WASHINGTON - Bitterness still lingers in South Korea over a painful international financial bailout in 1997. On the heels of the latest financial crisis, a powerful Seoul now wants to help other countries needing aid.

South Korea is working with the International Monetary Fund on a new emergency loan program to reduce the stigma that countries have faced when dealing with the global lending agency. Officials hope to unveil it at a November summit of the Group of 20 major industrial countries that Seoul is conducting.

Details are still being worked out, but the South Korean proposal addresses some fundamental problems: Applying for an IMF loan can be seen as an admission that a country's economic health is even worse than the most pessimistic forecasts. That can cause turmoil in financial markets. Governments can also face anger at home over what are often perceived as humiliating conditions attached to the loans.

The new proposal aims to get around these hurdles by having the IMF identify a group of countries with otherwise healthy economies that have been hit by a sudden, quick-spreading global financial crisis.

The fund would then offer short-term, simultaneous loans to take care of liquidity problems and quell market turbulence in those countries. This would eliminate the need for a country to swallow its pride and approach the IMF on its own.

The program isn't for countries on the brink of defaulting on their debts. It's meant to keep countries with solid economic policies from being swept up in a meltdown that's no fault of their own.

For countries with the best-run economies, the loans would come without conditions, according to Shin Hyun-song, a senior economic adviser in the South Korean government. For countries outside that group, Shin said in a phone interview, South Korea and the IMF are still working out how stringent the conditions would be.

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has spoken of the need to quickly provide money to countries during a crisis, "to stop the falling dominoes."

"Of course, no country may want to move first, as that might risk sending the wrong message to markets," he said last month in a speech. "To get around this chicken-and-egg problem, we could think about providing multi-country assistance simultaneously."

Although the crisis that followed the 2008 collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers began in the United States, the repercussions were quickly felt around the world, including South Korea, Asia's fourth-largest economy and one of the world's major exporting nations.

Even at the height of the crisis, however, an IMF stigma kept many countries from asking the fund for loans.

"If you are seen going to the IMF, then this is a very strong sign that your economy is going very badly wrong," Shin said. "It's typically a cue for financial conditions to actually worsen."

The IMF is the globe's economic rescue squad, providing emergency loans to countries facing financial trouble. It came under severe criticism during the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis for the types of stringent conditions it imposed on countries in return for aid.

South Korea's experience with the IMF was painful. In 1997, national pride was battered when a liquidity crisis forced Seoul to seek a financial bailout in return for across-the-board monetary policy changes. South Korea ended up receiving a $58 billion package arranged by the IMF.

The country moved swiftly to reform its economy and ended up using only $30.2 billion, eventually paying it back in less than four years. Still, South Koreans call the Asian meltdown the "IMF crisis."

The IMF has been mindful of criticism. It has shown greater flexibility in the loans it has extended for countries caught up in the current crisis. It has also created a new line of credit for countries with solid economic track records that comes without the tough restrictions of normal IMF loan programs. Mexico, Poland and Colombia have petitioned for funds under the new lending program.

South Korea's new proposal is different. Instead of a normally healthy country going to the IMF and asking for a loan, "it's the fund going to the countries and saying, 'If you want to borrow, you can borrow,"' Ted Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said.

Shin said this could help officials deal with modern economic meltdowns that spread instantaneously among linked banks in countries around the world.