South Korean civil movement organisations

Hope, crisis, and pragmatism in democratic transition

Amy Levine

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719090493
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This highly engaging book invites the reader to learn about how South Korean activists, intellectuals and various reformers approach the role of civil society in a post-colonial, post-Cold War, post-dictatorship, and post-IMF neoliberal democracy. In particular, it provides a detailed description of civil movement organisations in Seoul leading up to, during and after the Roh Moo Hyun era (2003–8). The book engages the entangled hopes, crises and pragmatic transitions that animated this era in South Korean politics and connects it with larger debates in anthropology, sociology, law and politics from around the world. Ultimately, the book contributes to growing areas of research, advocacy and general interest in pragmatism, ethnography, hope and crisis.

1

Entanglements

[T]he general difficulty of attaining unity over means, let alone ends, among people who have been robbed of political power. (Kenneth M. Wells)

Despite the frequent and approving outside mentions of democracy and civil society in South Korea, many who worked inside the organisations charged with promoting democracy and civil society spoke more about the threats, failures, crises, and overall weaknesses they faced. One colleague, Scholar Lee, went so far as to assert in 2004: ‘there is no civil society, only civil groups [in South Korea] (simin sahoe eopsi simin danche itda)’. The history of South Korea, particularly the rise of mass people (minjung) movements which led to unprecedented democracy in 1987, reveals a series of social movements, conflicts between factions, and projects more than it reveals a coherent civil society.

The focus of this work is civil movement organisations during Roh Moo Hyun’s presidency from 2003 to 2008. In this chapter, I will contrast two cases – the 2000 Citizens’ Alliance for the General Elections (CAGE) and a 2006 ‘New Right’ research study of People’s Solidarity for a Participatory Democracy (PSPD) – in order to demonstrate how President Roh affected civil movement organisations.

The lasting effect of Roh’s ‘participatory (chamyeo)’ administration is the deep entanglements it introduced for civil organisations. Roh’s biography, ideology, and methods presented unprecedented sameness for these organisations. Their links and relationships were recognised within, and became part of, a shared moral framework (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2004). This entanglement was evident in shared lower- to middle-class backgrounds, resistance to Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship, democracy and unification activism, as well as activist methods. The centrality of material sacrifice and expanded human rights at the expense of their own human rights were shared moral values. Deep commitments to some ideas that people expressed as ideology and solidarity also constituted entanglements between Roh’s administration and civil organisations. These entanglements were difficult to disentangle; the more resistance one or the other evinced, the more entangled they became.

South Korea more generally manifests many of the historical, material, commercial, and knowledge entanglements between indigenous economies and global capitalism that have existed in the Pacific region (Kirksey 2012; Spyer 2000; Thomas 1991). I will start to explore these entanglements in this chapter and continue in the next chapter. This chapter ends with an exploration of the increasing entanglements between activism and anthropology through the recent past of Korean studies. Ultimately, I argue that the various entanglements that defined the field (hyeonjang) incited equally various collaborations as a defining feature of ethnographic method (e.g. Choy 2011; Jacob 2012; Kirksey 2012; Rappaport 2008).

The pragmatist legacy

Entanglements for John Dewey were always already present in social life. Dewey wrote:

The experience of a living being struggling to hold its own and make its way in an environment, physical and social, partly facilitating and partly obstructing its actions, is of necessity a matter of ties and connexions, of bearings and uses. The very point of experience [is that it] is bound up with the movement of things by the most intimate and pervasive bonds. (Dewey 1903, quoted in Vass 2013: 94)

Entanglements, in other words, are the unavoidably ‘intimate and pervasive bonds’ of gaining experience. Such entanglements make sociality into ‘the capacity of being several things at once’ (Mead 2002: 75, quoted in Greenberg 2014: 45). Pragmatists have long articulated the tension between contingency and constraint that defines the entangled experience of sociality. George Herbert Mead’s (1934) situated responsivity has been an influential articulation of this tension. Sociologists and anthropologists alike have returned to this shared pragmatist legacy to foreground creativity (Joas 1996), contingency (Greenberg 2014; Holmwood 2011), multiplicity (Mol 2002), and transition (Koopman 2009). This legacy has also infused conceptions of civil society and democracy, to which I will now turn.

South Korean civil society in East Asia

South Korea is known to have a vibrant civil society in the East Asian context. I knew this about the place even before I could precisely place South Korea on a map. Book after book, often by Asianists, trumpeted Korea’s flourishing civil society. Bruce Cumings, the foremost historian of modern Korea, exemplifies the tone:

Korean democracy has come from the bottom up, fertilised by the sacrifices of millions of people. If they have not yet built a perfect democratic system, they have constructed a remarkable civil society that gives lie to common stereotypes about Asian culture and values. (2005: 511)

Nancy Abelmann’s (1996) seminal ethnography, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, traces the historical depth of these movements and sacrifices. As the story goes, South Korea has achieved greater levels of democracy in a shorter period of time than any of its neighbours with the debated exception of Taiwan. Those neighbours – China, Japan, and North Korea – often eclipse South Korea on the international stage, but South Korea’s history and traditions of bottom-up social movements have translated into unique democratic and civil society achievements in East Asia. The entangled role of the United States, particularly post-Second World War, in the democratic and civil society successes of South Korea is fraught.

Disease and sometimes cure

When the United States was enjoying the spoils of its victory in the Second World War, many South Koreans also viewed it as their victory because it definitively ended Japan’s colonisation of Korea, which officially began in 1910. The US was greeted by many South Koreans as liberators because they accomplished in 1945 what South Koreans had failed to do many times before, which was to end Japan’s colonisation.

Bruce Cumings has been engaged in an ongoing effort to ‘uncover truths that most Americans do not know and perhaps do not want to know’ about their role in shaping modern Korea (2010: xv). This includes militarisation (particularly the establishment of what Eisenhower later called the US’s ‘military–industrial complex’), secret intelligence operations and anti-Communist interventions, direct and indirect political influence, economic policy, development and humanitarian aid, and the ongoing negotiations with North Korea. Namhee Lee (2007) has described the South Korean approach to this post-war relationship as the continuation of a ‘ruptured and distorted’ Korean history. John Tirman (2011) has described the American approach to South Korea as ‘anti-colonial economic imperialism’.

The events surrounding Gwangju, a city in the south-western Jeolla region of South Korea, in May 1980 constituted a landmark event in democratic history that dramatically changed widespread South Korean perceptions of the US. Protests had been building since Park Chung Hee, the military leader who had been president since 1961, was assassinated by his security chief in 1979. The mass people’s (minjung) movement of students, labourers, and intellectuals calling for a civilian government through democratic elections reached an unprecedented feverish pitch and martial law had blanketed the country by 18 May 1980. The Jeolla region had long been economically and politically marginalised in South Korea (see Chapter 4), but it became a site of historical and democratic importance (hyeonjang) when an unprecedented number of local citizens were brutally killed and injured by military forces and police while protesting. Amid the violence, local residents fought back dramatically and pushed the military out of the city for several days. The protesters were charged with sedition by the military government and Kim Dae Jung, a long-time opposition leader from that region, was viewed as responsible.

Before Gwangju, the US was widely seen as ‘sacred and inviolable’ (Lee N.H. 2007). Many of those involved in the 1970s democratisation movements were Christian and received funds from the US to support their activities. Some with ties to the US took increasing risks with the expectation that the US government would back them up (Lee N.H. 2007). When the US did not intervene despite having troops stationed in and around Korea, ‘the Gwangju Uprising proved decisively that the United States had not only been deeply involved in Korea but had also shared responsibility for the ugliness of Korean history, for its authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and political terror’ (Lee N.H. 2007: 51).

One of my friends and colleagues told me in 2007, the twentieth anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, that ‘the United States gives [Korea] disease and sometimes cure’. This description captures the entanglements of the South Korea–US post-war relationships and sets the stage for the social movement traditions that continue to animate civil organisations.

Civil groups and movements, not civil society

One of the things I quickly realised once I started fieldwork in Seoul is that hardly any of my colleagues saw Korean civil society as strong despite outsiders’ calls to the contrary. Much like unification with North Korea or democracy, civil society was treated as a future aspiration more than a present reality. It was ‘a project always on the threshold of becoming’ (Greenberg 2014: 2).

Scholar Lee (see Chapter 4 for more) told me matter-of-factly in 2004, ‘[South Korea] doesn’t have a civil society; it has civil groups (simin sahoe eopsi simin danche itda)’. He said this with deep regret not long after he stopped working for a civil organisation and had started work on a government commission. Other colleagues often remarked on the relative weakness of Korean civil society and spoke of the decreasing donors, media coverage, and overall negative public perceptions (see more in Chapter 3). One of the most prominent analysts of South Korean civil movements, political scientist Jang Jip Choi (2010), has written of civil society being ‘engulfed’ by the ‘democratic state’ in the wake of Kim Dae Jung’s and Roh Moo Hyun’s presidencies. More recently, journalists have been mourning the ‘worrisome depletion’ of civil society (Kang 2014).

In Nancy Abelmann’s (1996) seminal ethnography, South Korea appears more as a contestation of social movements than a nation-state or (civil) society. She traces Eastern Learning (donghak), independence, nationalist, religious, farmer, student and many other mass people (minjung) movements through Korean history. Student minjung movements employed Marxist, Leninist, and Freirean-inflected approaches to class and labour and often undertook violent, street-based demonstrations against military rule (e.g. Cho 1992, 1994; Grinker 1998; Lee N.H. 2007). The citizens’ or civil (simin) movement, on the other hand, came after the minjung movements and thus employed liberal, identity-based, non-violent approaches to appeal to an increasingly affluent, educated and urban population and to enable the transition from movement to organisation (e.g. Abelmann 1996, 1997a; Oppenheim 2008; Song 2009). The transition from movement to organisation is often not linear; rather, it is often recursive. The phrase ‘civil movement organisation’ rather than NGO, NPO, or group is meant to highlight the inherent precariousness of naming among my colleagues in Seoul. Some of them were undertaking their own projects to rename job titles or to reimagine ideologies (see Chapter 4). ‘Civil movement organisation’ also underlines the ongoing transition between movement and organisation. This transition, like the one between procedural and practical democracy, has defined the discursive space inside South Korea in the twenty-first century.

Another way to view the minjung–simin distinction is analogous to the countryside–city distinction. While simin is conventionally understood and translated as citizen, its Chinese root literally means ‘city person’. Abelmann (1996, 2003) has explored the power of city and countryside as well as other keywords (Williams 1976) as indices of how South Korea has changed and continues to change. Following eminent social commentator Paek Uk-in, and Robert Oppenheim (2003, 2008) have articulated an ‘aesthetic’ and ‘moral’ shift from minjung to simin activism in terms of class, scope, and organising strategies. Both Abelmann (1996, 1997a) and Oppenheim (2008) articulate this shift in terms of ideology and pragmatism. Abelmann (1996) documents the valorisation of activist perspectives ‘free from ideology’ and the widespread post-minjung fatigue and distance not only from the ‘military authoritarianism of the recent past, but also from the righteousness and drama of dissent – from the totalising projects of both the left and the right’ (1997a: 250). Oppenheim similarly concludes that simin activism achieves moral privilege ‘not in ideological (or ‘interested’) commitment but in post-ideological pragmatic semi-detachment’ (2003: 482). The ‘post-ideological pragmatic’ activism I encountered inside movement organisations during the mid 2000s was not only an apparent break from the ideological past, but also a continuation of it (see Chapters 2 and 4). Roh Moo Hyun’s surprising election to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• Note on romanisation and translation
• Map of South Korea and neighbouring countries
• Introduction
• 1 Entanglements
• 2 Ideology as double bind
• 3 Green is life
• 4 Projecting discourse: less than theory, smaller than ideology
• 5 Designing the agenda with hope
• Conclusion
• References
• Index