[KS] Re: Choi Jang-jip's scholarship

[Henry H. Em]

Peter Hyun has lived an extremely interesting life,
but his characterization of progressive or leftist
intellectuals in South Korea, as reported in the
Chosun Ilbo (Nov. 16), is superficial at best.

To give some idea of Choi Jang-jip's scholarship,
I've pasted below a review (unpublished) which I
wrote last year - i.e. before the financial crisis and
before the Presidential election.

--------------BEGIN-----------------
Oct. 1, 1997
by Henry H. Em

review of State and Society in Contemporary Korea,
edited by Hagen Koo,  (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993)

Jang Jip Choi: "Political Cleavages in South Korea"

   The lead essay in _State and Society in
Contemporary Korea_, Choi Jang-jip's "Political
Cleavages in South Korea," offers a unique and cogent
interpretation of post-1945 South Korean political
history.  Choi begins his essay with the striking
statement, "Political conflict in South Korea takes
place around political cleavages created after
liberation in 1945."  The creation of ideologically
hostile states north and south of the 38th parallel,
the Korean War, and subsequent strengthening of
both states only paved over those cleavages. With
this, Choi argues that the evolution of the state-civil
society relations in South Korea should be
understood in terms of a structurally determined
process begun in 1945.

   Although the other essays in _State and Society_
also cast their argument within historical narratives,
I find Choi's essay remarkable for its attempt to
explain how the legacy of colonialism, division, and
the Korean War actually shaped the terrain of
South Korean politics.  With the collapse of the
Japanese colonial state in 1945, the political terrain
decidedly favored revolutionary nationalism
throughout the Korean peninsula. But in southern
Korea, the "U.S. military government policy and
the vast resources mobilized to achieve its
objectives" led to the precipitous decline of
"civil society," while the ensuing Korean War
transformed the South Korean state from an
extremely unstable and fragile state into a powerful
bureaucratic authoritarian regime.  Choi writes,
"fear became an integral part of the political culture,
fear of communism and of being labeled a
communist,...the political terrain was rearranged
by the terror of war."  This wartime experience
was appropriated by the ideological apparatuses
of the South Korean state, and thereafter the state
could invoke anti-communism, or national security,
to limit the parameters of political conflict, penetrate
civil society, and consolidate its legitimacy among
the people.

   Choi's interpretive history is a tectonic analysis.
Beneath South Korea's political terrain lay three
distinct but interlinked cleavages along which
political confrontations take place.  Because South
Korea differentiates itself from North Korea as
being a liberal democratic state, the authoritarianism
of the South Korean state begets the political
cleavage closest to the surface, i.e. the South
Korean state is most vulnerable to civil society's
aspirations for democracy.  Deeper down is the
fault line constituted by demands for economic
justice versus a development policy indifferent to
such demands (i.e. class struggle), and the deepest
fault line is the cleavage constituted by populist
(accommodating) versus conservative (conquer
the North) approaches to Korea's reunification.
The issue of reunification is thus the most difficult
(and perilous) issue for opposition groups because
it calls to question the very raison d'etre of the
South Korean state and exposes the opposition
groups to charges of being pro-Communist,
and pro-North.

   Like the earth's crust beneath Los Angeles, then,
the terrain of South Korean politics shifts
--sometimes violently--along these fault lines.
Because the three fault lines run beneath the political
terrain at different depths, these three cleavages
break open the political terrain in a definite
historical sequence.  Choi explains,

     "The salience of any particular cleavage
     during a given historical period [is]
     determined by the changing international
     context and the shifting power relationship
     between the state and civil society within
     South Korea.  (p. 14)

That is to say, at "specific historical junctures"
(such as the April 19 revolution), but also in terms
of the overall trajectory of South Korea's political
development, the cleavages open up progressively:
first along the issues of democracy (1960s), then
democracy and economic justice (1970s), and
finally along all three cleavage including the question
of national reunification (1980s).

   Many readers, especially those well-acquainted
with contemporary Korean history and politics,
will find Choi's interpretative history elegant, and
provocative.  But however elegant, we have to
question the verity of Choi's interpretive history.
[This section deleted]

   It should be noted that Choi's essay reflects the
historical time in which the essay was written, i.e.
on the heels of a profoundly revisionist
reconsideration of South Korea's post-Liberation
period history, and as the debate over the "civil
society" paradigm dominated progressive
intellectual circles in South Korea.  It was the
1980 people's uprising in Kwangju, and the
massacre perpetrated by government troops,
which broke the state's ideological hold over the
democratic movement.  The violence of the
state, and the devastation of the democratic
forces in the aftermath of Kwangju, drove
critical intellectuals to search for the historical
and structural origins of their predicament - and
intellectuals like Choi linked contemporary
political issues with the unfinished dialectic of
the post-Liberation period.  At the same time,
with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe
and the "democratic transition" seemingly under
way in South Korea, progressive-liberal
intellectuals like Choi were looking for
alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist paradigm
held by the revolutionary wing of the movement
forces in South Korea. 1

   The "progressive" aspect of Choi's politics tends
to see the state and civil society locked in a zero-
sum struggle - "an overdeveloped state implies a
weak civil society." (pp. 27-28)  For Choi, the
proper function of civil society is to remain vigilant,
checking the predations of a self-serving state.
If civil society fails to "outmaneuver and neutralize
the power of the state," then the democratic forces
can only hope for "limited gains within the existing
power structure."  That is to say, it's much too
simplistic to say that the Miracle on the Han
produced a critical middle class which then made
democracy bloom, and it is premature to assume
that the gains made by the democratic-progressive
forces in the past decade have been fully
consolidated.

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_______________________
Henry H. Em
Assistant Professor,
UCLA - Dept. of East Asian Lang. & Cultures

mailing address until Dec. 31, 1998:
c/o Asiatic Research Center, Room 303
Korea University,
Anam-dong, Sungbuk-gu,
Seoul 136-701,  Korea

Tel:  82(country code)-2-780-6185 (ho)
Fax:  82-2-780-7014
Tel:  82-2-923-8702,  Ext. #126  (of)




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