John Goulde

To anyone acquainted even with the barest outline of Korean history, the Korean quest for a strong, united, independent, peninsular state appears as a recurrent theme. Caught between the competing imperial powers of China and Japan, Korea has struggled again and again to maintain its territorial independence. At the same time Koreans have constructed and reconstructed their ethnic identity in support of their territorial claims. Utilizing both native and foreign ideologies, Koreans have constructed and refined their notion of who they are as a people. From the time of the first fortified city states in the late bronze age and their confederation and development into distinct kingdoms in the 4th century BCE down to the modern period, Koreans have appropriated and reappropriated peninsular history in defense of ethnic distinctiveness and territorial independence. Historians will recognize, of course, that the development of a Korean ethnonationalism is an ongoing process. It does not occur all at once or in a uniform manner. Like any people, the inhabitants of the Korean peninsula had to first reach a level of political-social organization and ethnic self-awareess that would allow them to make territorial claims. The fact that there were many such groups in the late Bronze Age that laid claim to different parts of the peninsula indicates that the of single, peninsula-wide ethno-nationalism was not guaranteed. Competition for territory between groups within the peninsula and competition for territory outside the peninsula between peninsular groups and other groups was a messy business. As every historian also knows, only to the victors of a competition went the spoils, which included the right to write the history of the spoils-taking. In the present study the author will argue that a recognizable, Korean nationalist discourse1 aimed at securing Korean borders and preserving Korean ethnic distinctiveness first emerges in the Kory6 period. It is built upon and fuses together the histories, ideologies, and ethnicities of the Unified Silla, Three Kingdoms, and pre-Three Kingdoms periods in support of its territorial claims against Chinese and other non-Chinese encroachments. It is characterized by a dual allegiance to a Confucianist standard of what constitutes a civilized and therefore an independent state and a Buddhist-primordialist2 ideology about the nature of the land and the kind of people it produces. This discourse is, as is all good historiography, revisionist discourse. It uses what is known of the past to explain and justify what should be known and supported in the present. As revisionist discourse it is also subject to revision, as political, social and cultural circumstances change. In the years following the Kory6, this discourse was· revised several times by the addition of a pure-primordialist ideology of racial and cultural uniqueness that continues to the present day.