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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
How do we imagine and actualize the space of neutrality in the radically bipolarizing environment of modern politics such as those that prevailed in the early Cold War? We can pursue this question in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement, or the politics of the Third World more broadly, the early initiative of which took shape at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and in the precarious time in Asia immediately after the Korean War. Alternatively, we may explore the same question more squarely within the 1950–1953 crisis in the Korean peninsula; in particular, in relation to the intervention of the politics of neutrality into the resolution of the Korean conflict, a formative episode in the early Cold War international politics. This essay looks at the latter aspect of alternative space-making to the global bipolar politics of the mid-twentieth century, with reference to the idea of neutrality that was embedded in the grassroots experience of Korea's civil-and-international war.
1 Cited from Frank N. Trager, “Burma's Foreign Policy, 1948-56: Neutralism, Third Force, and Rice,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1956), p. 89.
2 Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
3 See, for instance, Steven Hugh Lee, The Korean War (New York: Longman, 2001). Also Kim Dong-choon, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal:Japan Focus, Vol. 8, Issue 9 (March 1, 2010).
4 India was an important player in the early phase of Korean War Armistice discussions, which, having started in 1951, came to last two more years. The repatriation of POWs was a centrally critical issue in the delay. Later it played a formative role in the United Nations' initiative on behalf of the Korean War prisoners who chose neutral nations (such as India and Brazil) instead of repatriation. See Monica Kim, Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). However, his choice of Tagore as the ship's name may have a deeper historical background: Intellectuals in colonial Korea were well aware of the fact that Tagore was a rare, almost singularly unique scholar of South Asia at the time who saw Japan's colonial adventure to East Asia as a mimetic act of Western empires—rather than according to its propagated ideology of greater Asian solidarity in opposition to Western imperialism.
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