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Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea

As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul’s approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationa...

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Autores principales: Yi, Joseph, Lee, Wondong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7367163/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32836554
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00509-z
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author Yi, Joseph
Lee, Wondong
author_facet Yi, Joseph
Lee, Wondong
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description As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul’s approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This “pandemic-leftist” discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government’s relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one’s country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies.
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spelling pubmed-73671632020-07-20 Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea Yi, Joseph Lee, Wondong Society Global Society As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul’s approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This “pandemic-leftist” discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government’s relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one’s country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies. Springer US 2020-07-17 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7367163/ /pubmed/32836554 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00509-z Text en © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
spellingShingle Global Society
Yi, Joseph
Lee, Wondong
Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title_full Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title_fullStr Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title_full_unstemmed Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title_short Pandemic Nationalism in South Korea
title_sort pandemic nationalism in south korea
topic Global Society
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7367163/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32836554
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00509-z
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