Entangled Modernity of South & North Korea:
Uneven & Combined Development of the Two Koreas
What is modernity in the first place? Confronting reality! What kind of reality do we stand up? It depends on the geopolitical and geoeconomic context of each individual and each state. After the liberation from Japanese colonial rule, South & North Korea allied different external forces and took different developmental paths, the former capitalist, the latter socialist. Scholars all around the globe try to compare the two Koreas in many different angles. South Korea seems to accomplish nation building process such as state formation, economic development and democratization. It’s a successful case. After the digital transformation, K-Culture dominates the global cultural scene. North Korea, in contrast, seems to fall far behind compared to the progress of S. K. It looks like a failure. However, N. K. armed herself with nuclear weapons and insisted on the rank of ‘nuclear state’.
In this article we will try to delve into not only the emergence of divergent paths taken by the two Koreas, but also explain the interconnection and interaction of S.K. & N. K. By applying uneven and combined development theory to the South & North Korean case, we can highlight the entangled characteristics of the two Koreas under radical transformation: the singularity of modernity in the two Koreas.