In 1919, Korea rose while the world was rebuilding order from the rubble of war

On March 1, 1919, thirty-three national representatives read out a declaration of independence, and the demonstrations that followed grew into the largest national movement in Korean history, joined by every region and every class. It did not happen in a vacuum. Behind it lay the most devastating war humanity had yet fought, which had ended only months earlier, and the new principle that war had left behind.

What total war left behind: national self-determination

The First World War, fought from 1914 to 1918, was the first total war, with the European powers split into two camps. Trench warfare, machine guns, and poison gas produced tens of millions of casualties and brought down old multiethnic empires — Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, and Russia among them. At the Paris Peace Conference that followed, the American president Woodrow Wilson advanced the principle of national self-determination: that each people should decide its own fate.

In practice Wilson's principle was meant to apply to the colonies and subject territories of the defeated powers, Germany and Austria among them, and there was little room to apply it directly to Korea, a colony of victorious Japan. But the news was enough to convince independence activists abroad and intellectuals at home that here at last was a chance to put Korea's case to the world. The sudden death of the former emperor Gojong in January 1919 — attended by rumors of poisoning, and by public anger — served as the detonator, and the two currents met and exploded into the March First Movement.

Announcing independence to the world, and a provisional government

Japan suppressed the movement by force, at a heavy cost in lives, and the Korean question was never actually taken up at the Paris conference. Yet the movement left two clear results. The scattered independence forces at home and abroad drew together and founded the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai that April; and Japan found itself compelled to change its colonial method from rule by force to what it called cultural rule.

Similar resistance was rising elsewhere in the same period. In India, Gandhi was beginning to organize nonviolent resistance; in China, anger at the conference's handling of Shandong produced the May Fourth Movement — in May 1919, two months after March First. The First World War began as a war among European powers, but its aftermath lit independence movements across the colonized world, and in that sense the March First Movement was never an isolated Korean event.

What the comparison tells us

That the movement was bound up with global currents does not diminish it. If anything, what makes March First remarkable is precisely the planning and execution behind it: reading an opening in the international situation, then organizing an entire people to raise its voice to the world. That similar resistance broke out in India and China at the same moment shows that the First World War shook the colonial order everywhere, not only in Europe.

Japan replaced its military police regime with so-called cultural rule after March First, but this was closer to a conciliatory cover for continued repression. Wilson's self-determination, too, faded before long against the interests of the victorious powers. Even so, the Provisional Government the movement brought into being, and the tradition of organized independence work it began, became the root of a resistance that continued without a break for the twenty-six years until liberation.

The declaration read out that day is notable for what it did not do: rather than dwell on resentment toward Japan, it set out a case for contributing to the common good of humanity as advocates of peace. The movement's commitment to nonviolence carried into the Provisional Government's own constitution, and helped ensure that the Republic of Korea began, from the outset, as a state aspiring to be a democratic republic.

The movement is now written into the preamble of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea, which declares that the country upholds the legitimacy of the Provisional Government established by the March First Movement. That is also why March 1 is observed each year as a national holiday.

At a glance

Year	Korean history	World history
1914-1918	—	The First World War
January 1919	Death of Gojong	The Paris Peace Conference opens
March 1919	The March First Movement	—
April 1919	The Korean Provisional Government is founded	—
May 1919	—	The May Fourth Movement in China