The Migration History of Korean Mine Workers to Germany from the Perspective of Impairment

This article examines the migration of Korean men to Germany as mine workers in the 1960s and 1970s not through the conventional framework that links migration to development, but as an episode within Cold War history. In the Cold War world order, newly emerging forms of political alignment and incorporation into global capitalism produced regimes of development aid. These regimes operated by dividing the world according to the metric of “development,” a classificatory logic through which newly independent states were positioned within―and rendered deficient as part of―the “underdeveloped” world.As a representative of the “developed” world charged with facilitating the transition of such societies into modern industriality, Germany implemented technical cooperation programs in South Korea. These initiatives functioned as a contemporary rearticulation of earlier imperial “civilizing missions” that had structured colonial relations. On this foundation, Korean workers were mobilized and relocated under the designation of technical trainees, a process made possible by the epistemic framing of Korean society as underdeveloped.Within this discursive and institutional configuration, the workerhood of Korean mine trainees was structurally impaired. Their labor was extracted under conditions that produced multiple forms of disablement, circumscribing what they were deemed capable of doing and legitimizing differentiated treatment. Confronted with these disabling regimes, the trainees engaged in compensatory practices―both within institutional settings and in everyday life―to negotiate, contest, and offset the damage inflicted upon their workerhood.