the North Korean regime’s monopoly of nationalism helped it construct the founding myth of the party-state as an essential source of regime legitimacy. In contrast, the autocratic regimes in South Korea failed to eliminate the competing narratives about the nation and were unable to monopolize nationalism. As a result, South Korea struggled to construct a founding myth to buttress the regimes and became more vulnerable to domestic challenges.

Qingming Huang is assistant research fellow at the Institute for International Affairs, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
He was a Rothman Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida, a Junior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. His research works have appeared in Journal of Chinese Political Science, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and Perspectives on Politics.