K-POP INSTRUMENTATION AS SOUTH KOREA’S INTERNATIONAL ACTOR ON MAINTAINING THE COUNTRY’S RELATIONS THROUGH MIDDLE POWER DIPLOMACY UNDER PARK GEUN-HYE ADMINISTRATION (2013-2016)

Abstract

Music is the part culture that has become an identity of a country. However today, such culture has the more power to drive the country to move forward, to gain what the country wants, to pursue the national interest of that country, also to maintain good relations with other countries as well. This phenomenon mobilizes culture to have more power to contribute in local and global communities and become an important actor of the country. In the case of South Korea, a middle power country, K-Pop as the country’s culture is also known by being this “international actor”, which actually the next stage after being a “national actor”. K-Pop emerged in the end of ’90s and started to be known globally by the early 21st century. For the first time in South Korea’s history, “Nobody” by a K-Pop girl group, Wonder Girls, appeared as the first K-Pop Song on the global chart, Billboard Chart Hot 100 in 2008. Four years later in 2012, “Gangnam Style” by PSY hit worldwide with numbers of new achievements for K-Pop. Under Park Geun-hye administration, South Korea adopted the “New Era of Hope” as the priorities of the country, which includes K-Pop as the instrument for the country’s foreign policies and cultural policies. Through “middle power diplomacy,” the country does instrumenting K-Pop as the actor through formal and informal activities with smaller and bigger countries using “middle power” as the status of the country. This thesis is providing information and analysis of Park Geun-hye’s “New Era of Hope” and middle power diplomatic attempts by South Korea with K-pop instrumentation, that was instrumented through agreements, state visits, dialogues, and leader-to-leader conversation for formal activities, also the global cultural activities such as music festival and mutual cultural exchange programs for informal activities that were related to the South Korea’s public diplomacy policy with K-Pop as the actor that acts internationally beyond the states with the purpose on maintaining the country’s relations at the global scope.