Memory of ‘Compatriots’ and Defining the Boundary of Korean National Community

With a rapid globalization and the economic growth in the 1980s, the Republic of Korea began to gradually face not only the entry of ‘ethnic strangers’ into the Korean society as foreign workers, but also co-ethnic compatriots visiting relatives and working in their ‘homeland’ which triggered Korean governments’ interest in its population outside Korea. From the mid 1990s, the government began to pay serious attention to its overseas Koreans and to embrace them within the ambit of its nation-state by legally institutionalizing their status as ‘Overseas compatriot’ guaranteeing de facto quasi-citizenship rights through the ‘Overseas Korean Act’.

The Act, with much painful process of defining and redefining who is ‘Overseas compatriots’, was stipulated to include those who emigrated even before the establishment of ROK in 1948 and their descendants, acknowledging the historical validity of nation prior to the ROK.

While majority of studies on the Overseas Koreans have almost uniformly accused the legal measures of not going far enough for its ‘compatriots’ and tend to narrowly focused on the recent policies, this study attempts to examine the historical origin and development of the Korean governments’ perception toward the overseas Koreans and the ‘Korean nation’, and how such understanding has appeared in the Korean society at each important historical juncture by focusing on how the emigrants and their dispersion have been remembered and represented by the Korean state over time and how this memory has influenced in the process of legally defining who should be included in the Korean nation.