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North and South Korea have been divided for more than 70 years, ever since the Korean Peninsula became an unexpected casualty of the escalating Cold War between two rival superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. A Unified Korea For centuries before the division, the The division of Korea is a legacy of the Cold War.
Japan annexed the Korean peninsula in , and the country spent the next 35 years under Japanese military rule. For nearly seven decades, the Kim family dynasty has warned the North Korean people that the United States is a murderous superpower bent upon their annihilation—and their only chance of survival is readiness for an American attack.
This policy of paranoia without end has driven President Bill Clinton took the podium on October 18, , with aspeech that reads like a sigh of relief—the announcement of a landmark nuclear agreement between the United States and North Korea. But during the mid s, it was filled with something else The January capture of the U. Pueblo during a spy mission in international waters cost the life of one American sailor and began a grueling month imprisonment for the other 82 Americans aboard.
North Korea is a member of the United Nations. The monument to the founding of the Korean Workers' Party in Pyongyang. Benjamin Elisha Sawe April 19 in Politics. United States-Iran Conflict. The War In Afghanistan. But for well over a thousand years, until colonization by Japan in the early twentieth century, successive kingdoms on the Korean peninsula were able to maintain a society with political independence and cultural distinctiveness from the surrounding nations.
Settled, literate societies on the Korean peninsula appear in Chinese records as early as the fourth century BCE. Gradually, competing groups and kingdoms on the peninsula merged into a common national identity.
Within Korea there are some regional differences expressed in dialect and customs, but on the whole regional differences are far outweighed by an overall cultural homogeneity. Unlike China, for example, regional dialects in Korea are mutually intelligible to all Korean speakers. The Korean language is quite distinct from Chinese and in fact structurally similar to Japanese, although there is still debate among linguists about how the Korean and Japanese languages may be related.
Traditional Korea borrowed much of its high culture from China, including the use of Chinese characters in the written language and the adoption of Neo-Confucianism as the philosophy of the ruling elite. But while symbolically dependent on China for military protection and political legitimization, in practice Korea was quite independent in its internal behavior. After devastating invasions by the Japanese at the end of the sixteenth century and by the Manchus of Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth, Korea enforced a policy of strictly limited contact with all other countries.
The main foreign contacts officially sanctioned by the Choson Dynasty were diplomatic missions to China three or four times a year and a small outpost of Japanese merchants in the southeastern part of Korea near the present-day city of Pusan. Few Koreans left the peninsula during the late Choson Dynasty, and even fewer foreigners entered.
Japanese Colonial Period During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Korea became the object of competing imperial interests as the Chinese empire declined and Western powers began to vie for ascendancy in East Asia. It took Japan, itself only recently opened to Western-style international relations by the United States, to impose a diplomatic treaty on Korea for the first time in Japan, China, and Russia were the main rivals for influence on Korea in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and after defeating China and Russia in war between and , Japan became the predominant power on the Korean peninsula.
In Japan annexed Korea outright as a colony, and for the next 35 years Japan ruled Korea in a manner that was strict and often brutal. However, Japan also brought the beginnings of industrial development to Korea. Modern industries such as steel, cement, and chemical plants were set up in Korea during the s and s, especially in the northern part of the peninsula where coal and hydroelectric power resources were abundant. By the time Japanese colonial rule ended in August , Korea was the second most industrialized country in Asia after Japan itself.
In the final days of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to jointly accept the Japanese surrender in Korea, with the U. However, by , the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, combined with political differences between Koreans of the two occupation zones and the policies of the occupation forces on the ground, led to a breakdown in negotiations over a unified government of Korea. On August 15, , a pro-U. They agree to end hostile actions and work towards reducing nuclear arms on the peninsula.
A follow-up meeting in Hanoi in February breaks down after North Korea refuses nuclear disarmament in return for lifting economic sanctions.
Image source, AFP. Flood and famine. Historic handshake. Nuclear brinkmanship. Six-party talks. Nuclear declaration. Nuclear tensions rise.
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