Asian Studies: Issues and Research Agenda

Abstract

The topic of this volume, "Asian Studies in the Age of Globalization," directly points to two issues which I wish to discuss. Our title reflects these: first, Asian studies as an aspect of the academic study of foreign areas or area studies; and, second, the increasingly rapid globalization of economics, politics and even cultural patterns and developments in this century. The first of these aspects, area studies, is obviously of concern to the Center for Area Studies at Seoul National University; it is also of concern to all of us professionally as area studies specialists. The second is of concern to all humanity. When Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s coined the phrase the "global village" (McLuhan 1989), meaning a wired earth where no community was outside of the information networks of any other, he was dearly pointing to a phenomenon which has come to pass more rapidly than most of us conceived to be possible at that time. However, when many people, especially specialists in strategic studies and international relations, talk of the globalization of human activities and enterprises in the 1990s, they are referring to a more limited, if no less important, phenomenon: the end of the Cold War. For those of us in Europe, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the replacement of Communist-ruled states by a plethora of old and new governments pointed to the emergence of a new structure of world politics. Some of these new states have been successful and many unsuccessful in coping with pent up demands for individual rights and ethnically-designated privileges. Though the collapse of the divide between the so-called capitalist and communist worlds has been profound, it would be naive in the extreme not to acknowledge that Cold War legacies and the problems left in their wake persist on the Korean peninsula in a form similar to the previous division of European.