A New Kind of Pride; The president's anti-Japanese tirades play well with his core supporters. But a new neocon movement is arguing for greater openness to the world.

Byline: B. J. Lee

South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun minced no words in his tirade against Japan last week. Angered by Japanese moves to survey a contested range of islets currently occupied by Korea, he blasted Tokyo for essentially reaffirming "Japan's criminal history of waging wars ... as well as 40 years of exploitation, torture, imprisonment, forced labor and even sexual slavery." The comments drove relations between the neighbors to a new low--and, more to the point, scored Roh points with his young and intensely nationalistic core supporters.

Roh needs all the help he can get, with his Uri party expected to perform poorly in this month's local elections, mostly because of the lackluster economy. But the president may be picking the wrong fight. While Japan-bashing is a generally accepted practice across South Korea, a growing number of citizens worry that such populist outbursts are damaging the country's reputation, making it seem backward and isolated from the world. They are rallying not to the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), which remains tainted by a corruption-stained past, but to a budding movement of neoconservative thinkers. This loosely affiliated group--comprised of younger, pro-Washington, pro-market, pro-globalization conservatives--argues that Roh has wildly misjudged Korean interests on a variety of fronts, including the islands, called Dokdo by Seoul and Takeshima by Tokyo. "Because of Dokdo, our international relations [will] deteriorate," says Ahn Byung Jik, who leads a newly formed think tank called the New Right Foundation. "This government is making a huge mistake."

For much of the last decade, South Korea has been led by progressive regimes that have sought to shake up Korea's traditional foreign and domestic policies. They've done just that: under Roh and former president Kim Dae Jung, the government has distanced itself from Washington, adopted some socialist-tinted economic policies and pursued a rapprochement with Pyongyang. The New Right, in remarkable parallel to the rise of American neocons, has sprung up in reaction to these changes. They promote American-style capitalism, denounce the type of totalitarian socialism found in North Korea and--unlike traditional GNP conservatives--advocate a more open world view that transcends narrow nationalism. "The New Right has gained public support because Korea has moved too rapidly to the left," says Hong Sung Gul, a professor of public administration at Seoul's Kookmin University. "They have the potential to change Korean society again politically and ideologically."

Now mostly in their 40s, many of the movement's leaders spent turbulent college years in the 1980s fighting against South Korea's anti-communist dictators and dreaming of a socialist utopia. Han Ki Hong, 44, is a good example. When he was a junior at Yonsei University in Seoul in 1983, he railed against the Reagan administration and led student demonstrationsagainst the United States and also Seoul's military dictators. He served six months in jail.

...