3․1운동 전후 헌법담론의 형성과정에서 사상사적 단절과 연속

Abstract

The March First Movement is a gateway to understanding the characteristics of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea. The March First Movement is a prehistory of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea and a subject of current controversy. This article describes the March First Movement and the period before and after it in terms of East Asian modernity, and interprets the process of forming a constitutional discourse in a period when Joseon, a Confucian country, is transformed into a modern country, Korea. In particular, we wanted to look at what effect “disconnection or continuity in the history of thought” would derive from the constitutional history afterwards by tracing genealogy of confusionists in the face of modernization. 1) In order to clarify the meaning of modernity in East Asia at the time, we will look at Foucault's concept of racial struggle, which can be understood as a starting point and a regression point of modern space. 2) The March First Movement and the movements that embody the modernity of East Asia before and after the March First Movement are focused on the genealogy of the Confucian scholars. 3) The March First Movement represents a historical vacuum, and a system that imagines constitutional history continuously is established to reveal that it dominates the constitutional discourse today. The March First Movement would have been an event that showed the people of that time the future of an independent state. Afterwards, the movement was remembered and celebrated in a variety of ways before it was stipulated in the Constitution. However, in the context of East Asian modernity, the March First Movement cannot be regarded as a disconnected event that carried out modernity. The March First Movement did not fully achieve the conditions of modernity proposed by Foucault, and various social forces took a path of conversion, not self-renewation at the time. In the historical process leading to the March First Movement, constitution-making, and national establishment, the continuity of constitutional history is emphasized, but the voices of those who sought other forms of sovereignty on the Korean Peninsula were blocked. This can be confirmed by the following facts: The weakness and ambiguity of the provisional charter as political interpreter of the March First Movement, large-scale conversion and decline of thought groups, ideological divisions surrounding provisional government laws, and the birth of the Republic of Korea as the only legitimate government to legally succeed the March First Movement and Provisional Government. The March First Movement serves as an ideology of systemic competition, not as an ideological source that triggers the modernity of the Constitution.