Korean Studies Internet Discussion List KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
War And Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, edd. by David R. McCann and Barry S. Strauss. Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2001, 385 pp. (ISBN 0-7656-0694-1, hardcover, $77.95; ISBN 0-7656-0695-X, paper, $29.95).
Reviewed by Stephen J. Epstein
Victoria University of Wellington
War And Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War is an intriguing collection that juxtaposes 5th century BC Greece and 20th century Korea in order to explore a set of fascinating issues. As the publisher's promotional blurb asks: "Why do societies go to war, and what happens to them when they do? What are the factors, human and otherwise, which make wars take the form they do; and what are the factors that could have led to outcomes other than armed conflict?" Co-editor David McCann, well-known to Koreanists as a literature specialist, together with Barry Strauss, a prominent Greek historian, here assemble a number of equally distinguished scholars who treat the Korean War and Peloponnesian War as case studies in order to explore these timely questions.
Comparative work that brings together areas as disparate as ancient Greece and modern Korea is always fraught with difficulties, but Strauss and McCann argue cogently that the effort required is worthwhile. As they write in their helpful introduction, "Comparisons do not lead to a direct transfer of insights, but they can sharpen our awareness and let us think in ways in which we would not have thought before" (xii). While the co-editors offer several valid points of comparison between the two conflicts (terrain, unpredictability, destructiveness, and an ideological divide between the combatants), as a guiding theme Strauss and McCann focus on the way each placed a democracy on trial. They note that in the conception of Thucydides, the great Athenian historian, the Peloponnesian War revealed his city's democratic regime as aggressive, inefficient and prone to committing atrocities, while the Korean War raised questions about American democracy's leadership, its relationship to other cultures, and, for many at the time, "whether a liberal society could compete with the global threat of communism" (xi).
The books' fifteen articles are grouped into five triads that relate in different ways to the themes announced by the book's title (Part I: "Democracy: Bellicose, Imperial, or Idealistic?"; Part II: "Categorizing Wars: Civil or Hegemonic, Decisive or Cyclical?"; Part III: "Third Forces or Shrimps Between Whales"; Part IV: "Demagogues or Domestic Politics in Democracies at War"; Part V: "Realism, Militarism and the Culture of Democracies"). The structure, however, is forced at times, and readers may find they must work to impose thematic coherence upon the articles in each grouping. Part I, for example, joins Victor Hanson's analysis of Athens, in which he makes a case for the greater military efficiency of democracies, with a debate between Ronald Steel, who argues that American global hegemony constitutes an imperium, and Robert Kagan, who supplies a spirited rejoinder.
Part II similarly lacks overall integration: it begins with a piece by Bruce Cumings, entitled "When Sparta is Sparta, but Athens isn't Athens: Democracy and the Korean War," in which he reiterates his arguments for the civil nature of the Korean War and extends them with an analogy to the ancient world (which draws, for its part, on overly idealized images of Athens). His essay works well in conjunction with the next article, Kathryn Weathersby's account of "Stalin and the Decision for War in Korea." Weathersby maintains that "in the last analysis the Korean War was less a civil war than a hegemonic conflict" (xxi). Cumings and Weathersby engage here, as elsewhere, in a productive clash on this issue. Nonetheless, it becomes difficult to link these two pieces with the third member of their trio, Paul Cartledge's analysis of "The Effects of the Peloponnesian (Athenian) War on Athenian and Spartan Societies." Cartledge's main thesis is to argue against periodized models of Greek history that view the Peloponnesian War as a watershed event and postulate a decline in the 4th century BC after the so-called "Golden Age" of the 5th.
War and Democracy's use of scholars from at least three different areas (Koreanists, Classicists and Americanists) thus yields a collection that often lacks cohesion. This problem is exacerbated because, although each triad contains at least one piece that deals with the Peloponnesian War and one with the Korean War, most individual essays engage in little more than an introductory or concluding nod to specific comparison between the two. Juxtaposition may have worked well as a prime strategy for Thucydides, who allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the events he narrates, but a firmer editorial hand would be welcome here, and each triad could have benefited from a separate introduction drawing out common themes in detail and setting them within a comparative perspective.
In fact, only one essay out of the volume's fifteen (Jennifer Roberts' illuminating comparison of Alcibiades and Douglas MacArthur--to my mind the most engaging piece in the book) makes a genuinely sustained effort to bring Greece and Korea together in comparative perspective. Such reticence over explicit comparison between the two conflicts is thoroughly understandable, as few academics have deep familiarity with both. Even as a scholar who shuttles in his research between the ancient Mediterranean and contemporary Korea, I can claim no expertise in the volume's thematic focus. Consequently, War And Democracy is an inordinately difficult volume to review-- or, rather, a difficult two, or even three, books to review, and instead of continuing to give a synopsis of individual pieces, which would necessarily be disjointed,[1] I will record further some overall impressions.
Given the venue for this review, of course, it is appropriate to ask what Koreanists will glean from the volume. Unfortunately, of the main audiences for the book, Koreanists perhaps fare worst. Only four of the fifteen articles are by scholars of Korea specifically (Bruce Cumings, Dae-Sook Suh, Kongdan Oh, and Dong-Wook Shin), and their pieces take up just 64 pages in total, roughly one-sixth of the total volume. Furthermore, they largely provide overviews of topics that will be familiar to Korea specialists, rather than advancing any striking new arguments: Suh treats "The Korean War and North Korean Politics" while Oh does the same for South Korea, and Shin discusses "Characters and Characteristics of Korean War Novels." The contributions from the Greek historians, on the other hand, put forth many more original interpretations. One presumes that this contrast results from a belief that the audiences of both the 1995 Woodrow Wilson Center conference out of which the volume grew and the book itself would be largely unfamiliar with Korea's domestic situation.
The short shrift given to Korea per se also mirrors an implicit perspective on the Korean War taken by the volume: the book's major comparative concern, despite its subtitle and Bruce Cumings' article, is not Athens and Sparta as opposed to the two Koreas, but rather Athens vis-à-vis the United States. For the most part, the non-Koreanist contributors reveal an unspoken acceptance that the Korean War itself was "really" a larger ideological conflict between the United States and its communist foes, China and/or the USSR. In this reading, Korea becomes, despite Cumings' forceful arguments that the conflict should be understood as fundamentally a civil war, merely a "shrimp caught between whales," and thus of less concern than the superpowers themselves. Frequently, the book ignores Suh's salutary reminder that "studies emphasizing the international aspects of the war often neglect the domestic Korean cause of the war. It was fought in the Korean peninsula by the Korean people, who suffered the most casualties, and the peoples of North and South Korea are still suffering from the consequences of the war. While it is important to analyze the international involvement, it is more important to understand the war in terms of Korean domestic politics" (163). As a result, readers may be left uncertain precisely how to align the ancient and modern situations: the introduction to Weathersby's piece, for example, notes similarities between the "Peloponnesian War and cold war," rather than the Korean War as such, and the book's oscillation between the two sets of comparisons could have been more clearly worked through.
Indeed, at several points I was struck by just how American this book is. Although the overwhelmingly American perspective is perhaps to be expected, given the book's origins and that all the non-Koreanist authors are, according to the contributor notes, US residents, reading the book as a scholar of Korea, I found the extent to which the greater focus on the United States wrests the Korean War from Korean experience troubling. The cover itself, tellingly, overlays a photo of an evidently wounded American GI being helped by two comrades on top of a battle frieze from Delphi. The Korean War, yes, but no Koreans present. The very American nature of this book also appears in other ways: donning my Classicist hat, I read Greg Crane's "The Case of Plataea: Small States and the (Re-) Inventions of Political Realism" with pleasure: it is a fine piece with a nuanced discussion of Plataea's extremely difficult position during the Peloponnesian War. But while Crane certainly shows sympathy for the Korean people, remarks in his piece suggest an unconscious assumption that his audience is American: "even now most forms ask whether we are white or black, Asian or Latino" (137); "Nothing in this sad little episode would be out of place in the New York Times or Washington Post." (145)
There is, of course, nothing especially wrong with such assumptions, but it does lead, however, to my final points. I had eagerly awaited the publication of this volume, because it is a true rarity in bringing together my two academic fields. As I read through it, however, I found myself approaching this book not so much as a Koreanist and as a Classicist, but, to my surprise, most significantly as an American expatriate who has taken up dual citizenship in New Zealand. The volume, in fact, is ultimately of much more importance and interest to me as a debate on the country from which I emigrated. Although War and Democracy was published in 2001, before September 11, its sustained discussion of how democracies function in wartime has taken on a relevance that could not have been predicted at the time of its release.
I had originally intended to conclude this review with the at least partially accurate, if unfairly dismissive, remark that the book, as a whole, is somewhat less than the sum of its rather consdierable parts. In the sense that perhaps few will read it straight through because of the varied nature of contributions that do not always cohere, the statement carries truth. Nonetheless, in the period between first reading the work and allowing my thoughts to continue their leavening process before writing this review, I have found that its main themes and the questions it raises have remained with me, especially as the current United States administration pursues with vigor a largely unilateral policy towards Iraq. Engaged scholars and readers seeking to understand how the world works, whether or not they have a particular interest in Korea or ancient Greece, will find much of value in War and Democracy. Pericles, in a famous speech ascribed to him by Thucydides, said to the Athenian people, "it may have been wrong to have taken power, but it would be dangerous to let it go" (Thuc. 2. 63. 2). War and Democracy asks us to consider closely whether it is in fact true that "the United States has been an idealistic and lenient hegemon, particularly when compared to Athens" (xxi).
Ultimately, one can certainly recommend this book, as much within it is excellent, and every university library should have it in its collection: Strauss and McCann are to be lauded for bringing together an all-star cast of contributors, who, as the back cover notes, are "often in top form." Even more commendable is their eagerness to incorporate scholars who hail from different ends of the political spectrum and who have not shied away from controversy in their career. It would be difficult, for example, to imagine two scholar-commentators with more different ideological reputations and views of American overseas military involvement than neoconservative Victor Hanson, who champions American democratic values, and Bruce Cumings, whose outspoken criticism of the US and South Korea has even caused some to misconstrue him as an apologist for North Korea.
One final nitpick, however: a book that brings together so many distinguished contributors deserves far better proofreading. While most errors are insignificant ("the Athenians games" (133); "peace Tteaty" (162); "liberty could can also have" (227); "predicated" for "predicted" (286); "contradition" (360)) others are more insidious: any Hellenist will immediately recognize the error in the citation of Pericles' Funeral Oration as coming from Thucydides 1.34-46 (283), but Koreanists and American historians wishing to check the reference may not know to consult those chapters in Book Two instead. McCune-Reischauer does not fare so well either: p. 82 n. 35 alone contains two apparent mistakes ("Sûl" for "Sôul" and "chidae esûi" for "chidae esô").
Notes
[1] I direct those interested in a piece by piece summation to the on-line review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2001/2001-11-20.html> by Polly Low, who makes a similar point about the disjointed experience of reading the book.
Citation:
Epstein, Stephen J. 2002
Review of War And Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, edd. by David R. McCann and Barry S. Strauss. (2001)
Korean Studies Review 2002, no. 15
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr02-15.htm
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