Since 2005, research teams comprised of participants from across East Asia have been working on a collaborative survey project known as the East Asian Social Survey (EASS).¹  The participating research teams include the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Renmin University in China; Osaka University of Commerce in Japan (JGSS); SungKyunKwan University in Korea (KGSS); and the Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS) at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. The plan of the project is to conduct a survey with different topics for every two years. The first EASS survey, which focused on Family, was conducted in 2006. KGSS had now integrated the data that the four research teams compiled by the end of 2008. This data set is now ready for research use, both by members of the teams and by other interested parties. The topic for the 2008 survey is Globalization and Culture.

During the past two decades, the export-oriented economies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan experienced strong economic growth and rising income levels. More women entered the labor markets and obtained better-paid jobs. However, in the regions surveyed, men and women often do not equally share in economic prosperity and there still exists a sex gap in earnings. A paper recently co-written by this author and Paula England,²  using the 2006 EASS data, may be the first attempt to explore the size of the sex gap, the factors that explain the gap, and the variations among Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.³

To explain the disparity between the pay of men and women in the survey nations, we used regression analysis to predict the hourly wage from various characteristics, using separate regressions for men and women in each nation. Then we assessed how much human capital factors may contribute to the sex gap in pay. For each factor, there are two estimates of how much it explains, reflecting whether we use male or female slopes, or rates of return. The table below summarizes some of the paper’s preliminary findings. The last row of the table shows that the sex wage gap is highest in Korea, with Japan coming in second place. In Taiwan, women earned about 82 percent of what men earned. For comparison, in the United States in 2003, the comparable wage ratio of female-over-male was 79.4 percent.

What factors might explain the sex gap in earnings? In Japan, the table shows (20 percent for the make slope and 34 percent for the female slope) that education is a key factor—notably, women are less likely to be college graduates. Another key factor is that women are more likely to work in contingent or temporary jobs than in permanent, full-time employment. In the Korea case, the difference between the male or female slopes is small, and 37 percent (male) to 32 percent (female) of the gap is explained, again, by education, as fewer Korean women have completed college than men. In Taiwan, a much lower share (6 percent for men and to 0 percent for women) is explained, mainly due to potential work experience, followed by employment status. In Taiwan, women actually have more education than men, as more women than men have completed college. This education imbalance supports our finding that the sex gap is largest in Korea, where women are less educated than men, and smallest in Taiwan, where the reverse is true.

Human capital factors (education and potential work experiences) seem to explain smaller proportions in the societies with a smaller gap. On the one hand, if we were to attribute all the elements of the gap not explained by mean differences in our supply-side measures to be sex discrimination, this would imply that a higher portion of Taiwan’s (albeit smaller) gap can explained by pay discrimination. On the other hand, women in Japan and Korea are disadvantaged, both in their educational achievements and their opportunities for regular employment. The contingent or part-time jobs that these women do pay less per hour than do the permanent or full-time jobs in which their male counterparts are employed. The EASS survey indicates, thus far, that economic prosperity and advancement in human capital factors may not naturally bring about sex equality in earnings.

Notes

¹  More information on the EASS can be found at http://www.eass.info.

²  Chin-fen Chang and Paula England "Gender Inequality in Earnings in Industrialized East Asia," to be presented at the Beijing RC28 Meeting, Renmin University, Beijing, China, May 14-16, 2009.

³  In this paper, we excluded Chinese data because the other three societies are more comparable to one another in terms of their economic development.

Security officials and cleanup crews are now combing through the carnage in Mumbai, following last week’s terrorist attacks in the city. As the citizens of this vast metropolis seek to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives, it is important to probe the sources of the violence in Mumbai, and consider the attacks’ implications for regional security in South Asia.

How and why did the Mumbai attacks occur? Information at this stage is still incomplete. Nonetheless, a few points seem clear.

There is considerable evidence that Pakistan-based entities were behind the Mumbai attacks. The sole surviving terrorist is Pakistani. He claims that the attackers trained with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for months inside Pakistan prior to launching their assault. And Indian officials have determined that the terrorists took a boat from Karachi to the Mumbai coast, leaving behind cell phones that had been used to call Pakistan.

None of this directly implicates the Pakistani government in the Mumbai attacks. It does, however, suggest that Pakistan bears some measure of responsibility for recent events; the Pakistani government is either unable or unwilling to prevent its territory from being used to launch terrorist attacks against India.

In fact, Pakistan has a long history of supporting anti-Indian militancy. For example, during the 1980s, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) began to provide training, arms, and financial and logistical support to insurgent groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. This transformed what had been a mostly spontaneous, local uprising into a low-intensity Indo-Pakistani war. Despite repeated Indian diplomatic entreaties and military threats, Pakistan has never fully ended its support for such groups.

These outside links notwithstanding, the complexity and organization of the Mumbai attacks suggest that they also employed local Indian support. Thus, even if the operation originated in Pakistan, the terrorists may well have had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.

Since independence, many Muslims have thrived in India, availing themselves of educational opportunities, achieving high levels of prosperity, and blending into the country’s vast, pluralistic society. On a day-to-day basis they have faced little religious discrimination.

Less affluent segments of the Muslim community, however, have not been so fortunate. They have long endured discrimination in aspects of everyday life ranging from employment to housing opportunities. Past generations acquiesced in these humiliations. Today’s lower middle class Muslims, however, are better educated and more politically aware than their predecessors, and thus less prone simply to accept their fate.

Against this social backdrop, two incidents have helped to spur a process of Islamist radicalization within India. The first was a spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India after Hindu zealots destroyed the Babri Mosque in 1992. Hundreds of Muslims died at the hands of Hindu mobs while the police looked on. The second episode was a 2002 pogrom in the state of Gujarat that occurred after Hindu pilgrims died in a train fire allegedly set by Muslim miscreants. Few, if any, individuals involved these incidents have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, these two episodes helped to radicalize a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims.

The Indian government has failed to devise a set of policies to address these social roots of Islamist zealotry. In addition, many of India’s state-level police forces have not mustered the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress the resulting violence. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, employed tainted evidence, and abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. Such actions have only worsened the situation, making it easier for foreign militants to recruit domestic sympathizers inside India.

What are the Mumbai attacks’ implications for South Asian security? The Manmohan Singh government has sought to avoid confrontation with Pakistan in the wake of several recent terror attacks with potential Pakistani links. Instead, it has preferred to maintain regional stability in hopes of achieving continued economic growth. The Mumbai attacks, however, undercut this rationale for restraint; by attacking international targets in India’s financial hub, they threaten to inflict significant harm on the Indian economy. Also, considerable domestic political pressure for strong anti-Pakistani action is likely to emerge, both from the opposition Bharatia Janata Party (BJP), which has long accused the government of being soft of Pakistan, and from ordinary voters outraged by the attacks.

In 2001, a failed assault on the Indian parliament by Pakistan-backed militants managed to kill only five people and was over in the space of a morning. In response, India mobilized roughly 500,000 forces along the Indo-Pakistani border, triggering a major militarized crisis with Pakistan. The Mumbai attacks killed and wounded hundreds, and lasted for nearly three days. Given the scale of the violence, as well as the economic and domestic political factors discussed above, the Indian government will be hard-pressed to avoid a reaction similar to 2001 – particularly if the evidence from Mumbai continues to point toward Pakistan. Given that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, the stakes in any ensuing confrontation will be enormous. Nuclear weapons will give both sides strong incentives to behave at least somewhat cautiously, in order to prevent a crisis from escalating too far. But they will also leave less room for error, making the costs of miscalculation potentially catastrophic.

Will a serious Indo-Pakistani crisis emerge from the Mumbai attacks, or will the Indian government manage to continue its policy of restraint, even in the face of such a brazen provocation? The pieces would appear to be in place for a serious regional confrontation. But only the coming days will tell for sure.

Sumit Ganguly is the director of research at the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an adjunct senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles.

Paul Kapur is an associate professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe (Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.

In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders, member nations have asked whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, defined national membership in terms of a particular tradition of civic values:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.

Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco- Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but also challenged, in debates over the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.

The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence in European traditions for new Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade. European immigrant employment statistics are difficult to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the fastest growing resident minority.

The violence in recent years also presses us to revise theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against military police have ruptured public security and social cohesion. France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public opinion and the ministry declared a national state of emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962 War of Algerian independence, applied previously only against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence did not catch the government by complete surprise. Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in 2004 by the French interior ministry that documented more than 2 million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing. The ministry’s document admits that youth unemployment in what journalists referred to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over) surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.

Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as post-colonial migration. European governments created neighborhoods for immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole. The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and that background was roughly familiar to the host communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.

The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub- Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west, into an era not well served by existing models.

In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance. Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism, which, he argues, inadvertently enables European Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional European civic values (which he dates neither from antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism, but for a cultural pluralism that fosters social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies, University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European- Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy will find that the two essays shift the common critique of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective Turkish-EU citizens.

Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies, Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors on European political culture and social theory — rethink Western European responses to minority integration. Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona) reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in studies of European minority identity. The final article by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University) focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test the ability of mass media and film to influence the creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.

Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE and the Stanford Humanities Center.

To sign up for upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from the Stanford University Press when this anthology and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.

The year 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of South Korea's June 10 civil uprising of 1987, and the 10th year since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. To commemorate these occasions, the Korea Herald published a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin wrote the op-ed below, on the problems of Korean nationalism.

When the Virginia Tech massacre shook American society, Koreans and Korean-Americans alike nervously responded with a deep sense of collective guilt. Many first-generation immigrants took it upon themselves to apologize for the actions of gunman Cho Seung-hui on the grounds that they all share the same Korean ethnicity (meaning blood).

South Korea's ambassador to Washington, Lee Tae-shik, went so far as to say that the Korean- American community needed to "repent," suggesting a 32-day fast, one day for each victim, to prove that Koreans were a "worthwhile ethnic minority in America." The South Korean government offered to send an official delegation to the funerals of the victims.

This episode may seem bizarre or perplexing to non-Koreans since most ethnicities (including Americans) don't have that strong sense of collective responsibility. Yet this incident well illustrates Korea's psyche, i.e., deeply rooted ethnic national identity, which remains strong today.

Korea has been democratizing and globalizing for the last two decades but neither force has weakened the power of nationalism. On the contrary, it has only become stronger.

How can we explain this phenomenon of persistent ethnic nationalism in a country at the forefront of globalization? Where does such a tradition of collectivistic, ethnic identity come from? What are the positive and negative aspects of ethnic nationalism in Korea? How can Korea, as it is becoming a multiethnic society, deal with it in a globalizing world?

Origins and History

Historically Koreans have developed a sense of nation based on shared blood and ancestry. The Korean nation was "ethnicized" or "racialized" through a belief in a common prehistoric origin, producing an intense sense of collective oneness.

Ethnicity is generally regarded as a cultural phenomenon based on a common language and history, and race understood as a collectivity defined by innate and immutable phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. However, Koreans have not differentiated between the two. Instead, race served as a marker that strengthened ethnic identity, which in turn was instrumental in defining the notion of nation. Koreans are said to believe that they all belong to a "unitary nation" ("tanil minjok"), one that is ethnically homogeneous and racially distinctive from its neighbors.

This sense of ethnic homogeneity, contrary to the popular "prehistoric origin" belief, took root in the early 20th century. Faced with imperialist encroachments, from both the East (Japan) and West, Koreans developed the notion of a unitary nation to show its autonomy and uniqueness. For Korea, which had a long history of political, linguistic, and geographic continuity, the internal issues of political integration or geographic demarcation were less important than the threat of imperialism. Enhancement of collective consciousness and internal solidarity among Koreans against the external threat was more urgent. As a result, the ethnic base or racial genealogy of the Korean nation was emphasized.

Sin Chae-ho, a leading nationalist of the time, for instance, presented Korean history as one of the "ethnic nation" ("minjoksa") and traced it to the mythical figure Tangun. According to him, the Korean people were descendants of Tangun Chosun, who merged with the Puy of Manchuria to form the Kogury people. This original blend, Sin contended, remained the ethnic or racial core ("chujok") of the Korean nation, a nation preserved through defense and warfare against outside forces. The nation was defined as "an organic body formed out of the spirit of a people descended through a single pure bloodline" that would last even after losing political sovereignty.

The need to assert the distinctiveness and purity of the Korean nation grew more important under colonial rule, especially as Japan attempted to assimilate Koreans into its empire as "imperial subjects." The assimilation policy was based on colonial racism, which claimed that Koreans and Japanese were of common origin but the former always subordinate.

The theory was used to justify colonialist policies to replace Korean cultural traditions with Japanese ones in order to supposedly get rid of all distinctions and achieve equality between the two nations. Yet colonial assimilation policy meant changing Korean names into Japanese, exclusive use of Japanese language, school instruction in the Japanese ethical system, and Shinto worship. Koreans resented and resisted the policy by asserting their unique and great national heritage. Yi Kwang-su, a leading figure at the time, claimed that bloodline, personality, and culture are three fundamental elements defining a nation and that "Koreans are without a doubt a unitary nation ("tanil han minjok") in blood and culture." Such a view was widely accepted among Koreans: to impugn the natural and unique character of the Korean ethnic nation during colonial rule would have been tantamount to betraying Koreanness in the face of the imperial challenge of an alien ethnic nation. Ironically, Japanese rule reinforced Koreans' claim to a truly distinct and homogeneous ethnic identity.

After independence in 1945, and despite peninsular division into North and South, the unity of the Korean ethnic nation or race was largely taken for granted. Neither side disputed the ethnic base of the Korean nation, spanning thousands of years, based on a single bloodline of the great Han race. Instead, both sides contested for the sole representation of the ethnically homogeneous Korean nation.

Even today, Koreans maintain a strong sense of ethnic homogeneity based on shared blood and ancestry, and nationalism continues to shape Korean politics and foreign relations. Many ethnic Koreans overseas share this sense of ethnic homogeneity, which can explain the response by the Korean American community to the Virginia Tech massacre.

Prize and Price

Ethnic nationalism has been a crucial source of pride and inspiration for the Korean people during the turbulent years of their nation's transition to modernity that involved colonialism, territorial division, war, and dictatorship. It has enhanced collective consciousness and solidarity against external threats and has served Korea's modernization well. Nationalism is also the underlying principle of guiding the current globalization process in the South.

In the North, ethnic national consciousness offered the grounds for the formation of a belief that Koreans are a chosen people, a position that became the epistemological basis for the juche ideology and the recent "theory of the Korean nation as number one." Ethnic nationalism could also play an integrative role in a unification process, as this self-ascribed identity of homogeneity can serve as the basis for the initial impetus toward unification, if not as the stable foundation of a unified Korea.

At the same time, such a blood-based ethnic national identity became a totalitarian force in politics, culture, and society. Individuals were considered only part of an abstract whole, and citizens were asked to sacrifice individual freedom and civil rights for the collectivity.

Nation was also used as a trump card to override other competing identities as well as to justify violations of human and civic rights in both Koreas in the name of the "nation." The power of nationalism has thus hindered cultural and social diversity and tolerance in Korean society.

The dominance of collectivistic, ethnic nationalism constrained space for liberalism in the public sphere. In its formative years of nation building, nationalism developed in opposition to liberalism and these two ideologies were mistakenly positioned against each other. This historical legacy led to the poverty of modern thought in Korea, including liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. A lack of a liberal base, for instance, made Korean conservatism highly vulnerable to manipulation by authoritarian leaders.

Ironically, the very belief in ethnic unity has also produced tension and conflict between the two Koreas over the last half-century. The prevailing sense of unity in the face of territorial partition has provoked contention over who truly represents the Korean ethnic nation versus who is at fault for undermining that Korean unity. This battle for true national representation helps to explain highly charged inter-Korea conflict, including the Korean War that killed millions of fellows in the name of "national liberation."

Challenges and Future Tasks

Ethnic nationalism will remain an important organizing principle of Korean society. Neither democratization nor globalization has been able to uproot the power of nationalism. It would thus be wrong and dangerous to ignore or underestimate its power, treating it as a mere myth or something to pass away in due course. At the same time, we can't remain simply content with its current role, either.

Instead, it should be recognized that ethnic nationalism has become a dominant force in Korean society and politics and that it can be oppressive and dangerous when fused with racism and other essentialist ideologies. Koreans must strive to find ways to mitigate its potential harmful effects and use it in constructive manner. In particular, Koreans must promote cultural diversity and tolerance, and establish democratic institutions that can contain the repressive, essentialist elements of ethnic nationalism.

This important task is urgent because Korea, on the contrary to popular perception, is becoming a multiethnic society. Today about a half-million migrant labor workers, with the majority coming from China and Southeast Asia, live in the South. Only a decade ago, the number was less than one hundred thousand. Similarly more than one out of 10 marriages is "international," meaning that the spouse is nonethnic Korean (reaching 13.6 percent in 2005). Considering that the figure was only 1.7 percent in 1994, Korea is fast becoming a multiethnic society.

Despite new realities, however, perception and institutions are slow to change. Most Koreans still have stronger attachment to "ethnic Koreans living in foreign countries" than to "ethnic non-Koreans living in Korea." It is also much easier for a Korean-American who to "recover" Korean citizenship than for an Indonesian migrant worker living in Korea to obtain Korean citizenship. This is true even if the Indonesian worker might be more culturally and linguistically Korean than a Korean-American.

The principle of "bloodline" or jus sanguinis still defines the notions of Korean nationhood and citizenship, which are often inseparable in the minds of Koreans. In its formative years, Koreans stressed the ethnic base of nation without a corresponding attention to its civic dimension, i.e. citizenship. After colonial rule, neither state (North or South) paid adequate attention or made serious effort to cultivate a more inclusive notion of citizenship.

Social institutions that can address issues of discrimination against ethnic non-Koreans (e.g., ethnic Chinese known as "hwagyo") have been overlooked and underdeveloped. The Korean nationality law based on jus sanguinis legitimizes consciously or unconsciously discrimination against foreign migrant workers by explicitly favoring ethnic Koreans.

Korea needs to institutionalize a legal system that mitigates unfair practices and discrimination against those who do not supposedly share the Korean blood. Koreans need an institutional framework to promote a national identity that would allow recognition of ethnic diversity and cultural tolerance among the populace, rather than appeal to an ethnic consciousness that tends to encourage a false uniformity and then enforcing conformity to it.

They should envision a society in which they can live together, not simply as fellow ethnic Koreans but as equal citizens of a democratic polity. In fact, it is only a matter of time before Koreans will face serious challenges living in a multiethnic society (e.g., children of ethnically mixed couples, civic rights of migrant labor workers) that it is unprepared to resolve. Preparing for such challenges through public education and legal institutions won't be an easy task and should be an integral part of democratic consolidation processes that are currently under way.

Discussion of unification is premature and problematic if unification occurs without such adjustments. As the German unification experience shows, a shared ethnic identity alone will not be able to prevent North Koreans from becoming "second-class citizens" in a unified Korea. Even worse, because of higher expectations resulting from a shared sense of ethnic unity, a gap between identity (ethnic homogeneity) and practice (second-class citizens) will add more confusion and tension to the unification process.

All said, Koreans should strive to promote ethnic diversity and cultural tolerance, and develop proper legal institution so that all can live together in a multiethnic or unified Korea as equal citizens of a democratic polity. This task will be all the more important and urgent as Korea consolidates democracy, globalizes its economy, and prepares for national unification.