Abstract
The division of Korea came about as a result of the power vacuum left when the Japanese colonial government was defeated. The country was divided into two zones to handle the surrender of the Japanese forces but the division became permanent and the two entities which resulted fought a bloody war, in which one side was supported by the Soviet Union and China and the other by a United Nations force in which the United States played the dominant role. The armistice was never converted into a peace treaty; the communist regime in the North and the successive regimes in the South, dominated until recently by the military, have maintained mutual hostility. In her earliest days South Korea was weak economically, suffered from a low degree of international acceptance and was excluded from the United Nations. Her foreign policy was staunchly anti-communist and much effort was put into competitive diplomacy with North Korea in order to win international recognition.1
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Notes
Sang-seek Park, ‘Determinants of Korean Foreign Policy’ in Korea and World Affairs (Fall 1986) pp. 457–83.
A Handbook of Korea (Seoul: Seoul International Publishing House, Sixth Edition, 1987).
For a full discussion of this problem see, for example, Barry Gills, ‘Prospects for Peace and Stability in Northeast Asia: the Korean Conflict’ in Conflict, 278 (1995).
Sang Hoon Park, ‘North Korea and the Challenge to the US-South Korean Alliance’ in Survival, 36 (1994) pp. 78–91.
Kwang Soo Choi, ‘Korea’s Foreign Policy in the 1990s’ in Korea and World Affairs, 13 (1989) pp. 253–62.
Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, ‘Rethinking East Asian Security’ in Survival 36 (1994) pp. 3–21.
Desmond Ball, ‘Arms and Affluence; Military Acquisitions in the Asia Pacific Region’ in International Security, 18 (1993) pp. 78–112.
Aaron L. Friedberg, ‘Ripe for Rivalry; Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia’ in International Security, 18 (1993) pp. 5–39.
J. Clarke, ‘APEC as a Semi-Solution’ in Orbis 39 (1995) pp. 81–95.
Kishore Mahbubani, ‘The Pacific Impulse’ in Survival, 37 (1995) pp. 105–120.
Moon Young Park, ‘“Lure” North Korea’ in Foreign Policy, 97 (1994–5) pp. 97–105.
Paul Bracken, ‘Risks and Promises in the Two Koreas’ in Orbis, 39 (1995) pp. 55–64.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Middleton, L. (1997). South Korean Foreign Policy. In: Kim, D.H., Kong, T.Y. (eds) The Korean Peninsula in Transition. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25141-4_7
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