This post will draw attention to a less discussed success of South Korea, its raucous but stable and vibrant democracy. It's hard to imagine that this picture was just forty years back!
We all know about South Korea cultural exports - K-Pop (BTS, Blackpink etc), songs (Gangnam style, Butter etc), clothing (Yesstyle), soaps (squid game, Hometown Cha--cha-cha etc), movies (parasite), food (kimchi, bibimbap etc) etc - which have created a global Korean wave, described as hallyu. This comes on top of the country's spectacular economic success since its impoverished beginnings in the early 1960s. It's a global manufacturing powerhouse and its companies like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, KIA etc are world-leading brands. Ruchir Sharma describes it as the only one of four countries to have achieved 5% GDP growth for four decades in a row. It's also the only imperial colony to have graduated into the developed country status and become a member of OECD (1996).
But its successful democracy should count as an even more impressive achievement. The rise of democracy in Korea is fascinating. It was an extremely poor country even in the 1960s, and was at the frontline of the Cold War. It has also had despotic and brutal military dictatorships between 1950s and late 1980s. It has also had a string of corrupt political leaders, with its last three Presidents currently in jail.
The country also has had a very difficult colonial history. The Japanese colonial occupation in 1910 gave way after the Second World War to division of the country into two parts, with one part being defacto occupied by Soviet Union and another by the US. The Korean War (1950-53) was the vanguard of the Cold War and the Korean peninsula remained the frontline throughout the Cold War. South Korea struggled through the initial years of the Cold War. The Korea War never formally ended and the two parts remain technically at war even today. But thanks to the decade-long leadership of General Park Chung-hee and the benign security umbrella of the United States, the country pursued export-oriented industrialisation and started a four decade long period of extraordinary economic growth which saw it escape the middle-income trap and culminated in its ascension to the status of a developed country.
Finally, its unique history also creates formidable challenges to democracy. The ever-present danger of conflict with the North, the legacy of military rule and strength of the military, and the economic model of state-directed capitalism involving active industrial policy with close relationship between the chaebols and politicians, also mean that its political executive is powerful enough to be able to subvert other institutions. From a recent FT article on the forthcoming Presidential elections,
Park Sangin, professor of economics at the graduate school of public administration at Seoul National University, says that chaebol power continues to distort the economy and corrupt Korean public life. Highlight text He argues that the fate of the Korean economy — and with it, the fate of each individual presidency — remains dependent in large part on the investment decisions of a handful of companies and the families that run them. In turn, those companies depend on the good graces of regulators and prosecutors who are beholden to the Blue House. The result, says Park Sangin, is a culture of reciprocal “favours” that extends to financing for favourable media coverage and lucrative post-career sinecures. It means that when a new administration takes over, it has all the ammunition it needs to launch investigations into its predecessor. “It’s not just politicians who are beholden to chaebol money — it is lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and journalists too,” says Park Sangin. “No one is free from it.” Lee Sook-jong adds: “In Korea, a president rules for five years. But a chaebol family rules forever.”
However, despite all these challenges, the country has emerged as a stable and vibrant democracy. The country's success with democracy should count as one of the most impressive social and political successes of the last fifty years. It was a brutal military dictatorship for decades till 1987. It was toppled by street protests that brought together student unions and the Catholic church.
Since then it has remained a stable and vibrant democracy, with regular democratic elections. Ironically many of its Presidents have been corrupt leaders, who have ended up in jail after they lost power in elections. It's a mark of the strength of the Korean democracy that it has flourished despite these corrupt leaders, and institutional maturity to have tried its ex-leaders and even sent them to jail. Not even many democracies can claim this level of strength. From the same FT article,
The winner of the country’s first democratic presidential election in 1987, army general Roh Tae-woo, was jailed during the presidency of his conservative successor on bribery, mutiny and treason charges relating to the 1980 massacre of protesters in the southern city of Gwangju. But it was the investigation and subsequent death of progressive president Roh Moo-hyun in the late 2000s under his conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, that marked an escalation of the simmering conflict between conservatives and progressives. Roh jumped off the side of a mountain in 2009 under the pressure of a bribery investigation and it was under current president Moon Jae-in, Roh’s protégé, that Yoon oversaw the prosecution and imprisonment both of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye. “The imprisonment of former dictators was part of the democratisation process,” says Lee Sook-jong, “but the attempt to imprison Roh created a new dynamic.”
This is very impressive since there are hardly any examples of a democracy having emerged in 30 years. Most transitions from military dictatorships to democracy are difficult and get stuck in corrupt leadership, military recovering power, authoritarian leaders etc. The world is littered with such examples of failed democratic transitions.
Chile may perhaps be the closest example to South Korea of such transitions, though its success is far less unqualified.
A few observations:
1. How much of the South Korean success has to do with the sequencing of its democratisation? Francis Fukuyama, channeling Samuel Huntington, has described the three ingredients for a successful democratic state - rule of law, strong state, and democratic accountability. He also points to the sequence of the first two preceding the last in case of the Western European democracies.
Korea got the first two in place before it allowed democratic accountability. This is an important factor, one which other developing countries were in a position to adopt during the colonial transition and since.
2. A strong state can be an important factor in overcoming several other societal, historical and institutional handicaps. The Korean bureaucracy must be credited with its due share in the success. From the FT article again,
But Park Chong-hoon, head of Korea research at Standard Chartered, argues that the country’s success over recent decades demonstrates the system’s enduring strengths. Highlight text “Korea’s economic policy is ultimately run by its technocrats, and they run the system in a clean and stable way,” says Park Chong-hoon. “It is true that the chaebol are not always run in the wider public interest, and that inequality is a problem. But it is hard to look at the Korean economy and say it is malfunctioning.”
3. An important failure in democratic transitions has been the inability to keep the military away even after democratic governments assume power. Thailand is only a neighbourhood example. South Korea has been able to keep the military away. Is there something about the civil-military relationship which emerged after the late eighties transition that has been responsible for such restraint? Does it also speak something about the professionalism of the country's army? Or is it that the army could not use economic mismanagement, a common ruse, for intervention?
4. How much of its democratic success has to do with its herrenvolk nature of homogenous society and a long and common history? Patrimonialism and clientelism have its roots in kinship ties within the society, which are cultivated by political leaders to provide patronage and thereby exercise electoral advantage. If kinship ties are not salient, then political contests anchor around the concerns of economy and development.
5. The point about its last three Presidents being in jail is interesting. It's also interesting that the leaders of its two largest conglomerates Samsung and Hyundai too spent years in jail on charges of corruption, tax evasion etc. In a country where its chaebols and politicians are on the bed together, these trends also reveal a subtle condonation of the inevitability of transactional corruption which greases the system.
6. The spectacular economic successes of Japan and Korea are characterised by disproportionate contribution from metropolitan growth (Tokyo in case of Japan and Seoul in case of South Korea). In both cases, metropolitan areas make up three-fourth of national GDPs, with the capital city regions making up 40-50% the national GDP and GDP growth rates. See this on Japan and this on South Korea. In this respect, both may represent larger versions of Singapore and Hong Kong. In other words, while Singapore and Hong Kong are city states, Japan and, especially South Korea, are metropolitan cluster countries. I have not come across studies which explore this thread.
7. Finally, apart from the corruption associated with the closely intertwined nature of relationship between the chaebols and politicians, the country also suffers from problems like challenging demographics and a higher level of gender inequality for a developed country.
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