WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

The United Kingdom was one of a handful of countries that had diplomatic representation in southern Korea during the American military occupation from 1945-1949. This presentation will explore British diplomacy vis-à-vis Korea, perceptions of the US occupation, and policies towards elections held in southern Korea in 1948 and overseen by the UN Temporary Commission on Korea. Particular attention will be paid to William Kermode, the British diplomatic representative in Seoul.

This paper examines the tensions surrounding South Korea’s 1965 normalization treaty with Japan, highlighting the divide between state-led developmental nationalism and popular anti-Japanese sentiment. Facing declining U.S. aid, the Park Chung Hee government viewed Japanese financial assistance in return for restoring relations with Japan as essential to funding the first Five-Year Plan and consolidating political legitimacy. Japanese loans were distributed to a small group of conglomerates, strengthening the business sector and deepening chaebŏl–state alliances. Yet, popular mass media, such as the Weekly Hankook (1964-), in their coverage of successful businesspeople who benefited from the Japanese aid, erased any reference to collaboration with or reliance on Japan. Instead, the stories emphasized individual entrepreneurs’ anti-Japanese sentiment and nationalist determination. This disjuncture between state policy and popular representation reveals the unresolved colonial memories and legacies in the new era of Cold War alliances.

In 1958 North Korea became a rare case of a developing country manufacturing its own tractors, key to its ambitious plans for a mechanized agricultural sector based on large collective farms. Farming in South Korea, by contrast, remained private, small-scale, and mostly unmechanized, in the context of a broader economic strategy of export-driven industrialization. While North Korea’s agricultural sector experienced three decades of impressive gains, it met serious crisis in the 1990s, resulting in a major famine. In the same period, South Korea experienced rapid economic growth and the development of its own tractor industry, but one geared towards the global market. The story of Korean tractors provides a useful lens for better understanding the respective development trajectories of the two republics, and the consequences of the different ways each were integrated into global transfers of energy commodities, technology, and financial capital during the Cold War.

The failure to purge former colonial-era collaborators, and the central place of former collaborators within the anti-communist ruling elite lie at the center of discussions over historical memory and transitional justice in contemporary South Korea. Advocates for coming to terms with the past have repeatedly cited the cases of France or Germany as successful counterexamples. From this discourse, one may get the impression that South Korea’s continuity was a unique development. But was it? This presentation aims to reposition South Korea’s collaborator issue as a global history of the Cold War. As an Allied-occupied territory heavily affected by the course of events in the early Cold War, this presentation contrasts South Korea with the cases of West Germany, Japan, and Austria to argue that perpetrator/collaborator continuity and related disputes over memory need to be understood in the context of the Cold War.