The Retreat of Multiculturalism? Explaining the South Korean Exception

Abstract

In the past 8 years, South Korea (hereafter Korea) has experienced a multicultural explosion—a growing emphasis on multiculturalism in both popular and political discourse. After demonstrating how multiculturalism has been framed as a means, indicator, and object of individual and national development, this article focuses on the improvement of global rank as one reason for the shift in Korea. In the course of diffusing the discourse and policies of multiculturalism, international intergovernmental organizations frame cultural diversity, and tolerance as a matter of development: Cultural diversity is necessary for individual and national development, and the more developed a society is, the more tolerant its people are. Korea’s self-perception as a nation in the middle of the global economic and symbolic hierarchy encourages multiculturalism as a way to move toward the core. The Korean case then suggests a possible reason for the retreat of multiculturalism in Western Europe. In Western European countries, the failure of multiculturalism is blamed on (illiberal) immigrant minorities rather than on majority groups, so that retreating from multiculturalism does not threaten perceptions of liberality, democracy, or core status. In Korea, in contrast, achieving multicultural tolerance is construed as a task that nonimmigrant majority Koreans must achieve in order for the nation to gain the status of a truly developed country.