해방기 인권감수성과 시적 전유

Abstract

After liberation, human rights served as an absolute symbol in the reality of Joseon and South Korea, where the left-right ideology was polarized. As the single government was established, a competition was held against the logic of public order, but the discourse practice based on human rights did not shrink during that process. Rather, as the opposition against the Syngman Rhee administration became stronger, the human rights sensitivity was intensified and increased. The human rights is not an issue related to theoretical or systematical theory or an ideology, but is an issue that develops within the living relationship between people, and thus, forms a periodic, common sense of the people. This issue is better captured through newspapers rather than magazines for intellectuals. The newspapers during the liberation period informed people of the flow of the changing international order in detail. After experiencing fascism and World War II, the world called for an international and universal regulation to construct a peace structure. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations was the final piece of such demand. The U.S. also needed to establish legitimacy to become involved in world issues through an international principle called as human rights and international peace. The newspapers fully served as a human rights workbook at the time, by introducing and reporting various international regulations. The human rights sensitivity obtained through such process became the basis of cosmopolitanism in South Korea. The emphasis on the self-determination right was a main feature of modernistic human rights after World War II, and the sense of the self-determination right was a connotation of the desire for cosmopolitanism. The experience of colonization was to unconditionally call for the establishment of sovereignty to guarantee human rights. The people that experienced lack of freedom under the ruling of the U.S. Army Military government longed to establish an independent nation. The human rights sensitivity at the time when it is believed that individual rights could be guaranteed through guarantee of collective rights, regarded as important to first form a sovereign state, even though it meant the postponement of establishing a unified nation. Such liberalistic (a viewpoint by Locke, valuing the natural rights of individuals) human rights sensitivity can be said to be the origin of the conservative liberalism in South Korea. This demands escape from limiting liberalism during the liberation period to progressive liberalism, while suggests the necessity of adjusting the one-way perspective of viewing liberalism in the 1950s as being distorted by anticommunist nationalism. Human rights as a resistant discourse directly aimed the U.S. Army Military government and the Syngman Rhee administration. The U.S. military government sought the pro-Japanese group as their ruling partner and overlooked the act of violence by the police, which allowed to think about the meaning of actual post-colonization. As the Syngman Rhee administration was established, the privileges of the police, which further violated human rights, became a point of dispute. The conflicting position between the general public versus the police became settled as the conflicting position between civil rights versus government authority. The logic of public order began to challenge the concept of human rights, which had an absolute authority in connection with democracy previously. Now, human rights became a value to maintain through struggle, with priority in the realistic conditions of South Korea. Although procurement of sovereignty was accepted as meaning the guarantee of human rights before establishing a government, the conflict between public order and human rights allowed to re-think about the issue of human rights and sovereignty. This meant the rupture of popular sovereignty and national sovereignty. Hence, this was an experience of discordance between the human rights of the people and the civil rights of the citizens, which increased sensitivity towards the sovereign power. In addition, this conflict allowed for people to realize that democracy is not fixed in a world which is segmented into nation-state units, but must be restructured through enduring resistance movements. The political nature of such human rights sensitivity of the liberation period became the motive for gradually expanding political liberalism during the latter part of the 1950s and became the motive enabling the 4.19 revolution.