Unsettled Sovereignty: Colonial Liberation,
“In due course” was a fateful phrase that would resonate for years to come. In the original draft by Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins, Korea was to be granted independence “at the earliest possible moment.” Roosevelt changed this to “in due course” apparently at the urging of the British, who were concerned with maintaining con- trol of their own colonies after the war. For his part Roosevelt advo- cated independence for the colonies, whether Japanese or European, but had in mind a period of “tutelage” during which Koreans like other colonized peoples would be educated in self-government before achieving full independence.19 Sovereignty still had limits, as it had in the late nineteenth-century Age of Empire; in the post- World War II period self-determination was delayed for many for- mer colonies, some of which would be administered by the United Nations’ Office of Trust Territories. Roosevelt had suggested along these lines an American-Soviet “trust administration” for Korea, an idea that became a foundation for the four-power Trusteeship (administered by the US, USSR, Britain and the Republic of China) agreed to by the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in Decem- ber 1945. Many Koreans, who had expected immediate indepen- dence, vehemently opposed trusteeship and the idea was ultimately scrapped. By this time, the peninsula was well on its way to divided sovereignty, split between North and South.
The long-term division of Korea into separate states was neither planned nor expected by any of the parties involved with the post- war settlement. Division resulted from a series of decisions and con-
19 Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 251~252. Cited in Heiferman, Cairo Conference, p. 183, fn. 72.
flicts arising from a confluence of Cold War geopolitical rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States—both of whom were preoccupied with events in Europe—and political fissures within Korea itself.20 Initially the dual Soviet-American occupation was intended to oversee the orderly surrender of Japanese forces and facilitate the creation of a free and independent Korean government
“in due course,” as stipulated in the Cairo communiqué. The col- lapse of the trusteeship agreement in 1946 meant that a “free and independent” Korean government would not come about through multiparty tutelage. Instead, separate governments coalesced under Soviet and American occupation in Pyongyang and Seoul respec- tively. In the fall of 1947, over Soviet objections, the United States brought the Korean problem before the United Nations, which established a Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to over- see Korean elections. The Soviet Union refused to recognize the authority of the UN to supervise Korean elections, and did not allow UN election monitors into the Soviet-occupied North during the general election of May 1948. On August 15 the Republic of Korea was declared in Seoul, with Rhee Syng-Man as President. On August 25 the North held its own elections, declaring the South’s elections invalid, electing a Supreme People’s Assembly (two-thirds of which was reserved for representatives of South Korea), and establishing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on September 9 under Premier Kim Il-Sung. Both governments claimed authority over the entire peninsula.
20 John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark, D.E.: University of Delaware Press, 1989).
The almost inevitable result of such competing claims of legitimacy was civil war. On June 25, 1950, with Soviet backing and arms, the Korean People’s Army of North Korea attacked the South to reunify the peninsula by force. The attack had been considered for well over a year, since Kim Il-Sung had first proposed to Stalin that, given the current balance of forces in the North’s favor, military conquest of the South would be relatively swift and cost-effective, forcing the Americans to accept a Communist fait accompli.21 Circumstances, however, did not evolve quite as Kim had predicted. The Americans did intervene, pushing the North Korean forces back well above the thirty-eighth parallel, and provoking a Chinese counter-interven- tion. The result, after the Chinese entered the war in late October 1950, and had pushed the Americans in turn south of the thir- ty-eighth parallel by January 1951, was two-and-a-half years of bru- tal stalemate. Finally, in July 1953, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and the United Nations Command signed an armistice to end the fighting. A De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) was established, running close to the initial thirty-eighth parallel line, to separate North and South. After three years of fighting, millions of casualties, and untold physical destruction, the Korean War ended approxi- mately where it had begun, and Korea remained more bitterly divided than ever.
The Korea War itself would not have necessarily perpetuated Korea’s division. On the contrary, a decisive victory on either side would have resolved the problem of divided sovereignty once and for all.
But the stalemate on the battlefield, rather than the original thir-
21 Sergei Goncharev, John W. Lewis, and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
ty-eight parallel boundary between the two occupation zones, became the foundation of Korea’s long-term division. The UN Com- mission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea (UNCURK), established on October 7, 1950, embodied the UN allies’ expecta- tion that unification would soon be forthcoming.22 The Korean War armistice was by definition a temporary arrangement for a cessation of hostilities “until a final peaceful settlement is achieved,” according to the preamble of the Armistice Agreement.23 The nineteen belliger- ents of the Korean War met in Geneva from April 26 to June 15, 1954, to hammer out “a final peaceful settlement.” The Geneva Con- ference resolved nothing, and was the last time all the participant in the Korean conflict would attempt to establish a peace agreement.
The breakdown of the Geneva talks reflected the world’s de facto acceptance of the long-term division of Korea. Sixty years later Korea still exists within a “division system” established by the ambiguous end of the Korean War and the failure of the belligerents to achieve peaceful unification of the peninsula.