ABSTRACT
According to Arnold Toynbee’s famous dictum of “challenge-and-response” (Toynbee 1948), the history of a country unfolds through a series of internal responses against external challenges. He stressed that the greater the scope and intensity of the challenges a country faces, the more likely it is to become strong and wealthy. In its modern history, South Korea1 has faced three significant external challenges: the opening of the ports in the age of imperialism, liberation following World War II, and globalization pressures after the collapse of the Communist bloc. It would be no exaggeration to say, however, that though Korea has tried to use those challenges as a stimulus for advancement, it has not been successful. As a matter of fact, it was colonized by Japan immediately following the forced opening of the ports; it was divided into a Communist North and an anti-Communist South under the Cold War world order, and had to accept trusteeship by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to avoid national default after abortive globalization efforts in the 1990s. Today, Korea is still reeling from unprecedented globalization. Despite the fact that globalization had already penetrated the southern half of the peninsula on a large scale, the mismanaged segyehwa drive of Kim Young Sam’s administration led to economic meltdown in 1997. Subsequently, the neoliberal reform by the Kim Dae Jung administration under the IMF’s stewardship forced the country to expose itself even more to the capitalist world system. Metaphorically speaking, the country has become “naked” in that almost everything, from stockmarkets to animation industries, has been stripped of protection from global forces.
