Sung, M. (2010). The psychiatric power of neo-liberal citizenship: the North Korean human rights crisis, North Korean settlers, and incompetent citizens. Citizenship Studies, 14(2), 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621021003594783
1. Introduction
The spectacularly circulated miserable images of starving North Koreans have helped facilitate the claim of liberal human rights, encouraging South Korean viewers to find acceptable characteristics in North Koreans.2 The refugee spectacle explicitly affirms the irrefutable superiority of liberal capitalism over the communist regime while stigmatizing North Koreans as fundamentally deprived of the human nature of self-autonomy and self-promotion presumed in liberal capitalism. [127]
I pay attention to how North Korean refugees are categorized as a social group that is expected to develop techniques of neo-liberal citizenship that aim to maximize individual talents, values, and choices in a market-driven society. [128]
2. The North Korean exodus to the liberal world
It is speculated that approximately 300,000 North Koreans have stayed illegally in China and other neighboring Asian countries in search of food and shelter. [129]
After the war, Rhee more forcefully deployed this political doctrine so as to secure his anti-communist grasp in South Korean political culture. Under the circumstances, border-crossers from the North who came under severe political suspicion of pro-communists feared severe political and legal violence (Chung 2009, p. 7). [129]
It was not until the Park Chung-hee dictatorship (1961–1979) that border-crossers came to be treated as symbolising a heroic patriotic war against the communist regime. Park Chung-hee, who subsequently rose to the throne of political dictatorship by coup in 1961, declared the total mobilization of the South Korean population to defeat the Kim Il Sung regime. The defection of North Koreans was used as irrefutable evidence of the South’s superiority over the North. To implement this discursive tactic institutionally, in 1962 the Ministry of Defense established the Special Relief Act for Patriots and Heroes Who Returned to the State, to confer on them a patriotic honor and financial rewards for special treatment (Chung 2009, p. 8). [129]
Such symbolic deployment of militant patriotism continued in Chun Doo-Hwan’s military dictatorship (1980–1987) and his prote´ge´ Roh Tae-Woo’s government (1988–1993). In December 1992, Kang Bong-Hak, one of the North Korean lumber workers in Vladivostok, Russia was exiled to South Korea. The Roh Tae-Woo government then decided togrant the 33-year old defectorpolitical exile status, amending the Special Act for North Korean Surrenders of 1978 and enacting the Surrendering North Korean Compatriots Protection Law. In March 1993, the KimYoung-Sam government (1993–1997) signed amendments to the 1951 Refugee Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol that defines refugees’ rights and member-states’ legal obligations. [129-130]
At this point, what was noticeable in the 1990s is that the series of defections began to be framed as incidents of serious deprivation of human rights, helping to mark the decisive moment at which the spectacle of the North Korean human rights crisis came into play in making a discursive shift to anti-communism in South Korea. That is, the significant increase in the North Korean refugee flow primed the circulation of the dramatic images of North Koreans abused by human trafficking as well as suffering from hunger and impoverishment, turning on the ‘cultural Otherness’ of North Korea inscribed as ‘inferior, uncivil, and exotic’ (Lee 2002). [130]
3. The new conservative upswing in the North Korean human rights crisis
South Korean new conservatives pushed the South Korean government to adopt the 1997 North Korean Defectors Protection and Settlement Act, intended to help the settlement of displaced North Koreans in South Korea while also automatically granting them South Korean citizenship. [130]
One should be opposed to those who are simple-mindedly opposed to the Act, which explicitly does not aim to overturn the Kim Jong-Il regime but is designed in good faith of humanitarianism to improve North Korea’s human rights situations. Their skepticism will turn out to be an insane assault on the pedagogy of [liberal] human rights. (S.-Y. Kim 2004) [131]
Nevertheless, for South Korean new conservatives, ‘humanitarianism in good faith’ must be tied to the cause of the ‘democratization’ of North Korea [131]
Since the popular nationalist reunification policy implementation South Korean new conservatives have more emphatically demanded that North Korean border-crossers not be categorized as ‘defectors’ but as ‘refugees’.6 This politics of classifying displaced North Koreans has a significant ideological implication. While the term ‘defectors’ puts a premium on the impression of voluntary migration practice pursuing economic remune ration, the term ‘refugees’ brings the border-crossing movements into discursive effect. [131]
More specifically, the latter implies that these border-crossers are the innocent victims of oppression by the Kim Jong Il regime’s frightening violations of human dignity. [132]
In sum, South Korean new conservatives have successfully framed recent North Korean border-crossing issues as ‘serious crimes against humanity’ in an attempt to justify the liberal human rights regime, under which citizens should presumably be able to be guaranteed and enjoy individual autonomy and social rights such as income, health care, and education. [132]
4. From ‘refugees’ to ‘citizens’
The North Korean way of life programmed bythecommunist regimeare allegedly treated as backward, underdeveloped, uncivil, and inferior to the South Korean way of advanced modern life predicated on the gratification of individual achievements. North Korean ways of doing and thinking are not qualified as a normative driving force in successful social adaptation. [132]
As Hae Yeon Choo (2006) observes in her ethnographic research on North Korean settlers in South Korea, the gendered settlement education can help female settlers find jobs, making their entitlements problematically vulnerable to, and marginalized in, a f lexiblelabormarket. TheimageoffemaleNorthKoreansfrequentlyperceivedas‘victims’ of terrifying events such as human trafficking in their refugee process places them in a position to be better recognized by humanitarianism, but this humanitarian recognition doesnotleaveasubstantial resolution with which theycansurviveincheaper labormarkets than their male counterparts, owing to the earned work skills suited to domestic drudgery (e.g., cleansing, dishwashing). [133]
In such an assimilation process, North Korean settlers rise to the challenge in which ‘Citizenship ... becomes less anentitlement than adefinition’: the challenge of citizenship that is ‘centered on provisions rather than entitlements’ (Dahrendorf 1992, p. 17). [133]
5. Psychiatric power in the enactment of (neo-)liberal citizenship
Much research convincingly tell us that, in such a utilitarian tactic of reforming the social body, refugees are one of the most vulnerable human populations, in that their socially and culturally defined inner traits are considered to disqualify them from citizenship rights so long as those traits are not suited to the criteria of citizenship duties (Agamben 2000, Fassin 2001, Dicken 2004, Harrington 2005, Ong 2006, Nyers 2006). [135]
In such a discursive process, North Korean settlers also find themselves deeply ingrained by the stigmatization in which they are portrayed as inherently ‘incompetent citizens’. This arbitrary idea signifies to the discursively mediated assimilation of citizenship, not only because of the untenably naturalized superiority of advanced liberal democracies to the illiberal regime, but also because of the presumption of psychiatric investigation that the psychological repression imposed on North Koreans by the North Korean government is a fundamental barrier to the suitable cultivation of individual autonomy and self-promotion (Jeon 2007b, p. 147). [138]