If there is one thing that can tellingly distinguish Korean democracy from postcommunist democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, it is to be sure the extraordinary vibrancy of civil society in democratized Korea. It is literally “extraordinary,” because, among Western observers, it has been constantly reported that there is a salient contrast between a plethora of political actions and civil movements in democratizing postcommunist countries and a frustrating paucity of civic engagement in their democratized counterparts. Considering the similar transitional experience – which political scientist Terry Karl termed a “mass-ascendant” mode of democratization – in which “ethical civil society” played a pivotal role in breaking down the (postcommunist or pseudo-democratic) bureaucratic authoritarian regime, the contrast in the viability of civil society between democratized Korea and its Eastern and Central European counterparts is quite remarkable.

For most comparative political scientists, the most eminent question has been, “Why such a sudden disappearance of civic energy in postcommunist Europe?” Most often, the inertial lifestyle that the previous rigid party-state has engendered over the past half century has been singled out as the most crucial source of the problem. That is, blame is placed on the citizenry’s fundamental dependence on the party-state for virtually everything concerning their life: jobs, income, consumer goods, education, housing, health care, and social and geographic mobility. According to Marc Howard, a lack of desire to participate in voluntary organizations in the postcommunist people follows from their past life experience under the ossified bureaucratic authoritarian regime that had widened the gap between authentic private and hypocritical public lives, deepened the mistrust of formal political organizations, and fostered friendship networks in the private sphere.

In Korea, “multiculturalism” (damunhwa or damunhwajuui in Korean) is one of today’s hottest topics both in academia and in civil society. According to Dong-Hoon Seol’s recent article, the number of published scholarly articles containing damunhwa(juui) as a key word or a title word amounted to 810 as of November 2010, and the number of articles in the Korean news media on damunhwa(juui) has dramatically increased in recent years – from 137 in 2000 to 14,437 in 2009. Most tellingly, in 2006, as the total number of foreign residents (immigrants and migrant workers combined) approached one million, amounting to approximately 2 percent of the entire Korean population, and as the number of international marriages sharply increased (especially in rural areas), President Roh Moo Hyun publicly declared that Korea is moving toward a multicultural society and this trend is irreversible.

As a result, in the past five years, scholars, consisting mainly of sociologists and anthropologists, have actively discussed (1) the various factors contributing to a multicultural Korea – demographic change, economic demands, and, more directly, periodic immigration policy reforms in each democratic government since 1992, (2) the current state or character of Korean multiculturalism, and (3) both normative-theoretical and policy-oriented practical suggestions on how to create a more decent multicultural society in Korea.

The recent resurgence of Confucianism in social and political theory is largely (if not exclusively) affiliated with the communitarian discontent and critique of liberalism in the West (particularly in North America) over the past two decades. Echoing Western communitarians who find fault with rights-based individualism as psychologically hollow (because of its assumption of the self-choosing, socially unencumbered self), ethically unpalatable (because of its priority of the right over the good), and politically undesirable (because of its tendency to erode communal bonds and civic virtue), recent Confucian political theorists criticize liberalism as too self-centered in its valorization of individual autonomy, will, choice, and (negative) freedom at the expense of communal solidarity and common good. Despite the still theoretically ambiguous connection between the democratic political regime and the communitarian society, many advocates of “Confucian democracy” recognize the communitarian elements in Confucianism as essential in the making of a viable Confucian democracy that is distinct from liberal individualistic democracy.

However, “Confucian communitarianism” as a political vision and practice is not without problems, the problems communitarianism is generally exposed to. Most important, it is still unclear whether communitarianism is theoretically superior to liberalism, or at least whether communitarianism can withstand the liberal critique of it. For instance, as far as I know, communitarians (including Confucian communitarians) have not yet successfully met the challenges that Stephen Holmes raised two decades ago. Holmes claims that while critiquing the liberal valorization of the unencumbered self, communitarians go to the other extreme by valorizing the “social self.” But why is the social self a better self than the autonomous self? Is “social” not a descriptive, rather than evaluative, term? Also, can sociality and individuality not be dialectically intertwined rather than starkly opposed by mediation of liberal political institutions and social practices? Then, are communitarians not confusing a particular version of liberal theory predicated on a speculative Cartesian epistemology of atomistic individualism with liberal social and political practice, which relies on a liberal education aimed at inculcating liberal virtues and characters? Are communitarians not mistaken when they think liberalism is essentially antisocial while the gist of liberalism lies in its reformulation (not abnegation) of the relationship between the self and society? Any attempt to justify Confucian communitarianism not merely as an antiliberal ideology but, more important, as a viable political vision and practicable theory, should be able to address (and overcome) these important challenges.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, an increasing number of scholars who study East Asia have recently begun to argue that political meritocracy understood as rule by the wise and virtuous few is not only suitable for East Asian societies where there remains a strong Confucian tradition of respect for meritocratically chosen political elites, but more fundamentally offers a viable alternative to Western liberal democracy, which is often troubled by a variety of social problems that in their view germinate from liberalism’s rights-based individualism. Though these scholars disagree on how to implement political meritocracy, they concur on two points: the shortcomings of liberal representative democracy and the complexity of contemporary public affairs. First, advocates of political meritocracy argue that the policy of “one person, one vote (OPOV),” the political manifestation of rights-based individualism, ferments political irresponsibility and ultimately erodes the common good because of the unavoidable pressure on politicians, who are predominantly concerned with reelection, pandering to myopic popular opinion. Moreover, they assert that representative democracy, as long as it is OPOV based, is largely incapable of representing the interests of future generations and of the people living outside the national boundary. The second argument is independent of the ills or limitations of liberal representative democracy. Given the sheer complexity of public affairs, it is claimed, “a substantial amount of decision-making power must be placed in the hands of an intellectually agile elite, almost as a functional requirement of modern political societies.... [Hence] a pressing need for ‘brains’ in government.”

No doubt, liberal representative democracy is far from perfect, both as a political ideal and as a social practice. Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, it may not be so prudential to transplant any particular mode of Western-style democracy (note: there are multiple modes of Western liberal democracies) in East Asian soil that is still deeply soaked in communitarian, characteristically Confucian, social mores and habits.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Confucian communitarian critics of liberalism (and liberal democracy) argue that as an ethical theory liberalism is much too individual-centered and its staggering emphasis on individual right is fundamentally at odds with the obvious human condition that man or woman is radically situated in the particular social context in which the social roles that one plays are prior to one’s individual right and moral autonomy. They also argue that as a political theory liberalism is flawed because of the legalistic assumptions embedded in it: by envisioning the social and political world purely in terms of right, (negative) freedom, and law, liberal political theory dismisses what makes man or woman an ethical being and what makes society a fiduciary community in which men and women are expected to act properly toward one another, thereby enriching their communal bonds and mutual trust. At the heart of the Confucian communitarian critique of liberalism is that unlike liberalism placing a supreme moral value on legality, Confucianism as an ethical and political discourse centers on the idea of civility (particularly li-based civility), in and through which social relations, otherwise purely legal and lacking in common identity, can be refurbished into thick civic bonds of mutual trust.

Larry Diamond, a renowned political scientist, points to pluralism as one of the defining features of democratic civil society. He says, “To the extent that an organization, such as a religious fundamentalist, ethnic chauvinist, revolutionary or millenarian movement, seeks to monopolize a functional or political space in society, crowding out all competitors while claiming that it represents the only legitimate path, it contradicts the pluralistic and market-oriented nature of civil society.” In this brief statement, we find three important points about the nature of democracy and democratic civil society: (1) liberal pluralism is integral to democratic civil society, (2) the center of pluralism is the market, and (3) at the center of pluralism is the plurality of material interests. In fact, many political scientists now widely agree that the democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe, even if galvanized by the mass public’s anticommunist and procapitalistic spirit in civil society, occasionally faced difficulty transforming the national, ethically charged, civil society into various kinds of interest-based liberal pluralistic civil societies. For instance, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan understand the most profound challenge to Polish democratic consolidation precisely in terms of the difficulty of liberal pluralism. “Ethical civil society represents ‘truth,’ but political society in a consolidated democracy normally represents ‘interest.’ In political society the actor is only seldom the ‘nation,’ the more routinely ‘groups.’ ‘Internal differences’ and ‘conflict’ are no longer to be collectively suppressed, but organizationally represented in political society. Compromise and institutionalization are no longer negative but positive values.” Undoubtedly, pluralism is at the core of modern civil society, but the empirical political scientists’ understanding of pluralism as plurality of material interest is significantly limited for the following two reasons. First, liberal pluralism in political science completely dismisses Hannah Arendt’s insight that what is really meaningful is the plurality of the selves (or human beings). In this regard, empirical political scientists make a critical mistake by understanding the core of the individual self solely in terms of material interest. Such a view is what (Nozickean) libertarianism champions, but libertarianism hardly represents the entire liberal tradition, and it certainly does not offer the best case of liberal pluralism. Second, empirical political scientists fail to appreciate Max Weber’s insight that there are two categorically different kinds of “interest” – material interest and so-called ideal interest.

In Chapter 3, I took issue with the sufficientarian interpretation of the Confucian perspective of social justice, not only because of its idiosyncratic attempt to draw sufficientarian implications from the Chinese term zu 足 (often translated in English into “sufficient”) without much consideration of sufficientarianism’s background ethics (evidenced in Harry Frankfurt’s work), but also because of the negative thesis implicated in sufficientarianism which rejects egalitarian and prioritarian reasoning at least above some critical threshold. Indeed, given Confucianism’s strong commitment to the (moral and material) well-being of the people, it is hard to dispute Joseph Chan’s core contention that according to Confucianism, people who are worst off have first priority for care, which is highly compatible with John Rawls’s difference principle and his idea of social minimum. My problem with Chan’s view lies in his supplementary claim that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter, a claim that he rationalizes primarily with reference to Xunzi, who singles out merit and contribution (as opposed to family background) as the only legitimate source of emolument.

It is debatable whether the fact that Xunzi advocated the meritocratic emolument system, in the face of strong feudal aristocratic oppositions during the Warring States period, can be construed as an endorsement of inequalities beyond the threshold of sufficiency. But this interpretative issue, however important, is not my primary concern in the present chapter, nor am I interested in the philosophical investigation of which distributive principle Confucianism as an ethical system supports, between egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism, all of which tend to favor less advantaged individuals when their interests conflict with those of more advantaged individuals. Rather, my concern here is discovering the best way to realize the Confucian commitment to the people’s material well-being in the given contemporary socioeconomic and political context of East Asian societies. In this regard, what commands our attention in Chan’s sufficientarian claim is not so much its positive thesis, a point that is generally supported by all three distributive principles, but Chan’s perfectionist justification of economic meritocracy beyond the threshold of sufficiency.

The Plasticity of “Democracy” in the East Asian Political Discourse

One puzzling phenomenon in modern political science and political theory is that as democracy has become ubiquitous in many parts of the world and democratic values have become increasingly accepted as universal human values, the term “democracy” has become almost a cliché, losing its definitional political meaning. This is especially so among East Asians who have yet to establish (full) democracy, despite their strong desire for it, and those who have attained it only recently through bloody fights against authoritarian forces. On one extreme, democracy means everything good: political stability, economic development, quality of life, full protection of individual human rights, maximal respect of diversity, and so on. On the other extreme, democracy is associated with the detriments that Western liberal democracies are currently struggling with, such as unbridled egoism, consumerism, erosion of the common good, and social anomie – all of which might ultimately contribute to high divorce rates, dysfunctional families, juvenile violence, and so on.

For those who are in the first extreme, democratic struggle aims primarily to “remedy evils experienced in consequence of [existing or] prior political institutions.” Thus understood, democracy not only is compatible with but also can provide optimal political and societal conditions for a market economy, rights-based individualism, value pluralism (or cultural pluralism), a vibrant civil society, and social justice. In a democracy, the argument goes, we can have all these goods simultaneously and without any internal contradictions, if we, the citizens, so will it; if any of these goods are missing or if there is any tension between these goods in our putatively democratic system, quite simply our democracy has not reached its pinnacle, or in political scientific language, our democracy has not yet been consolidated. Originally conceived negatively as the absence of evils, therefore, democracy in this understanding turns out to be “democratic faith,” an optimistic belief in the omnipotence of democracy.

In Chapter 4, I argued that for Confucian democracy to be socially meaningful and politically practicable in increasingly pluralizing East Asian societies, both Confucianism and democracy must undergo dialectical transformations and constrain each other, thus creating the societal condition favorable for it. What was central to my argument was that as long as we understand Confucian democracy as a democracy operating on Confucian habits and mores that broadly constitute Confucian public reason, Confucian virtues must be differentiated into moral virtues concerned with a person’s moral well-being qua human being and civic virtues related to the polity’s public character and its reproduction and that only the latter should be relevant to the general public. I differentiated Confucian public reason from its liberal counterpart of the kind advocated by deontological liberals in terms of a freestanding conception of justice completely separate from the “background culture” in civil society, and argued that such an understanding of public reason as solely concerned with the standard for appraising the legitimacy of basic structures is too narrow to apply to a Confucian pluralist democratic society in which public reason (more accurately public reasons) derives from the background culture or the culture of civil society. In the Confucian democracy that I propose, public reason is more than what is required of judges, legislators, governmental officials, or the candidates for public office who are concerned with the constitutional essentials of the regime or who are dealing with basic constitutional structure in the (formal) public political forum. More important, public reason is what ordinary citizens appeal to in deliberating political questions and public policies in the public space of democratic civil society.

As far as its constitution is concerned, Korea is a liberal-democratic country. However, while its “democratic” character has been firmly affirmed in recent years, its “liberal” character still remains ambiguous. Though there is notable dissatisfaction with the formal/procedural definition of democracy in terms of a free and regular election based on the principle of one person, one vote among Koreans (especially among the left who understand democracy in a more substantive sense), they believe democracy, for which they have shed blood, is irrevocable in Korea. At a minimum, there is wide consensus across the ideological spectrum that the June Uprising of 1987 is the landmark event that vividly separates the post-1987 regime from the previous ones, qualifying it to be democratic. But what is the parallel event for Korean liberalism? Was the June Uprising a “liberal-democratic” revolution? Or does democracy naturally refer to liberal democracy? If we grant that Korean democracy is a liberal democracy, what kind of liberalism does it imply?

For a long time, Koreans have equated democracy with liberal democracy, understanding liberalism in the Cold War context, namely, as the antithesis of the communism of the North. For them, democracy is what they had (and still have) to fight for because it is about power and the common and equal sharing of power (i.e., collective self-government or popular sovereignty) had long been suppressed by earlier authoritarian regimes. However, in the popular understanding, Korea has always been (even under the authoritarian reigns) a liberal country, meaning opposed to, and often threatened by, communism. In fact, for some, because of the threat of communism, or to safeguard liberalism, human rights, the core value of liberalism, had to be suppressed at times. In short, in Korea, liberalism was not so much what the people had to fight for internally as what they had to guard against in the face of the external threat of communist forces. This strong ideological understanding of liberalism still deeply permeates Korean society.

As we have seen in previous chapters, many Confucian democrats argue not only that Confucianism is compatible with democracy as a political institution, but also that it can further invigorate a democratic way of life, which they count as essentially communitarian, because of its fundamental assumption of the self as a social self, and its faith in the harmony between individual and community and their mutual growth in mediation of Confucian rituals (li 禮). As we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2, however, this overly positive thesis on the possibility of Confucian democracy as a communitarian sociopolitical practice is vulnerable to and invites many challenging questions: What is meant by “social self”? Does the ontological claim that the Confucian self is a social self naturally (or always) support the ethical claim that it is a civil self? What exactly is meant by the “harmony” between individual and community? How can the relationship be immune to tyranny by the majority, to which democracy is highly susceptible, and what does it mean in the context of ethical pluralism, which is, according to John Rawls, the core characteristic of a modern democratic society? Furthermore, if Confucian harmony is attained by participation in the li by the members of the community, what is the relation between li and law, or more specifically, how can we place li within the broader institutional framework of democratic constitutionalism? In short, precisely in what sense is Confucian democracy an alternative sociopolitical practice to liberal democracy in East Asian societies?

Of course, these questions cannot be answered adequately in the societal abstract. After all, how a person is “social” (or civil) cannot be evaluated without taking into account the sociopolitical and cultural context in which his or her society is embedded, and historically, each Confucian East Asian country – be it China, Taiwan, Vietnam, or Korea – has developed its distinct local Confucian civil and political culture. To borrow Alexis de Tocqueville’s much celebrated language, Confucian East Asians may have a similar Confucian heart, but they have certainly cultivated and lived with different habits of the heart.