In 1989, during the transition phase of Korea's democratization, Jinwung Kim observed that Koreans were sharing “new stirrings of nationalism arising from their country's rapid economic growth and political liberalization” and that this new nationalism had stirred antiforeign sentiments aimed mainly at “Korea's ‘big brother,’ the United States.” In the 1990s, scholars, policymakers, and the media in both the United States and South Korea continued to note an upswing and “mainstreaming” of anti-Americanism that were attributed to a resurgent nationalism and a rejection of authoritarianism. For example, based on several nationwide surveys conducted in Korea in the early 1990s, Gi-Wook Shin concluded: “anti-Americanism is not confined to any particular strata, but is widespread in South Korean society.” However, he found that Korean anti-Americanism was neither an ideological rejection of the United States as representative of capitalism and modernity nor a rejection of American culture. Rather, “national consciousness” and “nationalist concerns” served as the primary political source of anti-Americanism.

In Korea, unlike in Germany or Japan at that time (the mid-1990s), “the presence of American military forces [had] not provoked strong reactions from the Korean people” although “continued misconduct of American soldiers … [had] recently begun generating a more negative picture.” But by the end of the decade, over 100 Korean civic organizations had joined together to voice their criticism of Korea–U.S. relations, particularly on the 1967 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and the role and behavior of U.S. troops stationed in Korea.

This chapter explores the causal linkages between two critical variables in the modern development of the Republic of Korea (ROK): security and democracy. Two questions drive this research inquiry. The first is an empirical investigation of the impact of security on the democratization process. In particular, how has the ROK's defense thinking, practice, and institutions helped or hindered the democratization and consolidation process in the 1990s (i.e., during the Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung governments)? The second question is more conceptual in nature. How does the legacy of Korea's military-authoritarianism affect the democratic consolidation process? Although the military as an institution has been rooted out of politics, to what extent does the South Korean political culture still harbor within it a residual affinity for aspects of its authoritarian past?

I emphasize that this is a first foray into this topic. Although there has been voluminous literature on democratic consolidation and on security, there has been relatively little that attempts to understand the explicit causal links between the two in the Korean context.

The chapter reaches two sets of preliminary findings. With regard to the impact of security on the democratic consolidation, I reach a negative finding. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, conditions of “security-scarcity” were not the primary impediment to the democracy process. There is no denying that South Korea's threatening external security environment hindered the democratization process – the North Korean threat often became the justification for authoritarian rule and empowered the military as a political institution, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Of the many developments of the twentieth century that have been directly transmitted to the new millennium, three legacies of global significance stand out. The first has been dubbed the “third wave” of global democratization, which began with the overthrow of Portugal's dictatorial regime in April 1974. The second and most dramatic development is the end of the Cold War, symbolized by the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and accompanied by a rapid succession of momentous changes in world politics (e.g., the collapse of communism, the end of superpower rivalry and bipolarity, German reunification, and the demise of the Soviet Union). Finally, the third of these significant phenomena is the acceleration and intensification of globalization in the last decade of the twentieth century. All of these developments have profound but differentiated ramifications for the future of Korean democracy. Here we will address the first and third legacies, with an emphasis on the relationship between globalization and democratization, as a way of establishing a broad global–local analytical framework for Korea's democratization process.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Republic of Korea (ROK, hereafter “Korea”) is widely regarded as one of the most remarkable and influential of the third-wave democracies. Korea's transition to democracy began in 1987–88, and five years later, with the presidential victory of Kim Young Sam in 1992, Korea elected its first civilian leader in three decades.

Introduction

Democratic transitions and their sustainability have become a major theme of the theoretical literature in the social sciences. After the wave of democratic transitions in the 1980s, scholars and policymakers turned their attention to the sustainability and strength of these nascent democratic countries. Scholars have been exploring whether the values and wealth of citizens create preconditions for democracies, examining institutions and strategic choices made by individual voters and politicians, and assessing the role that civil society plays in democratic transitions.

One major analytic issue that has arisen is the extent to which nascent democracies have actually become consolidated. Such a consolidated democracy, it is argued, is one in which democratic values and ideals are stable and deeply institutionalized. As Arend Lijphardt has written, “democratic politics is not merely a ‘superstructure’ that grows out of socio-economic and cultural bases, it has an independent life of its own.” Scholars taking a “maximalist” position consider democracy consolidated when an accountable civilian government guarantees basic civil rights such as expression and assembly, and when society is largely involved in the political process. Those taking a “minimalist” position focus on the existence of free competitive elections with peaceful transfers of power.

South Korea is a notable case of a democratic transition. And although South Korea has made dramatic strides toward true democracy in a number of areas, there is still concern that democracy is not yet consolidated.

Since the late 1980s, the Republic of Korea (ROK, or hereafter “Korea”), a formerly war-ravaged country, has acquired a scintillating dual identity as an East Asian model of economic prosperity and political democracy. Korea also became the first third-wave democracy in East Asia to transfer power peacefully to an opposition party, in early 1998. Despite the country's brief but checkered history, with no less than nine constitutional amendments and three aborted democratic openings between 1948 and 1988, Korea has made significant progress toward establishing pluralistic governing institutions and protecting the political and civil liberties of its citizens.

Although there is little doubt that Korea is now a secure electoral democracy, with electoral politics the only game in town, its journey toward democratic consolidation is far from complete. Much work and reform is still needed to consolidate Korea's democracy. The legacy of authoritarianism, deeply entrenched Confucian values, and regional factionalism are among the variety of forces continuously testing the newly established democratic procedures and institutions. Moreover, the country's limited experience in democracy thus far has provided little time for democratic norms and values to take root among the citizens and for necessary sociopolitical reforms to develop a more transparent, accountable, and responsive government.

The focal point of this study is Korea's democratic consolidation, defined as a multidimensional and multicausal process.

Since the June 29 declaration in 1987, South Korea has passed some major milestones in its march toward becoming a liberal democracy. Today, South Koreans enjoy a level of political freedom that is without precedent in their country's history. Their young democracy has endured the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and has met an important test of successfully transferring power from a ruling party to a genuine opposition party. Nonetheless, the extent to which South Korea has consolidated its democracy is open to question. South Korea has successfully institutionalized and legitimized a democratic, constitutional electoral process, but it is still struggling to establish a responsive, accountable political order and an inclusive economic system.

In this chapter, I analyze how the institutional “drag” of the developmental state, forged during the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, has impeded democratic consolidation. Effective in early stages of economic development, the collusive arrangement between the state and giant oligopolistic conglomerates, the chaebol, has proved not only economically inefficient and anticompetitive in the era of globalization, but also deeply entrenched and reform-resistant.

I contend that, among other reasons, South Korea is having trouble consolidating its democracy because of a complex interplay of agents and structures. Notably, the attempt by Kim Young Sam to reform the South Korean developmental state was a significant contributing cause of the economic collapse in late 1997. With political resources provided by his historic election, he tried to reform the anticompetitive and antidemocratic collusive arrangement between state and big business.

Since the political transition from authoritarian military rule to an electoral democracy in 1987, democratization in Korea has drawn much attention from activists and scholars of the “third wave” of democratization in East Asia, Latin America, and the former Eastern Bloc. In a positive response to this global trend, Rose Lee and Cal Clark suggest that women take advantage of democratization for the empowerment that East Asian economic development fails to provide them. Although the term “democratization” is likely to evoke the hope for an open and egalitarian society, particularly for formerly marginalized social groups, the reality of political transition to procedural democracy and its aftermath seem to be far from this normative ideal.

Introduction

Korea's road to democracy has been a rocky one and fraught with a seemingly endless succession of trial and error. Although a formal Westernized form of government began with liberation from thirty-five years of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, it was not until three years later, in May 1948, that general elections were held. This led to the organization of the national assembly of Korea and the first major nation-building milestone – promulgation of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea on July 17, 1948. Having had no prior experience in a Western form of democracy, the question in the minds of many at the outset was whether this foreign system would be compatible with the pressing need to construct a politically stable nation, a nation that could provide the impetus for reconstructing an economy left impoverished after Japanese colonial rule. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, it was not clear whether there was collective recognition and acceptance that, henceforth, this newly promulgated constitution would be the supreme law of the land, to be respected and recognized by the political leaders as the foremost principle to follow in governing the country.

As witnessed during the ensuing decades of struggle for democratization in Korea, uncertainty surrounding whether political leaders would respect and follow the law as laid down by this piece of paper provides a suitable characterization of the debate over the relationship between “rule of law” and governance in Korea.

The Republic of Korea (hereafter “Korea”) has been widely regarded as one of the most vigorous and analytically interesting third-wave democracies. During the first decade of democratic rule, Korea has successfully carried out a large number of electoral and other reforms to transform the institutions and procedures of military–authoritarian rule into those of a representative democracy. Unlike many of its counterparts in Latin America and elsewhere, Korea has fully restored civilian rule by extricating the military from power. As in established democracies of North America and Western Europe, free and competitive elections have been held regularly at all the different levels of the government. In the most recent presidential election, held on December 18, 1997, Korea also established itself as a mature electoral democracy by elevating an opposition party to political power. In Korea today, there is general agreement that electoral politics has become the only possible political game in town.

The successful establishment of electoral democracy cannot, however, be equated with the consolidation of democratic rule. To become consolidated, a new democracy, like the one in Korea, must achieve deep, broad, and unconditional support among the mass public as well as political elites. Moreover, its performance must be accountable and responsive to public demands and preferences. The main objective of this chapter is to examine why and how the Korean people reacted to democracy during the course of the recent economic crisis. How do ordinary Koreans understand democracy?

Civil Society and Democratization in Korea: An Overview and a Puzzle

Korean democratization defies easy classification and presents a unique challenge to students of comparative politics. Unlike some cases in Southern Europe and Latin America, what happened in Korea in 1987 was not really a “pacted” transition – a democratic transition that is centered around and determined by elite calculations and interactions. That there was a fatal tension and split between the hard-liners (e.g., Chun Doo Hwan) and the soft-liners (e.g., Roh Tae Woo) in June 1987 is a plausible but very dubious claim considering the circumstances preceding and following the democratic transition.

On the other hand, democratization in Korea was not an earthshaking revolution, unlike some cases in Eastern Europe. Although the June Uprising in 1987 and the ruling party's eight-point democratization package were in large measure a response to such an unprecedented “popular upsurge,” what happened afterward was far from a handsome victory for the insurgents. The eventual conclusion of the 1987 “revolution” was incredibly anticlimactic. The ruling party candidate, who was one of the coconspirators of the 1979–80 multistaged military coup and a key partaker in Chun's highly authoritarian rule, was elected president in December 1987. Neither the elites nor the masses “won” democracy in Korea; rather, what fundamentally characterized Korean democratization and differentiated it from other cases of the “third wave” of global democratization was the protracted and intense conflict between a strong civil society and a strong state.

HISTORICAL comparison can often yield telling clues about contemporary problems. To a remarkable extent, taxation as an issue in state–peasant relations in the 1990s echoes China's prerevolution past. Then as now, regimes appeared unable to devise, implement, and enforce a fair, equitable, and reasonably honest system of taxation. Then as now, regimes relied heavily on informal, ad hoc ways of funding governmental activities. Then as now, informal levies gave rise to widespread corruption. Then as now, the authorities had difficulty determining just how much households owed in terms of land and other taxes. Then as now, rural taxation was a major source of grievance and social instability.

The aim of this chapter is to illuminate the continuities and differences in the Chinese history of rural taxation by briefly examining the imperial and Republican periods as well as the Communist revolution and the Maoist era.

RURAL TAXATION IN IMPERIAL CHINA

China was an agrarian economy. Land taxes were the major source of revenue for the imperial government. As Table 2.1 indicates, the land tax plus surcharges (haoxian) together accounted for more than two-thirds of total revenue.

Because of their dependence on the agricultural population, most Chinese emperors adhered to a low-tax doctrine. They thought of themselves as Confucian benevolent rulers whose task it was to nourish the people. They feared that encroaching on peasant subsistence would threaten dynastic legitimacy and lead to disorder, if not rebellion.

FOR more than fifteen years China's top leaders called for the “lightening of the peasants' burden,” a term that referred to the imposition on villagers of “unreasonable” ad hoc fees, fines, local taxes, assessments on peasant households, or apportionment of governmental expenses among them. Some of these were authorized; many were not; most had at best a dubious basis in law and official regulations. Most were bitterly resented by the peasants for their unpredictability and open-endedness and the coercive manner in which they were collected. Year after year, central leaders and agencies sent edicts, directives, injunctions, exhortations, and pleas down the administrative hierarchy demanding that action be taken to lighten peasant burdens, but to no avail. In l985 the Central Committee (CC) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government's State Council warned that excessive burdens were damaging the authority of the regime and were causing rural unrest and instability. Similar warnings, often in somber tones, have been issued in the years that followed. In the most recent period, rural disturbances arising from burdens and other abuses have become even more worrying to the central leadership. So impressive a record of ineffectuality calls for investigation, analysis, and explanation.

We believe that examination of peasant burdens illuminates two fundamental problems of contemporary Chinese political development. The state faces major challenges in building administrative capacities appropriate to governance in the post-Mao reform era.