The Present in Hindsight

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, South Korea earned its reputation as one of the darlings of the development jet set, a fabulously successful late developer committed to export-led industrialization and touted by policy makers and international aid agencies as a model for other developing countries. As the South Korean economic miracle captured scholarly attention, most analysts took as their analytic starting point that exact same era of unparalleled bounty in the 1980s, or at best the final years of the 1970s when significant gains first were apparent. Rather than looking to the pre-1970 period for clues as to which state or class forces were responsible for South Korea's buoyant economy in those later decades, the tendency was to cultivate a presentist understanding of the structure and nature of the South Korean economy during the period it reached its heights. This meant that certain actors and conditions – namely, those most visible and powerful by the late 1970s and into 1980s, such as the chaebols – were routinely identified as key sources of South Korea's success. Others, most notably for our purposes the middle classes, were routinely ignored.

But the economic and banking crisis that hit that country several decades later, in the 1990s, changed all that.