“Korean Nationalism” Seen through the Comintern Prism, 1920s–30s

Abstract

One of the benchmarks of the Comintern’s approach to the non-European world was its (conditional) approval of the anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa, even if they were not orthodox Communist. This approach pioneered the engagement with non-Western, emancipatory anticolonial nationalisms on a worldwide scale, and was later followed by the Soviet policy of allying with and assisting “progressive” national-liberational regimes in the Third World in the 1950–80s. The present paper deals with the implementation of this approach in the case of Korea in the 1920s–30s. It finds that the main task that the Comintern originally set for itself in the case of Korean (non-socialist) nationalism was to organize it into a representative “national party” à la China’s Guomindang (Nationalists), which had the potential to become an effective partner of the Korean Communists within the framework of a broader anticolonial alliance. Different factions among the ethnic Korean cadres of the Comintern—which had hardly any non-Korean experts on Korea—suggested different nationalist and religious groupings as potential nuclei for such a “national party”; an autochthonous Korean religion, Ch’ŏndogyo, was commonly recognized as one of the preferred options. These plans were shelved by the end of the 1920s, as the Comintern’s politics radicalized, and were reactivated after 1935, with the Comintern’s shift to the tactics of the antifascist alliance. By that time, however, Korean nationalism inside Korea had been largely either co-opted or silenced by the Japanese. In the end, the Communists came to be seen as the political force with primary responsibility for the task of national-liberation.