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Though Canada recognized the Republic of Korea in 1949 and fought alongside South Korea in the Korean War, formal diplomatic relations were not established until 1963, partially because of Canadian distaste for the authoritarian ways of Syngman Rhee. However, after Park Chung Hee seized power in 1961, Canada put aside such qualms, and, at the urging of the Park government, agreed to put the Canada-Korea relationship on a formal diplomatic footing. This decision not only increased diplomatic interaction between the two states, both at the bilateral and multilateral levels, it also opened the door for Korean immigration to Canada and led to the gradual expansion of trade linkages between the two countries. Why did Canada change its mind? First of all, Canada was under pressure from both the U.S. and Japan to do so. Second, under Park, South Korea began gaining wider recognition on the world stage. Canada did not want to be one of the few “free world” countries that did not have formal diplomatic relations with the ROK. That might have a negative impact on corporations that wanted to do business with Korea. Third, in one sign that South Korea under Park was more interested in formal ties with Canada than it had been previously, the military government agreed that the Canadian ambassador to Japan could also serve as ambassador to Korea. That concession minimized the financial burden a formal exchange of ambassadors would have placed on the limited budget of Canada’s Department of External Affairs.

Though Canada established formal diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea in 1964, there was no embassy in Seoul until 1973. That year D. Gordon Longmuir was dispatched to Seoul to help open that embassy and serve as First Secretary and Consul, as well as Chargé d’Affaires until a resident ambassador arrived early in 1974. He stayed in Seoul until 1976. Among the more pressing duties of the embassy while he was stationed there was ensuring adequate safeguards for a nuclear reactor Korea was considering buying from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). At first Canada, somewhat distrustful of President Park Chung Hee, was uncertain whether or not to provide Park with such a nuclear power plant. However, after the ROK agreed to ratify the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the deal was signed and Korea eventually went on to purchase a total of four Canadian-designed CANDU nuclear reactors. As a representative of the Canadian government, Longmuir was in the audience on August 15, 1974, when a disgruntled Korean-Japanese attempted to assassinate Park but shot and killed Park’s wife instead. He also watched as, under Park’s leadership, the Korean economy began its rapid march to modernization while the government resisted pressure for democratization. The embassy occasionally had to intervene on behalf of some activist Canadian missionaries who felt that urban workers were being asked to pay too heavy a price for Korea’s economic progress.

In the past decade, the threat of North Korea’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) has challenged South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The Korean peninsula has long been a focal point for tension and rivalry among the various nations concerned about the implications for their own security of developments in Korea. North Korea’s admission of continued nuclear weapons development further heightened tensions in the Northeast Asia region. South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. demanded that North Korea guarantee that it would not produce weapons-grade plutonium from the old reactors. The growing economic vulnerability of North Korea, particularly since the demise the USSR in late 1991, has made the situation in Northeast Asia even more volatile. In an effort to defuse this situation, Six-Party Talks began in Beijing in August 2003, with the U.S., Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, and North Korea participating. In order to evaluate the chance for success in these talks, we need to take into account how the six participants each identify their national interest. We should remember that what North Korea wants most is survival. What South Korea wants is peace. China wants North Korea to remain a buffer between China and the U.S. Russia, too, wants North Korea to survive as an independent state. Japan wants North Korea’s nuclear threat eliminated. And the U.S. also wants North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, Canada watches and hopes that these multilateral talks will lead to a solution that serves the interests of the Korean people, North and South.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been a popular strategy for organizational growth in the world of business. Despite their popularity, more than sixty percent of M&As fail. Research suggests that one of the biggest reasons for such high failure rates is the culture clash taking place during the process of organizational integration. This article examines a unique case of integrating three organizational identities into one in a cross-cultural context. Alcan Taihan Aluminum (ATA) was created when Alcan, a Canadian multinational corporation, merged with Taihan in Korea in 1999. Later on, ATA acquired Koralu, Taihan’s former competitor. The culture clash between the North American expatriates and the Korean managers and employees was characterized as a clash between two organizational cultures: ‘lead and support’ and ‘control and command.’ Alcan’s management practices were rooted in North America, reflecting its cultural orientations such as high individualism, low uncertainty avoidance, and low power distance. On the other hand, the management practices from Taihan and Koralu were rooted in Korean culture characterized by low individualism, high uncertainty avoidance, and high power distance. There were other problems that had to be overcome as well, including problems in communication caused by differences in the first language of the expatriate managers and the Korean employees. Based on interview and archival data, this research examined the effective integration strategies and practices that helped ATA overcome the cultural clash during the first three years of their operation. We also discussed the potential problems and managerial challenges that had emerged during the process of cultural integration.

Yŏm Sangsŏp is known as the greatest realist in the formative period of modern Korean literature, with his novel Samdae (Three Generations; 1931) celebrated as the masterpiece of colonial realism. This article investigates the ideological and institutional constitutions of Yŏm’s realist literature. My analysis of his critical essays relates his aesthetic principle of critical realism to his political affiliation with progressive nationalists, who sympathized with the socialist historical outlook and yet placed an emphasis on national liberation over class conflict. I argue that Yŏm espoused critical realism as a national aesthetic alternative both to the nativism of cultural nationalists and to the proletarian literature of socialist radicals during the Sin’ganhoe period (1927–1931). In my textual analysis, I approach Three Generations not as a faithful portrayal of a contemporary middle-class Korean family but as an allegorical narrative of the nation, in which Yŏm projected the status quo of divided nationalist camps according to his critical perspective. My reading of Three Generations as a patriarchal national narrative leaves a crowd of mostly female minor characters unaccounted for. By observing their correlation to the emerging urban reading public, I inquire into the constitutive influence of popular readership on the maturation of Yŏm’s realist writing style, which he first modeled after those of Western and Japanese novels.

This article locates a critical historical shift in modern subject formation in the intellectual discourses from the incipient stage of the Culture Movement between 1914 and 1922. I argue that re-inscribing the nineteenth century modern European discourses on bio-politics, aesthetics, and cultural racism in the context of anti-colonial nationalism, the nationalist reformist discourses of this period produced the colonial-modern subject that is vitalistic, voluntaristic and sovereign in the delimited sphere of culture and aesthetics. The article also demonstrates that this spiritually and aesthetically sovereign subjectivity is simultaneously imbricated with the Korean nationalists’ adaptation of what Foucault defines as “governmentality,” bio-political discipline of the population, to their program of national strengthening and anti-colonial resistance. The first section of the article discusses how the nationalist discourses translated biological and material vitalism, available from Social Darwinism and liberal ideology, into a spiritual brand of vitalism and voluntarism. The second section deals with the convergence between the ideas of sovereignty of self and aesthetics on the one hand and the role of aesthetics as ethnonationalizing and hegemonizing interpellation on the other. The third section examines how the discourse of cultural racism of modern European origin was joined to the conceptions of the sovereign aesthetic subjectivity and bio-political disciplining of the population by focusing on Yi Kwang-su’s writings. Yi Kwang-su couples the need for modern bio-political disciplining of Koreans with moral and cultural reforms that must take place through the construction of a voluntaristic, autonomous self, which, in turn, can occur only through the education of emotion in the sphere of literature, aesthetics and culture. This reform of sentiment, morality, and behaviors is, for Yi, necessarily a program of racial improvement or racial rehabilitation. The specifically colonial characteristic of Yi Kwang-su’s nationalist program that combines these three types of discourses, spiritual vitalism, Romantic notions of self and art and racial rehabilitation, lies in its culturalism. Cultural(-ized) nationalism, on the one hand, silently assists the material bio-political projects of the colonial state, awaiting to metamorphose into the sovereign agent of their implementation in the political sphere in the post-colonial nation-state.

This article examines Kim Sowŏl’s (1903-1934) lyric poetry as it relates to Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as “affective charge” associated with cult value and appeal to solidarity. I trace the poetic language in Sowŏl’s works as emanating from a female voice that produces pathos, simultaneously opposing the logos of colonial rule and promoting the logic of the Confucian humanism of Korea’s past. As a type of poetry looking back to an oral culture, i.e., “folk poetry”, these poems can be read in two ways: on the one hand, as works capturing the familiar sounds of a dying era, and, thus auratic; on the other, as fixed reproductions of an already bygone era trying to resuscitate the aura which has vanished. I argue that the poet’s position of both economic and socio-political disadvantage as a colonial subject channels affect into han, the ritualized aesthetic marker for foreclosed desire.