Two Theories of Self-Determination: The Discourse of Democratic Peoplehood in Colonial Korea

Abstract

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from not only an assimilation ideology that the Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho, on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty.

Introduction

The cultivation of democratic culture is of great urgency for any society struggling to navigate the transition to constitutional democracy. ¹ The likelihood of founding a stable democracy depends not only on the design of the constitution itself but also on the process of democratic imagination that enables those involved in the founding act, as well as those who were not, to transform themselves into a collective body with both the privileges and duties of sovereign authority that are entailments of self-governance. While every democracy undergoes this transformative process, none does so in either a teleological or a unilinear fashion. A democratic people cannot be created ex nihilo; their self-constitution is always already conditioned by what precedes their existence (Lee and Liou 2022; Olson 2016). In her comparative analysis of modern revolutions, Arendt ([1963] 1990) implies that this path-dependent nature of democratic transformation is not necessarily a point of concern to communities whose traditions are broadly compatible with the culture of self-rule, as may have been the case of the American Revolution. A natural extension of this position is that for others without such a resonance between traditions and the founding act, the cultivation of democratic culture would be a puzzling, complex task.

Questions of culture and national aptitude are always trickier than questions of institutions and structures, and therefore they require a more nuanced approach. ² Although it is important to take heed of the danger of reproducing the hierarchical opposition between traditional, nondemocratic “others” and modern, democratic “selves” (Klausen 2010), naïve romanticization of the nondemocratic past is equally concerning. As Craig Calhoun insightfully notes, “it is misleading to approach ‘tradition’ as the opposite of progress, as referring to simple continuity of the past, or as simple backwardness. Tradition is partly backward-looking, a project of preserving and passing on wisdom and right action. But as a project, it is also forward-looking. Traditions must be reconstructed – sometimes purified and sometimes enhanced – whether this is explicitly announced or not” (Calhoun 2007, 21).

This proposal to reconceptualize tradition as a site of progress and innovation is theoretically sound and normatively appealing. It compels us to break away from the false dichotomy of the endogenous model of democratic founding often associated with the “West” and the exogenous model developed to explain the “non-Western” experience of democratic founding. Said (1993) has already pointed out that “the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable; just as Western science borrowed from Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece” (10). That said, it remains unclear how to reconcile traditions, which appear to be nondemocratic, with the principles of democracy as a practice of self-rule. Insofar as traditions are partially retrogressive, to what extent is it possible for a people to recast their nondemocratic tradition in such a way that it would be conducive to reinventing themselves as a self-governing people? The primary purpose of this paper is to answer this question by examining the discourse of democratic peoplehood and self-determination in early twentieth-century colonial Korea.

Prior to the rise of imperial Japan as a new regional hegemon in twentieth-century Northeast Asia, China had enjoyed centuries of political and cultural influence on the Korean peninsula. Chosŏn Korea (1392–1897), the last dynastic kingdom on the peninsula, was part of the Chinese tributary system, and Confucianism was instituted as the sociocultural foundation of the country. Following imperial Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), however, Chosŏn Korea had no option but to consider severing its cultural ties with China. Young Korean intellectuals spearheaded this departure from Confucianism and equated it with nondemocratic rule and a rigid sociocultural hierarchy, which they believed left the peninsula unarmed against colonial powers. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their national identity. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy not only from an assimilation ideology that the Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also from a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. In order to reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule.

For those who are keenly aware of how the problematization of self-determination can be abused as a theoretical tool in the service of colonization (e.g., Getachew 2019; Sultan 2020), the ways in which I frame the discourse of democratic transformation in early twentieth-century colonial Korea as a “problem” would certainly appear worrisome. This point is worth addressing from the outset. Part of the answer pertains to the historical reality of colonial Korea. It is widely known that Western powers acquiesced to imperial Japan’s domination of the peninsula despite Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech in 1918. ³ For most anticolonial thinkers in Korea at the time, the outcome of the speech was undoubtably disappointing because they considered the speech an international consensus on the principle of self-determination (Song 2012, 197–204). Moreover, disheartened by the lack of grassroots movements and of the general public’s cooperation to their calls for collective action, these anticolonial thinkers were divided into those who remained relatively more optimistic about the actualization of self-determination in the peninsula and the others who grew pessimistic about such a possibility (Yi 1993, 153). The Japanese colonial ideology was not a fabrication that could simply be dismissed. Some of the most ardent supporters of self-determination today could become colonial apologists tomorrow. The mere existence of a revolutionary people was insufficient. It was the role expected of colonized intellectuals to invent and declare this people as the self-governing authority of their nation in a hierarchical world order where, in Getachew’s (2019) words, national independence was “a precarious achievement” (29).

Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. Accordingly, this article proceeds in four sections, the first of which demonstrates the importance of a culture of self-rule to democratic foundings and subsequently highlights the complexities of cultivating one in the context of colonial Korea. The second section recasts Yi’s theory of national reconstruction as a theory of anti-assimilation. In so doing, I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. In the third section, I contend that Cho sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty. The final section focuses on the implication of their political thoughts for contemporary debates about the role of intellectuals in the politics of founding. Drawing upon both canonical and contemporary writings on the “inventedness” of the people, I develop two distinct images of the legislator, Yi as a sculptor and Cho as a narrator, and argue why the latter is more democratic than the former.

The Complexity of Peoplehood in the Colonial World

To caution against populist movements in nascent constitutional democracies, recent scholarship in constitutional studies and democratic theory proposes that we (a) shift the locus of constitutional legitimacy from the sovereign people to the procedure and (b) anchor the temporality of its legitimacy in a promise regarding a collective project that extends to the future rather than in a single revolutionary act that occurred in the past (e.g., Arato 2016, 2017; Chambers 2004, 2017, 2018; Olson 2007; Tekin 2016). Andrew Arato lucidly summarizes this transition in the following passage:

As for popular sovereignty, if one still wishes to retain the idea of bodies, then it must be the multiple rather than the two or even three bodies of “the” people. It must involve the legalization of each supposed body. But the survival of the definitive article “the” even here indicates the danger that a temporary incarnation expressing one valid perspective will be propagated and accepted as the only valid one. . . . Thus it may be best to go beyond incarnation altogether, as Lefort and Habermas both repeatedly suggest, and replace the idea of popular sovereignty by that of a democracy that can be defined only in procedural terms, the notion of the people in the singular by a model of pluralistic legitimation. (2016, 280–81; emphasis added)

A key theoretical insight of this procedural understanding of democratic founding is that the problem of legitimate founding becomes a dilemma only if one fixates on a snapshot of the constitutionalization process at a particular moment. To borrow Habermas’s (2001) expression, the legitimacy deficit that exists at the moment of founding when a new constitution is written and ratified is “the understandable expression of the future-oriented character, or openness, of the democratic constitution” (774). As Habermas stresses in his later works on constitutionalism, the ambition to create a constitution that embodies democratic ideals of a free and equal polity is virtually impossible to achieve in a single moment or act. The issue at hand is not only one of establishing institutional frameworks to guarantee a trajectory toward a more inclusive democratic community, but also one of continuously accommodating societal changes to address emerging collective concerns and recurring disputes (Chambers 2018, 260). In this respect, constitutionalization (including the act of founding) entails a complex, ongoing process of legitimation that operates through normative and legal registers (Habermas [1973] 1975, [1992] 1998). From the normative perspective, public participation in the constitution-making process gradually augments and reinforces the legitimacy of a constitution. The legitimacy of a constitution is not based simply on participants’ evaluations of the constitution but on the rigor and inclusivity of deliberations regarding the constitutional order. Indeed, a vitally important trend in contemporary constitution making has been a focus on the inclusion of citizens (Bernal 2017, 142). From the legal perspective, the legitimacy of a constitution resides in a set of procedures, one that embodies the values of freedom and equality sustaining the durability of democratic constitutions. Without these legal frameworks that both reinforce and sustain each constitutional order, “popular uprisings”—though they may invoke the authority of “the sovereign people” in the constitution—could too easily jeopardize political and civil liberties. For precisely this reason, Habermas underscores the co-originality of democracy (the normative) and law (the legal), the two pillars of constitutional democracy.

As a novel theoretical approach to the problem of constitutional legitimation in emerging democracies, the proceduralist approach to constitution-making process is a highly compelling contribution to political theory. This multistage constitution-making process provides conceptual resources and practical proposals for reconceiving the founding act not as a logical impasse, but as a temporally extended, future-oriented project. As Chambers (2018) writes, “constitutionalisation is understood instead as a disaggregated process over time that could have any number of institutional articulations and manifestations, for example, referenda, constituent assemblies, online crowdsourcing or no extraordinary procedures at all” (257). Although nascent constitutional democracies may lack legitimacy at the outset due to practical and theoretical difficulties entailed in the process of constitution making, they nevertheless can augment their legitimacy over time through a process of self-correction and inclusion.

When approached from a more empirically informed perspective, however, this proceduralist paradigm appears less promising. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Ochoa Espejo (2011) demonstrates that the incipient Mexican state could not initiate the process of constitutionalization in 1821 in part because the so-called Mexican people did not view themselves as a collective body (104–105). Similarly, Leigh Jenco, in Making the Political, explores the challenge of cultivating a democratic culture in the absence of properly functioning constitutional institutions. Jenco (2010) argues that in societies without previously established democratic practices and institutions, democratic peoplehood must be cultivated from within through “the gradual reorientation of personal practices and outlooks toward unprecedented, society-wide ways of living and governing” (5). Drawing on the political writings of Zhang Shizhao, Jenco raises the possibility that individual action may be capable of inaugurating the founding of a democratic regime where it had never previously existed. This question of democratic transformation, according to Jenco, is rarely discussed in the mature democracies of northern Europe and North America because “many of the necessary institutions and shared practices of democracy are already there” (ibid., 6). In the early Republican Chinese case, as Jenco emphatically puts it, “political regimes meant nothing without the commitment of the people who both founded and sustained them. . . . At the same time, without a tradition of democratic self-rule, the Chinese people were bereft of the practices that could motivate and sustain a self-ruling government” (ibid., 49; emphasis added).

Understood this way, the proceduralist project—one that aims to create a virtuous circle between the maturation of constitutional institutions and the cultivation of democratic peoplehood—is at best a work in process. Institutional changes that systemize constitutional democracy do not necessarily result in or guarantee a corresponding transformation of the subjugated people into active agents capable of protecting and exercising effectively their rights and duties as citizens. Especially for ordinary people living in societies without sufficient experience of democratic self-rule, they must first rediscover themselves as the sovereign people and then authorize themselves as capable of practicing the act of self-governance. Chambers (2018) eloquently expresses this point: “politics (in the narrow sense) cannot create a civic culture ex nihilo. . . . One can write as many constitutions as one wants, but without some underlying lifeworld purchase for the ideas contained in the constitution, it is not likely to take root and serve its purpose of structuring democratic action” (261).

This necessity of cultivating a culture of self-rule was the issue that animated the discourse of democratic founding in early twentieth-century colonial Korea. Upon the founding of Chosŏn Korea in 1392, the ruling class gradually replaced Buddhism with Confucianism as the governing ideology of their newly found regime. Confucianism permeated all levels of society and continued to function as the sociocultural foundation of the country up until the mid-nineteenth century. Only around the 1880s did foreign educated intellectuals dispatched to America and Japan begin to seriously problematize Confucianism as part of their project of modernization (Kim 2009, 16; Song 2011, 66). Taking a critical stance toward the government’s failure to protect the country from the imperial Japanese intervention in the year of 1876, these young reformers firmly believed that “the culture targeted for expurgation was not that of the immediate colonizing power, as is so often the case with colonies of the West, but that of its neighbor, China” (Schmid 2002, 11). Along with this momentum from above, popular uprisings from below further accelerated the nation’s transition away from the centuries of Confucian rule. Following the Peasant Revolution of 1894, the Korean caste system finally collapsed, and the People’s Assembly of 1898 was established. As the first civil group to encourage commoners’ participation in politics, the Assembly demanded a constitutional monarchy in which commoners and the emperor would govern the country together. The prospect of the nation’s democratic transition, however, became very remote following the enforcement of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty of 1910. Korea soon became a protectorate of imperial Japan and was deprived of the right to administer its internal affairs. In early twentieth-century Korea, a pessimistic outlook for national independence was widespread among anticolonial intellectuals (Cho 1979b, 67).

In the face of this national crisis, the March First Movement (Samirundong), one of the earliest public displays of Korean mass resistance during Japanese colonial rule, declared commoners, not the defunct imperial family or the Japanese emperor, to be the new sovereign authority of the nation. The movement was instigated by thirty-three Korean independence activists who drafted the Proclamation of Korean Independence (Kimidongnipsŏnŏnsŏ) and organized a mass demonstration in Seoul on March 1, 1919, the day of the funeral procession for Emperor Kojong. On the appointed day, the thirty-three leaders, with the hope of bringing international pressure on the imperial government to end colonial rule in Korea, signed and distributed their proclamation and had coconspirators read it in townships throughout the country. Initially targeting only students and independence activists, the movement rapidly caught the ears of common people, including merchants, peasants, and workers. The suppressed anti-Japanese sentiments of the Korean people were released in one great explosion, and mass demonstrations took place throughout the country, forming one of the largest national protest rallies against foreign domination in Korean history.

Inspired by the March First Movement, a group of independence activists gathered in Shanghai, China, to establish a provisional government for national independence. The first meeting was convened on April 10, 1919, and among notable figures, Cho So-ang, with the help of Yi Kwang-su and Shin Ik-hi (1894–1965), drafted the first constitutional document of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. After extensive discussion and multiple rounds of revision, the “Provisional Charter of the ROK” (Taehanmin’gung imsihŏnjang) came into existence on April 11, 1919. Inheriting the spirit of the March First Movement, the 1919 Provisional Charter declared the establishment of the first democratic republic in Korean history.

At the same time, political movements to reinstate the system of Confucian monarchy persisted even after the March First Movement (Sŏ 2012, 77–78). One of the most influential organizations was the Great Unification Association (Taedongdan), the members of which claimed that Confucian monarchy could function as the symbol of national solidarity, and they attempted to install one in colonial Korea (O 2009, 282–83; Sŏ 2012, 77). Although it is unclear whether the Great Unification Association had any substantial impact on Yi and Cho when they were drafting the 1919 Provisional Charter, Article 8 does manifest a concern about the continued influence of the Confucian rule on the domestic population: “the Republic of Korea provides preferential treatment to the imperial family” (Han 1999, 45). Given the evidence that the Confucian analogy between the parent–child relationship and the emperor–commoner relationship had been deployed by the imperial family throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (Kim 2009, 214; Song 2011, 60–66), the special status of the imperial family in the Charter was clearly in conflict with the proclamation of democratic founding (O 2009, 290).

As the primary drafters of the Charter, both Yi and Cho found this persistence of Confucianism deeply problematic, for they believed it would render the Korean people vulnerable to the colonial ideology of assimilation and developmentalism. As has been widely noted, Japanese colonial ideology was largely influenced by the French model, one in which the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of progress were combined together to serve as a justification for assimilation policies (Belmessous 2013, 3; Han 2004, 185–95). The imperial Japanese government implemented a set of colonial policies by benchmarking this model in a belief that “the Korean people might share similar origins with the Japanese people, but their ineffective government of the past centuries created a gap that had to be narrowed before the Japanese could accept Koreans as legitimate members of the Japanese Empire” (Caprio 2009, 86). For anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century colonial Korea, the principle of self-determination was not necessarily self-evident, and the future of the nation appeared bleak. The simple presence of a revolutionary force alone was not enough. The responsibility fell upon the intellectuals in colonial Korea to (re)invent and declare the entirety of the Korean people as the sovereign authority of their nation.

Yi Kwang-su’s Theory of National Reconstruction

Yi Kwang-su’s reputation in the history of Korean political thought is at best a complicated one. Yi in his later years actively collaborated with the Japanese government and even adopted the Japanese name of Kayama Mitsuro in 1939 (Lee 1992, 83). Adducing pro-Japanese activists as such, some commentators assert that Yi’s writings manifest his inclination toward Japanese colonial ideology from early on, even though he tenaciously repudiated an accusation that he betrayed the Korean nation in his post-independence writings. Those who are more favorable to him shift attention to his participation in independence movements in his early years, pointing out that he produced numerous short stories, poems, religious and philosophical commentaries, and essays on the future of Korea. Whether we follow the former or the latter view, it is crucial not to dismiss all his earlier writings as pretexts of treachery to his own nation.

As Skinner (2002) emphasizes, “to understand what any given writer may have been doing in using some particular concept or argument, we need first of all to grasp the nature and range of things that could recognizably have been done by using that particular concept, in the treatment of that particular theme, at that particular time” (77). We cannot fully appreciate the originality of individual thinkers’ ideas and arguments unless we situate them within their intellectual contexts, and this is especially so with regard to Yi’s most famous essay, “A Theory of National Reconstruction [Minjokkaejoron],” published in The Great Opening (Kaebyŏk) three years after the March First Movement. If Yi (1993) had turned himself into a colonial apologist by this time, why did he insist in this essay that his vision of national reconstruction coincided with the view of independence activists in Shanghai, China (89)? To what extent would it have been reasonable for him to write such an “evidently pro-Japanese” text only shortly after the founding of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in 1919? To answer these questions, we need to read this deeply controversial text in conjunction with his other writings as well as his contemporaries’.

Let me start by revisiting one of his earliest political writings, “A Theory of a New Mode of Living [Sinsaenghwallon]” of 1918, which was published in The Daily News (Maeilsinbo). The primary target of critique in the essay is Confucianism, which, according to Yi, had been the mode of domination and oppression throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (233–234). Arguing that every great philosophical idea and thought has originated from and thus is most relevant in its immediate historical and cultural contexts, he condemns those who view Confucianism as the readily available and most appropriate form of sociopolitical precepts for the Korean people: “Our ancestors not only failed to acquire deep understanding of Confucius’ and Mencius’s teachings, but extracted from their writings only most cited principles to follow and even forced us to act on them” (235).

With this critical remark, he goes on to analyze what he considers the ten evils of Confucianism in Korean history, including the dismissal of economics and science; the obsession with rituals; entrenched sociocultural hierarchies; and the docility of commoners (235–264). “A Theory of a New Mode of Living” is committed to examining each of these “evils” and proposes through it an alternative, democratic form of political life for the Korean people. In the first issue of The Independent (Tongnipshinmun), published by the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea on 21 August, 1919, Yi further clarifies this vision of national reconstruction:

Korean people used to enjoy an honorable history and throughout it embodied a valiant, noble national character, one that is being destroyed by the tyranny of Confucianism and of the Japanese. Though our land is taken away [by the Japanese], we should not forsake the cultural inheritance from our ancestors. . . . The fifth mission [of The Independent] is to transform ourselves into a new people, a reconstructed or resurrected nation, by promoting our national history, fostering our national characteristics, and learning new ideas and thought. (Cited in Ch’oe 2013, 268; emphasis added)

In “A Theory of National Reconstruction,” he continues this sharp critique of Confucianism and condemns those who blame maladministration as the sole cause of Korea’s fall (1993, 119). He contends that accusing the government elites of maladministration is as meaningless as praising the British and Americans for their just rule. Although fully agreeing with his contemporaries’ diagnosis that maladministration was clearly the most direct and prominent cause of the fall of the nation, he demands his readers to look beneath the surface. He claims that, if the Korean people “had an affinity for liberty, as the British do, and equality, like the French” (110), they would not have tolerated the untrustworthy ruling class. As much as the ruling class brought ruin to the country, he further argues, so did ordinary Koreans who acquiesced to their behavior. Citing Rousseau’s dictum that “[one] must become a person first, before becoming a politician, soldier, or minister” (155), he thus concludes that every project of political change, including the founding of an authentic democracy, must begin with the Korean people transforming themselves into a new people.

This incisive critique of Confucianism raises a challenging question of which Yi himself is fully aware. In “A Theory of a New Mode of Living,” Yi problematizes the Confucian principle that “the way of life is fixed and unchanging” (228) and exhorts the Korean people to develop a new mode of living, but the issue here is that if, as he asserts, centuries of Confucian rule in Korea had domesticated ordinary Koreans to conform to the nondemocratic rule, would not the likelihood of cultivating of a democratic culture be slim (113)? Yi discovers the answer to this question in the writings of prominent French sociologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931). In The Psychology of Peoples, Le Bon (1898) makes a distinction between fundamental national characteristics, which are permanent, and secondary national characteristics, which are flexible and amendable (17–24). Applying this distinction in exploring the possibility of democratic transformation in colonial Korea, Yi (1993) stresses that fundamental national characteristics of the Korean people are by no means inferior to those of Anglo-Saxons or Latins (114). In his view, the only difference between the Korean people and Europeans is that the former’s secondary national characteristics have been contaminated by Confucianism.

To a reader familiar with The Psychology of Peoples, it should be easy to notice that Yi is reading Le Bon against himself. Inheriting the core premises of social Darwinism, Le Bon in this book provides an explanation as to why only certain nations have succeeded in modernizing themselves (Betts 1961, 67). His distinction between fundamental and secondary national characteristics is an analytic tool that serves this purpose:

To elucidate the causes of these changes, we will remind the student in the first place that a psychological species is formed, as is an anatomical species, of a very small number of irreducible, fundamental characteristics around which are grouped accessory characteristics which are modifiable and changeable. The breeder who transforms the apparent structure of an animal, or the gardener who modifies the aspect of a plant to such a degree that it is unrecognizable to the unpracticed eye, has not affected to the slightest extent the fundamental characteristics of the species; all they have done has been to influence the accessory characteristics. In spite of all the artifices employed, the fundamental characteristics always tend to reappear with each new generation. (Le Bon 1898, 18–19; emphasis added)

Postulating this immutability of human nature, Le Bon claims that “the idea, still widespread, that education can achieve this result [the transformation of inferior peoples into superior peoples], is one of the most baneful illusions that the theoreticians of pure reason have ever brought into existence” (37). For him, insofar as Asians are ranked as “intermediate races” in accordance with his classified racial groups, the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn would be that they will not be able to civilize themselves.

The originality of Yi’s theory of national reconstruction lies in the distinct ways in which it challenges this Le Bonian Eurocentrism. In the same passage, Le Bon adds that “the mental constitution possesses fundamental characteristics as immutable as the anatomical characteristics of animal species, but it also possesses accessory characteristics that are easily modified. It is these latter characteristics that may easily be changed by environment, circumstances, education and various other factors” (19). Yi juxtaposes this passage against Le Bon’s previous quote on the immutability of human nature to make a case for the Korean people’s transformation into a democratic people. According to him, there exists ample evidence of the Korean people’s aptitude for self-rule (1993, 118–23). Referring to a variety of sources—including modern Korean history, writings of Chinese thinkers on the lives of the Korean people, and travel journals written by foreign missionaries—he writes that “when we look into the life of ordinary Koreans, it clearly manifests the spirit of self-reliance and independence” (121). He thus affirms that if the Korean people could succeed in reforming their secondary, Confucian characteristics, the success of democratic transformation would be nearer than ever.

Although Yi’s proposal may sound persuasive at first glance, note that it is silent regarding the detrimental effects of colonial rule on the Korean people. Given the fact that Yi himself criticized not only Confucian tradition but also Japanese colonial rule in his previous writings, this radical absence of the colonizer in his reconstructive project is certainly puzzling. It is thus not surprising at all that Yi’s contemporaries expressed their strong discontent toward “A Theory of National Reconstruction.” From their standpoint, Yi’s seemingly qualified approach to the future of the Korean nation was fraught with compromises and rationalizations of the colonial reality (Ch’oe 2020, 150). As Ellie Yunjung Choi writes, Yi’s (2013) “distaste for radical movements led him and other cultural nationalists to emphasize gradualism, sound organization, and planning in the realm of culture, a preparatist formula that critics have denounced as politically conservative or, worse, fascist” (4).

These considerations notwithstanding, as Ch’oe (2013) and Lee (2021) propose, it is possible to construe Yi’s theory of national reconstruction as an argument in favor of national independence. Interacting with Japanese intellectuals since his years studying abroad in Tokyo, Japan, Yi was very much familiar with the Japan–Korea common origin thesis (Nisendōsoron), one that was widely accepted by mainstream Japanese intellectuals and government authorities during the Taishō era (Caprio 2009, 83; Han 2004, 190). This quasi-anthropological logic was an attempt to rationalize how Japanese colonial rule promoted, rather than inhibited, the birth of a democratic people on the peninsula. According to this thesis, the Japanese and the Korean people shared the same ethnic roots, but while the former enlightened themselves and succeeded in establishing a modern nation-state, the latter failed to form a unified will and to nurture an ability to govern themselves. Thus, the latter could actualize the ideal of self-determination only through its assimilation into the former. Consider, for instance, the following passage in which Torii Ryūzō (1870–1953), a respected Japanese anthropologist at the time, refutes the argument in favor of Korea’s independence:

Some claim, from the point of view of self-determination, that we must differentiate Koreans from the mainlanders [the Japanese] and allow Korea’s independence. I think this is a flawed argument, for the Japanese and the Korean people are of one and the same ethnic group. . . . Insofar as the Japanese and the Korean people are of the same ethnic group, the latter’s incorporation into the former is justifiable. Only through this unification will the purpose of self-determination be sufficiently fulfilled for the first time [in the history of Korea]. (Cited in Han 2004, 196)

Seen against this backdrop, one can spot an anticolonialist side to Yi’s theory of national reconstruction. Recall that Yi concurs with Le Bon that fundamental national characters are invariable, and the extension of this position is that the Japan–Korea common origin thesis is ultimately futile. The logic is the following: (1) fundamental, invariable characteristics of the Korean nation are distinct from those of the Japanese. (2) The Japanese can thus only shape the secondary characteristics of the Korean people. (3) Then, the assimilation of the Korean people into the Japanese is impossible insofar as “the fundamental characteristics always tend to reappear with each new generation” (Le Bon 1898, 19). In this line of reasoning, one can recast Yi as an advocate of democratic founding in colonial Korea instead of as a colonial apologist. For him, the most practical method of national independence may have been a gradual decoupling of Confucian tradition, which in turn could enable the Korean people to (re)invent themselves as a democratic people comparable to the Japanese and other European powers.

Cho So-ang’s Theory of Democratic Transformation

This generous interpretation of Yi’s political thought nonetheless fails to fully salvage Yi from the accusation that his adherence to developmentalism rendered the idea of Japan’s tutelage relevant and even legitimate in the context of colonial Korea. In fact, as mentioned in the previous section, Yi collaborated with Japanese assimilationists in his later years. They found Yi’s preparatist position compatible with their own insofar as it could have been construed as a possible justification for Japanese “protection” of the Korean people from Western colonial powers (Ch’oe 2013, 277). Yi’s contemporaries vehemently criticized Yi’s national reconstruction thesis precisely because of this danger.

As the codrafter of the 1919 Provisional Charter, Cho was in agreement with Yi that Confucian tradition had been the primary root of perpetuating nondemocratic rule in the country. Consider the following passage written by Cho during his undergraduate years at Meiji University in which he juxtaposes democracy with Confucianism: “the presence of democratic energy is the prerequisite of the founding act, but the Korean people have been intoxicated by the tyranny [of Confucianism] for five centuries. Although the ruling class lacked a clear vision for the future, the ruled was forced into utter silence, which resulted in national maladies we currently suffer from. . .” (Cho 1979b, 207). Cho’s critique of Confucianism continues in his later writings. In the “Historical Foundation of the Korean Revolution [Han’guk’yŏngmyŏngŭi Yŏksajŏng T’odae],” he denounces the previous government for using Confucian ideas as a pretext for retaining the caste system, one that subordinated commoners to the ruling elites “on the basis of ancestries, clothing, manners, language, etc.” (Cho 2019, 105). In another passage from the same essay, he goes as far as to contend that Confucianism is merely a branch of foreign studies (126). On the issue of national origin, Cho postulates the existence of primordial nationhood, as Yi does. In the “Sketch of Korea’s Modern History and Cultural History [Han’guk kŭndaesa mit munhwasa sogaemun],” Cho claims that the origin of the Korean nation dates back to Tan’gun period (2333 to 1122 BCE):

Four thousand years ago in ancient Korea, nine tribes commonly called the Koo-I, with the tribal names of Kyun, U, Bhang, Whang, Paik, Chuk, Hyun, Poong, and Yang, were the aborigines. . . . These wild tribes chose Tangoon, a very wise man, to be their king. When Tangoon became their king, he taught them the relation of king and subject, the rite of marriage, the art of cooking, and the science of house building. (1979a, 383–84) ⁴

The reference to this primordial nationhood, along with the antagonization of imperial Japan, repeatedly appears throughout Cho’s political pamphlets as a means to reject Japanese assimilation ideology, on the one hand, and Sinocentrism, on the other hand. ⁵

Although both Cho and Yi were likewise committed to the project of transitioning away from a Confucian society to a democratic community, they differed in some fundamental and distinct ways with regard to the question of how to attain such a goal. The most prominent instance of disagreement was about the performative meaning of the March First Movement. In contrast to Yi (1993), who rather hastily dismissed the March First Movement as a disorder without its participants having any concrete sense of a democratic identity (91), Cho (2019) celebrated it as the sign of pouvoir constituant in action (142). Indeed, the people marching on the street that day were qualitatively different from sin-min (or the subject of the emperor) in the National Polity of the Great Han (Taehan’gukkukche). ⁶ The people on the street declared themselves as the sovereign authority of a constitutional democracy to come, thus rejecting the label of a blind multitude imposed on them by Emperor Kojong in 1899. For Cho, it was a clear sign that the commoners identified themselves with the self-governing people, not with the defunct dynasty, thus presenting themselves as an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty.

This observation needs some careful unpacking. After all, to what extent would it have been possible for a democratic culture to emerge from more than five centuries of Confucian tradition defined by the culture of domination and docility? In the “Historical Foundation of the Korean Revolution,” Cho answers this question by proposing an alternative reading of modern Korean history. According to him, the history of oppression can be reread as the history of self-transformation. While the collective action in the year of 1919 failed to bring about national independence, it finally completed the longue-durée process of forming a countertradition, one that could function as the foundation of democratic transformation in colonial Korea. Consider the following passage in which Cho (2019) provides lengthy historical explanations of how this countertradition has emerged in modern Korean history in the span of five decades (135–41):

To sum up, the Korean revolution, though first initiated by the imperial family, subsequently brought in aristocrats, intellectuals, students, laborers, and peasants. Only through such an expansion could the revolution enter the current stage of an organized movement by laborers and peasants. When it comes to the strategies and tactics of the revolution, they encompass suicides, righteous armies, associations, protests, propaganda, and direct action. . . . In terms of political ideology, while initially driven by the spirit of vengeance, the revolution eventually evolved into an emancipatory movement, one that seeks the restoration of sovereignty, democratic independence, and the liberation of all subjugated classes. . . . Upholding the principle of democratic constitutionalism, the revolution now heads toward the right direction to establish neosocialism (ibid., 140–141).

Though this passage is historically particular and theoretically intricate, it is relatively easy to distill from it the gist of Cho’s argument—the March First Movement represents the culmination of a democratic transformation, one that unified the Korean people for the purpose of structuring collective action. This countertradition at inception was exclusive, disorganized, and reactionary but in its fruition embodied the principle of inclusiveness, harmony, and voluntarism. Under the banner of democratic self-rule, a population previously hierarchized and divided converged on the street to usher in a new political reality. Interpreting the performative meaning of the collective action in this way, Cho declares that those who participated in the March First Movement marked the apex of democratic action, even though it was ultimately suppressed by the imperial Japanese armed forces. As he puts it in a repentant tone, “previously I lamented our nation’s lack of unity, but this was my premature, misguided judgment. The March First Movement taught me that ‘We, the Koreans’ were the most unified nation when seized the moment of mental maturity” (1979b, 67).

If one finds this revisionist reading of modern Korean history reminiscent of Karl Marx’s idea that class consciousness is the result of immiseration and oppression, that is an apt observation. Cho was quite familiar with Marxist ideas and philosophy as early as in his undergraduate years in Japan through his interaction with Chinese intellectuals, such as Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and Dai Jitao (1890–1949), and he became a critical reader of Marx-Leninism by the time of the March First Movement (Cho 1979a, 213; Kim 2015, 38; Hong, 2014). Although Cho does not mention Marx’s name explicitly in his discussion of the notion of class struggle, one can easily see how Marx’s political thought is at play in his post–March First Movement writings. According to Cho (1979a), landless Korean peasants had been deprived of fundamental human rights by land-owning nobles throughout 2000 years of national history (213–16). The nobles had monopolized the means of production and forced the peasants to pay double taxes, first to the landlord and second to the government. In making this argument, Cho (1979a) sharply contrasts the land-owning nobles with the landless peasants to emphasize that the former exploited the latter’s labor, which in turn prohibited the latter’s access to politics and education (216).

That said, it is crucial to note that Cho (2019) does not consider the collective identity of the Korean people that emerged from the longue-durée process democratic action to be identical to either class consciousness or national consciousness (143). Rather, he adds another layer of complexity to his Marxist historiography with an argument that it was through the shared experience of colonial oppression that class consciousness and national consciousness merged together, thus forming the foundation of a democratic culture in Korea. Recall that in the “Historical Foundation of the Korean Revolution,” Cho holds that the landowning nobles and the landless peasants initially struggled over political, economic, and educational rights, but as imperial Japan enslaved every single Korean in the country, they had no option but to form a coalition together against the common enemy. In the later part of the same essay, he provides a variety of statistical data that represents the detrimental effect of colonial oppression on the Korean people in the realm of politics, education, and economics, including the number of Korean inmates from 1910 to 1929, the number of protests that took place in Seoul in the year of 1929, and the number of Korean emigrants from 1919 to 1927 (Cho 2019, 39–50). According to Cho, these figures merit attention insofar as they demonstrate that Japanese oppression resulted in the polar opposite of what it intended to achieve. The more imperial Japan oppressed the Korean people in the political, educational, and economic spheres, the more they single-handedly sought self-determination: curtailing freedom of expression increased the number of thought criminals; Japanizing the education system begot academic boycotts; and economic exploitation left farmers and laborers no choice but to join the independence movement. Arguably, this reading of emerging democratic consciousness from within the subjugated people resonates with the view later articulated by Frantz Fanon – there is no pre-existing democratic consciousness or democratic culture, which means that it is shared struggle against oppression and domination itself that gives birth to democratic peoplehood (Fanon [1961] 2005).

To be clear, I unequivocally reject the account that Cho found colonial experience to be an indispensable condition of collective action in colonial Korea. Rather my claim is that he believed that the Korean people themselves, through the shared commitment to overcome both the chains of Confucianism and of colonialism, began to develop a collective consciousness as a self-governing political agent. In this respect, it was not that imperial Japan as an external force was a necessary condition of the Korean case of democratic transformation but that in the presence of imperial Japan the Korean people formed a collective identity as the sovereign people:

The Korean nation has been exploited and trampled under hideous despotism for ages. Although the Korean people must liberate [themselves] from despotism and create anew politics, laws, economy, education, and religion, they are still chained by them. . . . Upon the annexation, the mass of the revolution exponentially increased under the tyranny of the foreign nation [imperial Japan]. In other words, prior to the fall of our country, each social class pursued its own distinct group interests. However, as every Korean was enslaved together upon the national crisis, they had no option but to form a coalition to expel the foreign nation and seek solutions for the entirety of the Korean people (Cho 2019, 101–102).

Cho interpreted the voice of the March First Movement as an unmistakable desire to overthrow the tyranny of the Confucian rule and the colonial reality all together. Although Cho admits that the collective action in the year of 1919 was initiated by a coalition of religious leaders, he stresses that its driving force was grounded on the Korean people’s desire for self-rule. This understanding of the March First Movement aligns with recent scholarship on modern Korean constitutional history that challenges popular interpretations of the event as a singular moment of national consciousness. While the March First Movement indeed occupies the center of modern Korean history as the moment of collective action against colonialism, it must be emphasized that the entire movement was also about the ideal of self-rule. As Hahm and Kim eloquently put it, “the organizers of the protest [the March First Movement] decided to read the 1919 Declaration and to spark mass demonstrations throughout the land. For a document proclaimed to a funeral crowd, the text was conspicuously silent with regard to the monarchy and utterly lacking in nostalgia or any restorative outlook. Independence was being declared in the name of the ‘self-governing people’ of Korea, not the defunct dynasty. That is why the spirit of the March First Movement could be deployed as an expression of the ardent desire for not only national independence but also democratic self-rule” (Hahm and Kim 2015, 172, emphasis added).

A Sculptor or a Narrator: Two Images of the Legislator

In his discussion of the rise of popular sovereignty in modern England and America, Morgan (1989) argues that the sovereign people are never a pregiven, static entity but a political actor to be invented through an interpretative enterprise of elite intellectuals. One can also find this idea of the inventedness of “the people” in canons of Western political thought, such as the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In The Social Contract, Rousseau famously introduces a wise legislator whose intervention is constitutive of the making of a democratic people at the moment of founding and provides several examples of this mysterious figure—including Numa, Moses, and Lycurgus. Although the historical contexts of these notable founders differ in important ways, their primary role is quite similar: to inspire a sense of collective identity in prepolitical people through the act of lawgiving. For Rousseau (2011), this collective identification would enable the transformation of prepolitical people into “the people” (69). That said, this godlike figure cannot dominate or monopolize the entire process of democratic transformation and its subsequent modifications. Rather, his role is “to read the text of collective action and shared experience, hear its underlying meaning, and interpret the historically conditioned endeavors of the people in their true light” (Tekin 2016, 67), and he must leave the picture once the act of law giving is completed.

Critical commentators of Rousseau have pointed out that this constructive intervention of the legislator does not necessarily yield an ideal outcome (e.g., Connolly 2004; Honig 2001; Villa 2017). For instance, Dana Villa demonstrates that it is the reliance upon the distinction between “teachers” and “taught” in the work of Rousseau that ironically generates civic passivity and ignorance. This in turn creates conditions favorable to the emergence of an undemocratic and illiberal populism (Villa 2017). Drawing upon the contemporary case of constitutional refoundings in Latin America, Bernal (2017) also observes that the direct appeal to and representation of the sovereign will of the people is a double-edged sword (156–58). In this respect, intellectuals involved in the fouding act are often expected to take up a complex role of the legislator, one that requires sensitivity to both the actual people and constitutional principles.

In the case of Yi and Cho, they did not leave the picture as Rousseau’s legislator did but took up a similar role of drafting a constitution in the name of the Korean people and through it sought to encourage them to transform themselves into a democratic people. In the case of Yi, he discovered what he believed to be the essence of Korean national identity from the past and proposed it as the foundation of democratic transformation. As long as the Korean people could continue cultivating their authentic selves, democratic founding would be possible, Yi maintained. That said, he was largely dogmatic and inattentive to the performative meaning of the actual people acting in concert to claim self-determination and thus resorted to the essentialist understanding of national identities in such a way that raised more questions than it solved. As mentioned in the previous section, he was critical of the March First Movement, although the people on the street that day were perhaps the democratic people he had been waiting for. Furthermore, he failed to take into consideration that grassroots movements in the past, especially the Peasant Revolution of 1894, succeeded in pressuring the previous government to implement egalitarian measures for the common people. However enlightening his vision of democratic transformation may have been, he too hastily dismissed the voice of ordinary people. Regardless of his intention, such a project of national reconstruction imposed a certain idealized image of democratic peoplehood on the actual people, carving out what could have been problematic of them and only keeping in them what would have been promising. In this respect, he was at best a meticulous sculptor and at worst a misguided idealist.

In contrast, while Cho in early years was critical of the Korean people, he soon acknowledged that the “problem” of self-determination was in fact of his own and did not hesitate to apologize that he had misjudged the Korean people’s democratic aptitude shortly following the March First Movement. Rather than attempting to rectify the perceived lack of democratic consciousness among the Korean people, Cho assumed the role of a narrator, thereby developing a historical narrative of those who participated in the March First Movement. To his eyes, the Korean people appeared from time to time docile and subservient but at the same time autonomous and self-sufficient. To a certain extent, he even understood the Korean people as a liminal entity in that they seemed to oscillate between being the blind masses to be guided by a wise legislator and being a self-motivated agent of their own action. On the one hand, to borrow Marx’s (1978) metaphor of the French peasantry in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”, the subjugated may act as if they were merely a sack of potatoes—a homogeneous body without any collective consciousness. On the other hand, insofar as the possibility of microresistance is latent in any mode of oppression, the sheer collective presence of individuals in the name of the sovereign people is always already political. While Cho’s reflective attitude enabled him to comprehend this liminal nature of the very people whose collective will he was hoping to represent, Yi’s idealist vison resulted in a nonidealistic reality of colonial apologetics. These two images of the legislator, Yi as a sculptor and Cho as a narrator, each mirrored in its own ways the complexities of democratic transformation in the colonial world.

Conclusion

Democratic transformation is a path-dependent enterprise, and people will often take their own national traditions as the starting points. However, traditions as internalized, habitual modes of sociocultural being and democracy as an alternative, participatory system of political life are not necessarily compatible with one another. Although East Asian democracies are no longer traditional Confucian societies, they appear to be partly saturated, often without being aware, with Confucian habits and mores. In fact, the idea that democracy is inappropriate in the Confucian context has recently gained currency. While several contemporary thinkers, pondering the future of Northeast Asia, have raised the possibility of democracy in so-called Confucian societies (e.g., Herr 2019; Kim 2014), some have questioned the compatibility of democracy with Confucianism (e.g., Bell 2016; Elstein 2010).

Throughout this article, I have argued that Yi and Cho were wrestling with a similar issue in early twentieth-century colonial Korea. As I hope is clear to the reader, their recastings of the allegedly nondemocratic, Confucian past as a site of democratic transformation were not simply unvarnished colonized thinking or crude emulation. Rather, they reflected uniquely self-critical and self-aware understandings of the historical and institutional limitations of the authors’ own theoretical practices. Yi and Cho cautioned against romanticizing longstanding institutions of governance and the social order of the past. Insofar as these systems of domination and oppression were undergirded by Confucianism, both of them exhorted in a similar fashion the Korean people to depart from their Confucian selves in order to act in concert toward a democratic future. Accordingly, they were more cautious about an “endogenous” way of problem solving, compared to mid- and late-nineteenth-century Chinese reformers who revisited Chinese classics in order to discover from within resources of democratic transformation (Jenco 2015, 107–16). At the same time, they could not resort entirely to foreign knowledge in their attempts at fostering a democratic community. In this case, they would be abandoning the very foundation of their national identity to which the claim of self-determination is anchored. This issue of cultivating a democratic culture was further complicated by the reality of colonial Korea. The Japanese justification of colonialism was marked by an overarching discourse of assimilation and development, like that of Western colonizers in the nineteenth century (Sultan 2020, 81). Facing this colonial problem of self-determination in early twentieth-century colonial Korea, Yi and Cho each approached the nation’s Confucian past with a critical eye and reconstructed it as a site of democratic possibilities.

For both Yi and Cho, it was evident that colonized people needed to carefully recreate their tradition in the democratic struggle for self-determination. In this way, the people would be remade for democratic constitutionalism rather than taken for granted as an already-existing entity. The declaration of the Korean people as the people in the year of 1919 was not the by-product of metaphysical thinking or of transient national solidarity. A more nuanced approach to this performative act in that year would be to understand it as what Spivak (2006) calls the “strategic use of positivist essentialism”—that is, a political strategy in which the oppressed group deliberately homogenizes itself based on shared, imagined identities to represent themselves as a political agent. In this line of reasoning, the presumed opposition between tradition and democratic peoplehood ceases to exist. Tradition is no longer an obstacle to democratic founding but rather a reservoir of transformative possibilities. It is a seemingly problematic mode of life in the past that ironically serves as the foundation of democratic peoplehood to come. Attending to this mutually constitutive relationship between tradition and democratic peoplehood helps us realize that a purely proceduralist approach to democratic foundings has the danger of oversimplifying the sociocultural dimension of democratic transition for the purposes of generalizability. The founding of democracies (as well as the sustainment of democracies) requires a culture, a people. The essence of democratic founding lies not in transplanting a modern institution onto a seemingly premodern society, but rather in undertaking a temporally extended process of self-transformation with the vision of realizing democracy. The discourse of peoplehood in early twentieth-century colonial Korea demonstrates this transformative and regenerative potential at the heart of the founding act.