Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The Korean War has never come to an official ending, since the ceasefire agreement in 1953 was only a pause button, not the end button, and a number of attempts to finally and formally end the Korean War in the 21st century failed. While existing literature focuses on the motivations and policy changes of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Korean peninsula which caused the Korean War, this paper argues that two Korea’s domestic politics placed the war in the Korean peninsula but nowhere else. Furthermore, domestic politics in the two Koreas before the war was shaped mainly by intervention from the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945-1948, marked by the establishment of United States military government and Soviet Civil Administration. In this paper, I argue that not only direct intervention by sending troops to the Korean peninsula was crucial, but also indirect intervention such as intervention in public ideology. Through intervention, the narrative of solidarity as a single-nation state collapsed and turned into conflictual two Koreas in three years. In other words, the year 1945 was independence for Korea, but 1948 was also independence, not for Korea, but for two Koreas.