Korean Studies Internet Discussion List KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Doh C. Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 320 pages. ISBN: 0-5216-5823-3.
Consolidating Democracy in South Korea. Larry Diamond and Byoung-Kook Kim (eds.). London: Lynne Rienner, 2000. ISBN: 1-5558-7848-2.Reviewed by Mike Goodwin
College Station, TX[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 4 (2001): 184-188. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
The Republic of Korea's transition to democracy began arguably on June 29, 1987 when the then would-be Democratic Justice Party (DJP) presidential candidate Roh Tae Woo "relieved," as Larry Diamond and Byung-Kook Kim write in their new collection, Consolidating Democracy in South Korea, "a dangerous stalemate between the authoritarian regime and its democratic opposition" ( p. 2). Any number of points could be made about this. Roh's decision, for example, to stand down his candidacy (until Korea's military ruler, Chun Doo Hwan, had both pardoned the imprisoned Kim Dae Jung and allowed for direct presidential elections) served to contain what were increasingly virulent, widespread, and highly popular "anti-Chun" demonstrations. Yet relieving the 1987 crisis as he did also led, in part, to Roh's own election as the president of the Republic later that same year. For in the following December election (and in a classic Korean-style moment of failure to align national interests) the opposition vote was "split" between the newly released Kim Dae Jung and the Reunification Democratic Party's candidate, Kim Young Sam.
What more can be said about the summer of 1987 when Chun Doo Hwan reluctantly accepted Roh's demands? [1] Perhaps it is this: though thirteen years could rush by since that time, nothing -well, almost nothing (in the realm of Korean democracy anyway) would ever again seem as clear as it did back then, on that day. Or such is the overwhelming impression I have recently formed on reading both Consolidating Democracy in South Korea, as well as Doh C. Shin's masterly 1999 contribution to the "Cambridge Asia-Pacific Studies" series entitled, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea. [2]
Before I explain just what I mean here allow me to speak to the market by emphasizing some methodological points. These two works complement each other in several important respects and this should make them attractive to educators in Korean Studies. Taken together, for instance, they might nicely serve as the foundation for a critical, comprehensive, and extremely up-to-date middle and/or upper-year college "survey" of the complex array of issues-both theoretical and empirical-underlying Korea's efforts to claim a place amongst the so-called, "third wave" democracies.
Despite all the substantive changes that have, since 1987, combined to produce within Korea what Shin calls, "a politically new state," (and despite the rapid pace with which such changes have been affected), Korean democratization "still remains largely unexplored using the theories and methods of comparative political inquiry" (xxiii). If it is true, as Seymour Martin Lipset has said (and here I paraphrase), that to know a lot about one nation, and one alone, is really to know very little about anything at all, then the comparative aspect of Shin's study may well emerge as one of its primary strengths.
Shin's study both compares and contrasts Korean developments with those in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as Scandinavia and Western Europe and other regions (e.g., Taiwan). But the analogous aspect of this study of Korean democracy is not limited to international comparison alone; there is also a cultural-theoretical side to the work. For a decade that witnessed the veritable emergence of a new state in Northeast Asia, Shin declares, "not a single volume can be found [that offers] a comprehensive and balanced account of the Korean example, which 'challenges directly the notion that Confucian societies don't really want democracy'and offers 'an East Asian model of prosperity and democracy'" (xxiii), Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea aims to fill this gap. Thus, while Shin situates Korea today within the history of similar Western experience, the book also promotes a vision of the complementarity of democracy with traditional Asian values.
Sensitivity to both comparativist and cultural issues is a key virtue of Shin's work. Another is its robust empiricism. "This book," the author writes, "seeks to define and distinguish the Korean model of democratization in terms of what the Korean people themselves have actually experienced during the course of change." (xxiv, my emphasis) But what is the best way to understand what people have actually experienced? The answer, of course, is "to engage in survey research asking people directly what they think and how they choose to act in the political process" (xxvii).
The core data for Shin's study was collected (by Seoul National University and Korea-Gallup) over a period of some nine years. Beginning in 1988, six nation-wide surveys were conducted; two in the Roh era, and four throughout Kim Young Sam's tenure (November 1993, November 1994, January 1996, and May 1997).[3] It is, Shin suggests at the outset, incontestable: "Koreans neither interpret nor value democracy in the same way as Westerners do." (xxix) In an effort, therefore, to avoid the "teleological assumption that Koreans are becoming like citizens of Western democracies," many of the indexes used by Shin (both qualitative and metric) were constructed specifically for this study (274). [4]
The surveys themselves comprise over eighty separate questions ranging across twenty-two different categories and were designed to solicit-among other things-citizens' understanding of democracy, views of their experiences with democratization, their preferences for democracy (both in theory and in action), as well as a sense of the nature of their commitment to democracy, and their dissociation from authoritarianism, etc. (pp. 277-287).
Diamond and Shin's edited compilation, Consolidating Democracy in South Korea contains eight quite independent chapters; each of which (with the exception of Kim and Diamond's introductory essay and the final segment of the book by Georgetown University's Asian Studies Director, David Steinberg) is written by a Korea-based scholar. Contributors to this work also include Song-min Kim (Yonsei University), Hyun-Chin Lim (Seoul National), Chung-in Moon (Yonsei), Hyug Baeg Im (Korea University), and Kyoung-Ryung Seong (Hallym).[5]
The subjects discussed by these authors include comparative assessments of the Korean experience with consolidation (H-B Im), the ambiguous successes of Korean political parties (B-K Kim), the achievements (and remaining objectives) of an emergent civil society (Seong), dilemmas faced by labor (B-K Kim & H-C Lim), an analysis of the connections between the consolidation process and Korea's overall economic performance (Moon and S-M Kim), and a study of the effects on electoral politics of the 1997-1998 economic crisis (B-K Kim).
Consolidating Democracy in South Korea begins with a valuable overview of the book in which its editors seem to chart a middle course between the optimists and the pessimists. "[E]ven if South Korea's democracy can be considered 'consolidated'" (a point on which the contributors to this volume disagree), its political institutions, write Diamond and Kim, "remain shallow and immature, unable to structure a meaningful choice of policy courses and to provide the responsiveness, accountability, and transparency expected by the South Korean public." (p. 2) But why is this? And what are the obstacles facing Korea in its efforts to achieve the level of stability now enjoyed by other "third wave" democracies in Central and Southern Europe?
As I mentioned, Diamond and Kim's book dovetails nicely with Shin's study, and educators may find this helpful in developing their own curricula. In fact, Shin's national surveys provide much of the data for Diamond and Kim's own introductory chapter. As Shin writes, "[c]ontrary to what was expected during the promising transition from military rule, the consolidation of democratic political structure has advanced neither quickly nor steadily. Nor has the political culture consolidated" (p. 250). Building on this, Diamond and Kim note that, while in 1996 a full 84 percent of Koreans supported the shift from a military regime to the Sixth Republic, "[m]ass public support for democracy declines sharply in the wake of the 1997 financial collapse" (p. 5) In fact, "in October 1998, only 54 percent said 'democracy is preferable to any other form of government.'"
But there's more as well -and it's not good news. In the final, cynical year of Kim Young Sam's "democratic" administration (a period that saw more Koreans prosecuted under the National Security Act than under Roh Tae Woo), the Korean polity was badly battered by a volley of scandals. These included the arrest (for bribery) of a key Blue House advisor, the arrest (for bribery) of the director of the nation's Security Oversight Commission, the arrest (for bribery) of the Defense Minister, the resignation (under suspicion of bribery) of Kim's Health & Welfare Minister, the arrest (for bribery) of the President of Seoul Bank, and of course, the complete collapse of Hanbo Steel -something which eventually led to the arraignment of Kim's Interior Minister, a close fund-raiser, and the conviction of his own son.[6]
Given all this, is it surprising that, as Kim and Diamond report, by October 1998 (and with the economic crisis now full-blown), "[a]lmost a third of respondentsclaimed that 'under certain situations, a dictatorship is preferable'" to a democratically elected government? Is it perplexing to find (as anyone who has been reading the newspapers lately surely senses), that close to a majority (i.e., 44 percent) believe they would actually "prefer 'rule by a dictator like Park Chung Hee rather than a democratically elected president?'" (p. 5).
This sort of backsliding in the consolidation of democracy contrasts, as mentioned, with relative steady successes enjoyed by other new democracies in Central and Southern Europe, as well as Asia (i.e., Taiwan).[7] Yet when we step back and reexamine the apparent clarity that surrounded the events of June 29, 1987, we may begin to wonder what happened? Where did the apparent promise of a straightforward trajectory marking the gradual but steady consolidation of democracy in Korea go? Will the early gains of the 1988 to 1996 period return? If so, when? And how? These are complex questions touching not just on the procedural or "electoral" domain (the solidity of which seems, in a way, to be one of the few certainties in Korean politics today) but also on matters of fundamental cultural transformation as well. Those interested in exploring further the wide range of issues currently influencing both the consolidation of democracy in Korea, as well as the participation in that process by the Korean people themselves may wish to begin their exploration with the works discussed above.
Notes:
1 Hoare, James E. and Susan Pares, Conflict in Korea: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA. 1999) p. 164.
2 We know that between 1962 and 1978 -a period of some sixteen years-the autocratic Park Chung Hee was five times "elected" president of the Republic of Korea (i.e., in 1962, 1967, 1971, 1972, and 1978). How often though do we reflect on this fact: the "consolidation" of democracy in Korea has been under way for a period of time equal in length to fully one-half of Park and Chun's (much despised yet increasingly fondly remembered) "military" era as a whole (i.e., 1961-1987)?
3 As I read Shin's survey findings I found myself recalling some major events on Korea's bumpy road to democracy: e.g., the Kim Young Sam government's desperate (and ultimately foolish) efforts to "railroad" anti-democratic labor and national security laws through the National Assembly during the Christmas season of 1996; the same government's "raid" on the student movement at Yonsei University in the summer of 1996; and of course the slow, painful unfolding of the Hanbo scandal in mid-1997. From this point of view, Shin's data is fascinating in its specificity, because it allows readers to chart their own impressions of Korean democracy on the basis of their own preferred recollections (and to then compare their results with the Korean peoples' themselves).
4 Shin's study rejects ethnocentric (Western) teleology and something else too; i.e., the sort of "procedural minimum" definitions of democracy that appropriate aspects of Schumpeter, Dahl, and Huntington, among others. Such views tend, Shin writes, "to equate democracy with the mass public's free, fair, and competitive elections [sic] of political leadership on a regular basis." (p. xxiv) For Shin, this perspective misses too much about the quality of life under democratization. But if widening his analysis to include cultural, as well, more traditional electoral, legal, and institutional factors strengthens his study, it also invites controversy. In 1997 Bruce Cumings, for example, wrote this: "[t]here is no question in my mind that the American organization of society in our time, speeded by a globe-ranging media, carries every alternative social form before it. It is deeply popular because it convinces people everywhere that they can lead a life of carefree individuality, and thus it transforms and dissolves the alternatives one after another, including old Korea." (Korea's Place in The Sun, p. 14) Surely such claims fly-apriori-in the face of what Shin seeks to do?
5 In addition to their academic responsibilities at the institutions mentioned, both Im and Seong are members of Kim Dae Jung's Presidential Commission on Policy and Planning and, therefore, likely bring to their work a measure of practical, "on the ground" experience.
6 Source: James West, Research Fellow (East Asian Legal Studies), Harvard Law School, Harvard University, June 6, 1998. Personal Correspondence.
7 It may be objected that Taiwan has not undergone the economic "trauma" and, therefore, the deep social and political stresses to which Korea has been subject since 1997. One rebuttal-or at least a balancing comment-is that while Taiwan has indeed largely escaped the recent Asian economic "crisis," Japan certainly has not and (on the surface at least) one sees there little evidence of a widespread withdrawal of support for the principles of democratic governance. Also, Taiwan shares with Korea the day-to-day reality of remaining cold war tensions, as well as a highly contested political future. (A fact that is often cited as an important, even an "exceptional" factor influencing the consolidation of democracy in the latter nation.)
Citation: Goodwin, Mike 2001
Review of Doh C. Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea, (1999) and Larry Diamond and Byoung-Kook Kim, eds., Consolidating Democracy in South Korea
Korean Studies Review 2001, no. 17
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr01-17.htm
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