The Korean War 1950-1953 and its impact to 1977 (AS interpretation)
Was the Korean War a civil war or an international war?
Or, who started the Korean War?
These are some of the key debates within the historical interpretations of the Korean War. Over the last half century, historians have shifted their opinions with the increased availability and diversity of source materials, as well as the ever-changing global political climate.
Or, who started the Korean War?
These are some of the key debates within the historical interpretations of the Korean War. Over the last half century, historians have shifted their opinions with the increased availability and diversity of source materials, as well as the ever-changing global political climate.
1950s-1960s
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, most historians of the 1950s-1960s strictly followed the official lines of their respective governments, crafting histories closely aligned with the voices of those in power.
In South Korea, historians generally agreed that the war was an act of aggression coordinated by the North, USSR and China. This view reflected the prevailing stance of the Republic of Korea's (ROK) government, also bolstered by scholars’ personal experiences during the war. Many of them were eyewitnesses or victims of conflict, which heavily influenced the genesis of an overwhelmingly anti-communist culture in the South.
Shared sentiments in the English-speaking world, in turn, produced similar scholarly opinions. These historians retroactively justified the United States' involvement in the Korean War as a military act of 'policing' against the threat of China and the USSR's imposition of 'totalitarianism' in the North. This mainstream narrative was best represented by David Rees in his Korea: The Limited War, first published in 1964.
Likewise, historians from North Korea, China and the Soviet Union generally followed the ideological stances of their own countries, framing US imperialism and Southern aggression as the main progenitors of war.
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, most historians of the 1950s-1960s strictly followed the official lines of their respective governments, crafting histories closely aligned with the voices of those in power.
In South Korea, historians generally agreed that the war was an act of aggression coordinated by the North, USSR and China. This view reflected the prevailing stance of the Republic of Korea's (ROK) government, also bolstered by scholars’ personal experiences during the war. Many of them were eyewitnesses or victims of conflict, which heavily influenced the genesis of an overwhelmingly anti-communist culture in the South.
Shared sentiments in the English-speaking world, in turn, produced similar scholarly opinions. These historians retroactively justified the United States' involvement in the Korean War as a military act of 'policing' against the threat of China and the USSR's imposition of 'totalitarianism' in the North. This mainstream narrative was best represented by David Rees in his Korea: The Limited War, first published in 1964.
Likewise, historians from North Korea, China and the Soviet Union generally followed the ideological stances of their own countries, framing US imperialism and Southern aggression as the main progenitors of war.
During this time, there were a small number of historians in the West who dared to challenge the official line, due to their disillusionment with on-going Cold War events (for instance, the Cuba missile crisis and the Vietnam War) although such works were often neglected by their contemporary audience. One of the earlier works is I. F. Stone's The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), which analysed US intelligence reports and the actions of key political players in the West to comprehensively refute the war's 'official story.' Over time, as western scholars acquired direct experience in Korea, their sympathies with the peninsula's residents increased, causing some of them to turn their attention to the colonial and post-liberation historical periods to find the war's root causes.
1970-1980s
Since the 1970s, based on declassified US and British documents as well as captured North Korean files, more historians have begun to challenge the notion of the Korean War as an 'international' one. Attitudes shifted in the peninsula, as well. Although South Korea remained a military authoritarian regime until the late 1980s, local scholars had opportunities to go abroad and work with international colleagues. Outside the country, they also had a better exposure to certain theories that were academically marginalised at home (especially Marxism), and took an increasingly balanced view towards communism. As a result, opinions shifted within South Korean scholarship. Some historians then viewed the Korean War as an internal conflict, and by international imperial politics. Some also acknowledged internal splits within North Korea.
In the US, works emerged detailing the military's brutal tactics (Callum MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam,1986; Gavan MacCormack, Cold War, Hot War: An Australian Perspective on the Korean War, 1983). The peninsula's internal political conditions also received further attention, leading to the suggestion that the US intervened in domestic revolution for its own political purpose (Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vol., 1981-1990). Like in South Korea, they took a second look at the internal operation in North Korea, and questioned the claim that North Korea was merely a proxy of USSR and China. These criticisms, especially those toward military brutality, received great support from South Korean intellectuals, who were at that time in constant conflict with the ruling militants such as Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan.
Recent works on ordinary lives during the Korean War
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1990s - present
After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, more documents became made available for Russian and Chinese academics, providing an invaluable new body of sources dealing with the Korean War. Studies on China’s initial involvement in the Korean War, using Chinese sources and interviews, revealed crucial additional context into the conflict's origins (studies such as Chen Jian's China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation, 1994). In an example of most recent work within this trend, Japanese historian Wada Haruki uses international documents from the war's many actors. In his 2013 book, The Korean War: An International History, Haruki advocates for viewing the Korean War as a distinctly regional conflict, claiming that both the South and the North had military ambitions. Though, he does concedes that both Koreas often disagreed with their respective superpower backers, and thus were not mere proxies in a global Cold War. Within South Korea in this period, scholars turned their focus away from the traditional Cold War and international relations' paradigms, instead examining the sociological, psychological, and cultural impacts of the war on ordinary Koreans throughout the peninsula. |
So, was the Korean War a civil war, or an international one? In the current historiography, scholars tend to adopt a multi-dimensional approach, taking into account a wider range of historical factors than ever before – including Japan's imperial regime, domestic issues throughout the peninsula, international intervention from the two global superpowers, and influences from the then-newly established People's Republic of China. In a truly diplomatic fashion, then, the war could – and perhaps, should – be best described as an ‘international-ised civil war.’
[This piece is based on sections from Grace J Chae, 'The Korean War and its Politics,; in Micheal Seth ed., Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016)]