hankyoreh

By Jeong Jeong-hun, lawyer

There is a debate going on right now over whether to continue the Gukgie daehan maengse, the "Pledge to the Flag," Korea's version of the pledge of allegiance. That the pledge derived from one that Koreans were forced to recite during Japanese colonial rule and that its current wording is a product of the Park Chung-hee dictatorship and thereby risks being totalitarian is in my view of secondary importance.

The essence of the problem here is that state is forcing people to be "loyal." Is the state something to be loyal to? There is not going to be a correct answer to that question as long as it is left to personal judgment. Whether the state can force loyalty, however, is a different matter. Forcing people to have loyalty towards the state takes the relationship between the state and the citizenry and its reciprocity of rights and obligations and turns it into a hierarchical relationship where the people must live up to all their duties to country. This takes the unique regulatory kind of relationship like that which exists in the military and unduly applies it to the whole population. For this reason, it goes against the basic spirit of the constitution. It also goes against the direction of history, in which the position of those who make up a country has constantly changed. People have elevated their status from feudal subjects forced into loyalty to become modern citizens in a relationship of rights and obligations, and it would be wrong to attempt to turn back history.

In the three versions of the revision to the pledge put forth by the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, all you find is a people who faithfully fulfill their duty to the state. You do not find a citizenry which asserts its rights. That is because asserting your rights is something that fundamentally does not fit with a format for declaring loyalty. In light of how historically state power has often translated into violence towards sovereign citizens, what is needed instead is a civic spirit that sees the state as an object of control.

Those in favor of the pledge say they are worried about "individualism" on the part of young students these days. However, it would be fatal poison for the health of the community to prescribe collectivism and or nationalism for dealing with individualism. Collectivism is merely an expanded form of individualism. The right approach would be to instill, through history education based on a perspective of peace, the idea that the individual exists in a social relationship and that the state and the Korean people as an ethnic group are one of those relationships, thereby bringing back the spirit of inter-relatedness.

There was a time years ago when teams playing football (soccer) would fight over whether or not a goal was valid if it was made right at 5 p.m., when the whole country was supposed to drop everything and stand still for the pledge broadcast every day. Those times were real tragicomedy forced upon the nation by a modern history full of twisted principles. Today, more than 70 percent of the public supports keeping the pledge, a sad example of the social effects of nationalist education and defining ourselves solely as a country's nationals.

Changes and development in history have come not through the internalization of the spirit of loyalty and obedience, but with a spirit that is free and critical and the courage to question what is assumed to be self-evident. In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled that punishing a person for damaging the U.S. flag would damage the precious freedom it is supposed to symbolize. All that you have when the state forces you to pledge loyalty and in a social atmosphere that makes you internalize one-way discipline is freedom's shadow.

Criminal gangs force new members to pledge their loyalty, too. That is surely because you need to disallow criticism through that kind of format if you want to maintain an organization that lacks legitimacy. State philosophy is destitute if it tries to establish the legitimacy of state power the easy way - by forcing a pledge of loyalty instead of by guaranteeing freedom and equality for its members as well as achieving justice through efforts by the state in cooperation with social consensus. The state thirsts after the position of Absolute as it forces people to make its pledge, but to me that attempt looks more like a vision for the state that comes out of a gangster mindset. The pledge takes the citizens for low-level gangsters and as such should be abolished, because that is what would fit with the spirit of the constitution, which declares that it is from the people that the state gains legitimacy for its power and authority.