East Asian Regional Politics and Korean Language (6/5)

D A Y S   L I K E   T O D A Y   granted my wish for academic rigor. Our East Asian Regional Security class was followed by an introductory class on the Korean language, meaning we had a day full of educational gold! I was a very happy student, but not a very happy photographer-- it's hard to take interesting pictures when you're in class all day!

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In our first class, we took an extremely valuable regional-level look at East Asian security. Dr. Tessman outlined the abundant sources of potential conflict in the 21st Century. Much of this tension is readily apparent about the region, but doesn't necessarily register as a reason for pessimism, at least to my non-realist eyes. Regardless, there's a lot to worry about if one's really looking for it, and Tessman eloquently arranged these threats into five areas: 

• Radical differences in economic and political size and power that throw the concept of the balance of power to the wind;

• A lack of inclusive institutions for collective security and cooperation (think NATO or the EU)

• A mix of regime types including new democracies, quasi-democracies, authoritarian and communist states

• Historical animosities, such as Japan's colonialism, political tension between China and Vietnam, the Korean War, and the growth and prominence of the regional giants India and China

• Resources, including the Spratly Islands (those islands in the South China Sea that everyone is always sabre-rattling about), the region's Rare Earth minerals, and, as populations increase and our environment changes, the availability of water

All of this, from a realist international relations perspective, is reason to write the region off as unstable and dangerous. What do these pessimistic views predict? That Japan will rearm and that the region will devolve into balancing/power politics, both because they're the rational, self-interested thing to do! Yet we don't think of the region as on the brink, do we? I certainly don't! And there's reason to argue against the pessimists, as Dr. Tessman went on to explain.

First, Asia doesn't react towards hierarchy the way Europe seems to. Historically, Tessman argued, it's been most stable when China has been strong enough to stand above the rest; this seemingly natural position doesn't evoke challenges from other actors in the region but instead leads to regional stability. Asia doesn't seem to need a NATO or EU to keep things civil, its ad hoc network of regional institutions don't cause the friction there they seem to in other regions. Next, Japan doesn't act like a realist state-- it could have rearmed long ago, especially given the strength of its economy throughout the 90s, but it has chosen not to. And finally, the region seems to tend towards bandwagoning and hedging rather than the balancing that realism predicts-- many of the smaller countries in the region have benefited from the tension between the US and China, as aligning with one or the other comes with economic and political perks.

I   W O N D E R   to what degree we were falling into Orientalism by concluding in part that "'Asia' is different", or, more importantly, how terribly irresponsible it is to project realism and eurocentric international relations theory onto the world's diversity, but these are the things that distance me from many of my peers in the field-- you sort of have to accept these things to play the international relations game, at least as far as I can tell by now.

Korean language class!

S P E A K I N G   O F   O R I E N T A L I S M  , one of the fascinatingly sticky things about the idea is that it isn't just "westerners" or "foreigners" who are responsible for its inaccurate generalizations-- those who have historically been orientalized have also been known to self-orientalize, often to exploit opportunities created by the perceived differences between East and West. An example may be a Chinese vendor of trinkets who capitalizes on a Western tourist's orientalism by playing along and selling them caricatured parts of their culture for profit.

I bring this up because the impression of the Korean language I got from the class I took seemed extremely rosy and favorable, to the point that I wondered if I wasn't being fed exactly what I was looking for, like the Westerner in the example above. It's extremely unfair and not at all my intention to bring the teacher of this class and her representation of the Korean language into a conversation about Orientalism, and to be blunt I do not mean to accuse my teacher of such. However, it's interesting to consider representations across differences, and to wonder who gets what impression of something as immense and unintelligible as a language and its roots. How similar is the impression I got of the language's background to the impression given to a native speaker, and how accurate is that representation compared to the "objective" nature of the historical "facts"? Language, History, and Difference are all deceptively political; I can't help but wonder about their interplay at an intersection like this.

Commentary aside, the impression I was given of the Korean language was, simply put, awesome. According to the telling, King Sejong, a people's king, decided to forsake the exclusive monopoly the Korean aristocracy had on language and literacy by assembling the greatest minds of the age and tasking them with creating a people's language. I'm such a sucker for anti-exclusive populism like that, I couldn't help but love the tale. The Korean language, then, was made to be accessible to all, in order to lower sociopolitical boundaries. Its characters resemble the positions of the throat and mouth necessary to produce the sounds, rather than the esoteric and endless symbolism of a language such as Cantonese, and its grammar and structure have been compared to the elegant simplicity and functionality of binary. Not only did the language come from great origins, it is also said to be at the root of Korea's technological and economic second-coming, as its structure allegedly enables a logic that aids math, science, programming, and all those other fancy things the global economy seems to favor.

I didn't retain a lot of the language itself, but the context from which the language came really stuck with me. It's certainly something I'd like to pick up at some point in my life (if I weren't so bad at learning foreign languages -__- )

And, other than some meals and minutiae, that was my day!