냉전연구의 문화적 지역적 전환 문제

Abstract

This study focuses on the question of the cultural and spatial turn in Cold War Studies while comparing the achievements of New Cold War History Studies from the West and the newly rising Asian Cold War Studies. These could be classified as comparative socio-cultural historical orientation in Cold War Studies and cultural-political orientation in reconstruction of historical reality of Cold War Asia. The US-centered New Cold War History Studies either follows realist theories of International Relations or ends up at the question of national security and national interests even when it tries to understand the Cold War in terms of conflicts of thoughts, political system, and institutions. Although this approach can theorize the question of US-domination, it is unable to tackle the questions of the cultural construction of the dependent countries in systemization of the Cold War such as the overlapping questions of Americanization and Orientalism in construction of national states. The New Cold War Studies from Europe challenges the long-held concept of Cold War Studies as a policy-oriented discipline and advocates broadening of the scope of study to include locally based socio-cultural study of the subject, and building a relationship between Eastern and Western studies of the Cold War. However, it is still uninterested in postwar troubles of Asia produced by Europe’s violent redefinition of the continent in an attempt to re-live its past imperialist glories. Cold War Studies in Asia took off in the 21st century. It is no doubt an outcome of, alongside the rise of Asia as economic powers, the effort to construct postcolonial academic knowledge that challenges the hegemony of US-centered Regional Studies, its revisionist perspective, and absolute superiority in possession of historical records. It is a project to establish an independent and balanced perspective in search of Asia’s own voice. It was inevitable that Cold War Studies in Asia has been positioned outside the rigid academic disciplinarian classification and adopted the flexible form of Cultural Studies. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Method, conceptualizing the Cold War as the principle of institutionalization and internalization/routinization in nationalization, enables Cold War Studies to reconstruct past and present of Cold War Asia rendering it visible the macro vision of building and institutionalization of ‘national states’ in Asian countries, and the micro vision of Cold War’s internalization at the levels of the conscious, the aesthetic, the everyday, and the cultural. Asian Cold War Studies constitutes the new trend of global regionalization of Cold War Studies, and at the heart of it is New Cold War History Studies from China. It is not surprising because China’s founding as a socialist state brought the Cold War to Asia, and her participation in Korean War became the practical beginning of the systemization of the Cold War. However, the Chinese New Cold War History Studies should step up to the stage in which it overlaps China-centered temporality with Cold War Asia’s multiple temporalities, and attempts to grasp the landscape of countless postcolonial, post-Cold War projects contest and articulate, and newly created and collapsing imaginaries of relationship from the perspective of ‘double marginality.’ Cold War Studies in Korea is at the starting point heralded by the establishment of the Korean Association for Cold War Studies in February 2015. It opened up new public sphere by raising various questions and presenting diverse positions on the Cold War which is, unlike Europe, still going on in Asia as showed in armistice in Korean peninsula and heightening military tensions and territorial disputes in the Asian pacific region. In cooperation with scholars and research units in Asia as well as other parts of the world, the association plans to archive data on the Asian experience of the Cold War, and Asian subjects’ struggle against it. Cold War Studies as reimagining Cold War Asia is not only historicization of Asia but also presentization of placeness full of “jetztzeit.” It is not a homogeneous and vacuous historical process but dialectics of the static that creates the moment of historical rupture by capturing the flash point of historical emergency produced by the empire, the Cold War and globalization, and by translating the actions of the contemporary subjects of the Cold War into a ideological resource.