[INSIGHT INTO KOREA (4)] Counting the blessings of democratic politics

2007-07-07 10:02

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987 and the
10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared
a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant
changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our
readers can gain some insights into the nation`s future from these articles. - Ed.

Koreans often seem to be the last people to understand how far their nation`s
democratization has come in the past two decades, and how good Korea looks when
contrasted with other countries that suffered under dictatorships, whether of the
right or the left. One of the curiosities that I noticed almost immediately while
sitting in tabangs (tearooms) in Seoul when I first lived there nearly 40 years ago,
was an overweeningly critical political culture. In the late 1960s it was still possible
to say what an idiot Park Chung-hee was without being trundled off to jail - if you
said it quietly - or to excoriate both ruling and opposition politicians. Koreans seem
to scrutinize their political leaders with the same fervor that Americans follow their
favorite movie stars. All through the 1990s "the three Kims" were on the cover of
newspapers as often as Angelina Jolie`s face appears on American supermarket
magazines. When you combine a single five-year
presidential term with this hyperactive political
culture, it is inevitable that a president becomes
unpopular almost as soon as he walks through
the Blue House door. For Kim Dae-jung, even
winning the Nobel Peace Prize merited only a
small upward bump in the public opinion polls,
and if one were to judge President Roh Moo-hyun
by his standing in the polls, he ought to walk out that same door tomorrow morning.

Critics of Korean democracy argue that the nationwide uprising in June 1987 that
overthrew the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship and got the military out of politics
actually happened in the name of a broad participatory democracy, or unification
with the North, or independence from the United States, or even socialism and
"national liberation," and that none of these outcomes have been realized. What, in
fact, was accomplished in 1987? Putting the military firmly back in the barracks,
such that 20 years later it is impossible to imagine a military coup in Korea.
Establishing the precedent of direct presidential elections, with serial free elections
ever since. Giving labor a strong breath of life, which enabled it to develop into one
of the strongest labor movements in the world. Unleashing a formerly repressed
civil society, which is also remarkably vital compared to many countries. (Koreans
may not know it, but in most countries people don`t strap on headbands and march
through the streets all the time - blue collar unions may do it, but not bank clerks,
government workers and even police.)
These crucial victories look even better when compared to the aftermath of
dictatorship in the Philippines, Indonesia, Argentina, Poland or Rumania. Most
telling, they look good when compared to the United States: Americans have lived
through six years of illegal war, arbitrary assertion of executive powers, permanent
detention of suspects without trial, vile torture of captives, and Central Intelligence
Agency "renditions" of suspects to squalid countries that practice despicable
methods of interrogation. It is odd to say it, but today the rule of law looks more
secure in Seoul than it does in Washington.

The gains of 1987 also have to be understood alongside other major victories for
democracy - in 1995, and again in 1998. Radicals who wanted 1987 to signify a
quick path toward unification may forget that South Korea needed to be unified first.
In some ways there were three Koreas after the war ended in 1953, the third being
the southwest of South Korea, historically rebellious against the Japanese, the U.S.
occupation from 1945-48, and successive dictatorships. As historian Kim Yong-sop
has shown in his many works, South Jeolla was the site of the Tonghak peasant war
in the early 1890s because it occupied the intersection of great Korean wealth - the
lush rice paddy fields of Honam - and Japanese exporters who sent that Korean rice
flowing out of southwestern ports to Japan and the world economy. Even after the
Tonghak and the subsequent Uibyong (or "Righteous Army") forces were put down,
in the 1920s Japanese travel guides still warned against going into the interior of
South Jeolla, and of course Gwangju was the site of a major student uprising against
the Japanese in 1929. But it was the events of May 1980 that shook the post-1953
political regime to its core, and played a strong role in its eventual demise.

The Gwangju Rebellion was South Korea`s Tiananmen crisis, deeply shaping the
broad resistance to the dictatorship in the 1980s and paving the way for
democratization in the 1990s, and for the conviction on charges of treason and
sedition of the perpetrators who illegally seized power and massacred innocent
citizens in Gwangju. As scholars like Na Kan-chae of Chonnam University have
argued, the 1995 trials of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo and Kim Dae-jung`s
election in 1997 represented a distinct victory for the people of Gwangju and South
Jeolla, even if they came 15 years later and after great suffering. All you have to do
to see how much this means to the people of the region is to tour the carefully-
tended graves of the victims or the fine new museum in Gwangju dedicated to
exploring the truth of what happened in 1980.

I toured South Jeolla in 1972 as part of my doctoral research, riding on local buses
through the countryside. Local people frequently stared at me with uncomplicated,
straightforward hatred, something I had rarely experienced elsewhere in Korea. The
roads were still mostly hard-packed dirt, sun-darkened peasants bent over ox-driven
plows in the rice paddies or shouldered immense burdens like pack animals, thatch-
roofed homes were sunk in conspicuous privation, old Japanese-style city halls and
railroad stations were unchanged from the colonial era. I toured it again this year
and was amazed at how much has changed. A dirt-poor mining town like Hwasun,
site of many radical protests, is now merely a quiet suburb of Gwangju. The sleepy
port of Mokpo has grown into a major city. With the settling of accounts in 1995 and
the election of a son of Mokpo in 1997, the southwest finally feels itself to be a part
of the Republic of Korea. It would be hard to gainsay the importance of this
achievement.

What happened in 1998? A decade has now passed since the Asian financial crisis
flattened the Korean economy, and if you read the retrospective articles in the
business pages on the tenth anniversary, you see that Korea recovered more
quickly and more successfully than any of the afflicted countries. Less evident are
the major democratic gains from this crisis. Through an unpredictable conjuncture
of events, the first genuine political transition to the opposition since 1948 occurred,
labor was empowered, and both democracy and the economy were strengthened.

The supreme irony of the 1997-98 financial crisis was that it came just as the
Korean people were about to elect dissident Kim Dae-jung, who had suffered abuse
from the previous dictators as much as any comparable political leader in the world
- plus the Wall Street Journal and other business pages worried that he might be a
"radical."

Paradoxically, this election became a key enabling mechanism for Washington and
the IMF to get their way in Korea, because Kim`s election brought to power people
who had long criticized the state-bank-conglomerate nexus and who, like the new
president, had long been its victims. No other conceivable political leader was
better positioned than Kim to truly change the Korean system, since he had called
for reforms analogous to those of the IMF throughout his long career.

While foreigners worried about Korea`s strong labor unions disrupting the reforms,
President Kim assuaged labor interests with a master stroke in January 1998 (even
before he was inaugurated), one that promised a far-reaching political
transformation: Under his direction, for the first time in Korean history labor leaders
met with leaders of business and government to work out fair and equitable policies
to deal with the IMF crisis, a kind of "peak bargaining" arrangement that
represented labor`s biggest political gain ever. After tough negotiations, Kim got
labor to agree to large layoffs, tripling the pre-crisis unemployment rate. In return
labor unions got the right to exist legally and to participate in politics and field
candidates for elections.

President Kim`s chaebol reform package went along with IMF demands to eliminate
intersubsidiary loan guarantees, to lower debt-to-equity ratios, and to improve
transparency - because he also championed these changes. Mainly he wanted to
break the collusion between the government and the conglomerates; the depth of
the economic crisis ended up doing Kim`s work for him: Even the best of the
chaebol had such a towering level of bad debt that Daewoo went bankrupt, Hyundai
continued to have massive troubles in returning to profitability and accommodating
strong unions, and only Samsung seemed to emerge from the crisis relatively
unscathed. Within two years high growth rates had returned (over 11 percent in
1999 and 9 percent in 2000). Korea`s civil society and democracy were both strong
and vibrant, and no longer threatened by the military. Labor chose to condition the
IMF reforms, rather than destroy them. What`s not to like about these
achievements?

A more telling criticism of the 1987 breakthrough is that it provided for procedural
democracy, but not substantive democracy. The mass of the Korean people got the
forms of democratic representation, but not the reality of daily participation in
decisions affecting their lives. I am sympathetic to this argument and always have
been, because it puts its finger on the essence of the problems of democracy not
just in Korea, but in the United States. The system of American democracy and
American justice tells you that if you follow proper electoral or court procedure, the
outcome will be democracy or justice. In fact the outcome can be an unelected
president who gets into the Oval Office through the 18th century elitist device of an
electoral college, or representatives who, judging by their own performances on
television, are not qualified to run the country. The slim pickings of procedural
democracy may be reflected in one of the lowest voter turnout rates among the
major democracies - usually around half of the eligible voters make it to the polls in
American presidential elections.

But what is substantive democracy, and where does it exist in the real world? In his
classic book, "Knowledge and Politics," Roberto Unger distinguished between an
inner and an outer circle in contemporary politics. The inner circle represents power
and domination, exercised everywhere by the few. The outer circle includes all the
rest, and their search for community, decency and participation through the
architecture of politics. Nowhere has the problem of the inner circle been resolved,
he argued, and therefore in the outer circle "the search for community is
condemned to be idolatrous, or utopian, or both." This might be a good description
of the idolatry of North Korean political practice, surrounding a tiny elite who hold all
the power. But it really encapsulates democratic politics, too, whether in South
Korea or the United States.

A final blessing of democratization since 1987 was to open the way to the grandest
Korean value, the reunification of the peninsula. As long as the dictators ruled, the
only principle of unification was kill or be killed. No leader of South Korea before
1987 imagined unification as anything other than the extension of the southern
system to the north. That meant there would be no unification, because the North is
the world`s most astonishing garrison state, a militarized society unlike any the
world has ever seen, and to imagine imposing the southern system on it was to
imagine the next Korean War. Moreover, as long as the dictators were in power
North Korea was under no pressure to democratize, and gained legitimacy from its
history of anti-Japanese struggle, whereas all the southern regimes until the 1990s
were full of people who had collaborated or cooperated with imperial Japan (or their
sons and daughters). By inaugurating a long period of reconciliation, peaceful
coexistence, economic exchange and people-to-people contacts, Kim Dae-jung set
in motion the only strategy that might actually change, open, and eventually
democratize the North, if slowly. The gains from this have been tremendous
compared to what went before, in my view, but maybe the gains in the South have
been greater, because people have completely transformed their image of their
northern brethren from menacing devils to estranged cousins led by nutty uncles.
This could never have happened without a genuine democratic breakthrough in the
Republic of Korea.

Maybe it`s better to count the blessings we have, instead of the ones we might
have. It might be better to remember the real and unquestioned victories after the
political blight Koreans lived under, only twenty years ago: arbitrary dictatorship,
preventive detention, routine torture, a CIA spying on everyone, a nonexistent labor
movement, a press forced to put Chun Doo-hwan`s photo or his brilliant words on
its front pages every day.

By Bruce Cumings