Michael Breen - The new Koreans: the story of a nation

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To qualify as a global citizen and not just pretend, a wise man once told me, you must live in other countries and love the people there more than your own. At least three if you can. The more different, the bigger the challenge. I can claim to have made it with the Koreans, which is a good start. I know, because I root for the Koreans in the FIFA World Cup. And so, this book is for them. I dedicate it to my wife, Arem, who, for me, is their representative.

There are a number of schemes for rendering Korean words in the Latin alphabet. I mainly use the Revised Romanization introduced in 2000 by the South Korean government. With North Korean place names, courtesy demands that we use North Korean spelling. This comes from a slightly revised version of the McCune-Reischauer system, which was developed in the 1930s by two American academics, George McCune and Edwin Reischauer, and is still in use among scholars outside of Korea. The other exception is with personal names. In those cases, I use whatever the owner prefers. If Im deciding for them, I use the South Korean system, with a nod to familiarity in that I dont call any Kims Gim or Parks Bark.

This book began as an update to an earlier one, The Koreans , but so much has changed that it turned into something new.

In that first book, which was written in the late 1990s, I suggested that the miracle on the River Han, as South Korean economic development was commonly described, had given rise to a second miracle of democratic development, and would lead to a third: reunification with North Korea, but on South Korean terms. These three remarkable and unanticipated changes would, I thought, complete the reinvention and healing of a once-backward country whose spirit had been broken by Japanese colonial occupation and by its division into North and South by outside powers. I anticipated the sequel by this time to be The Unified Koreans.

Besides being wrong on timing, I have refined my view of this emergence and of what it means. First, while it is true that foreign occupation and national division left both North and South Koreans with a shattered identity after World War Two, I fear that I missed something that now strikes me as obvious about the modern development of the South Koreans: that the source energy driving it was defiance, not of the Japanese who colonized them, but of an entire history that had delivered them to a broken present. They refused to accept the place the world thought they occupied. Their defiance was set alight by anger against their brothers and sisters in the North and drove them to find the right way to compete.

This posture seems petty now. At the start the North was stronger economically and in terms of morale and confidence, but it has become an isolated and sad state whose leadership is mocked around the world.

It is ironic that the North Koreans are now seen as defiantwaving around nuclear weapons, celebrating their racial purity, congratulating themselves for their independence from foreign influence, and flouting international rules and diplomatic courtesies, while all the time looking for handouts from their enemies.

But the North Koreans are blowhards. Their defiance never took them anywhere. They are posers, a flag in one hand and a begging bowl in the other. It is the South Koreans who harnessed defiance and made something of it. It is their habit now, as they set about achieving something, to plug into this source energy as it carries them along, achieving if not everything, at least more than outsiders like me imagined they would.