Using the Enemy’s Vocabularies: Rethinking the Origins of Student Anti-State Nationalism in 1980s Korea

Abstract

This study explores how anti-colonial discourses of student anti-state nationalism in the 1980s were influenced by the state nationalism during the Park Chung-Hee era. With few exceptions, studies on Korean democratization have exclusively focused on the growth of civil society, independent from the authoritarian state government. Nevertheless, this trend in research overlooks the simple historical fact that student protesters in the 1980s had been heavily indoctrinated by the state discourses of nationalism to the point of having to recite the National Charter of Education in elementary schools. This study investigates the symbolic structure of student anti-state nationalism in the 1980s and its connectedness with the state nationalism of the 1970s and argues that the force of nationalism produced both domination and resistance in those two decades.