Korean Society

Civil Society, Democracy and the State

Charles K Armstrong, Charles K. Armstrong, Charles K. Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135986384
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Asiatische Geschichte

While most analyses of Korean politics have looked to elites to explain political change, this new and revised edition of Korean Society examines the role of ordinary people in this dramatic transformation. Taking the innovative theme of 'civil society' - voluntary organizations outside the role of the state which have participated in the process of political and social democratization - the essays collected here examine Korea as one of the most dramatic cases in the world of ordinary citizens participating in the transformation of politics.

Key topics discussed include:

• comparisons of Korean democratization to the experiences of post-authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world
• comparisons of the theory of civil society as developed in Western Europe and America
• the legacy of Korea's Confucian past for contemporary politics and society
• close examinations of various civil society movements
• South Korea and North Korea.

Conceptually innovative, up-to-date and timely, the new edition of this book will be an invaluable resource for students of contemporary Korea, Asian politics and the global struggle for democracy.

1
Civil society in West and East

Bruce Cumings

Thinking about the differences between Korea and the United States is an inevitable career by product for Americans who study Korea or Koreans who study America, because they are, or they become, people who have a foot in both cultures. Such scholars also change, and they become people with both feet planted firmly in neither culture, that is, feet planted nowhere, or in an indefinable space existing between the two countries. But what is always so striking to such a person is the contrast between his or her daily life, where thoughts and images of Korea and America mingle profusely, and the stark contrast exemplified by the two peoples: Americans and Koreans were joined together as allies and friends since 1945, but they rarely think about each other (although this generalization is more true of the American people, who know little about Korea), and even more rarely do they actively compare each other on the same plane. In a recent book I tried to understand the complexity of perception that results from these juxtapositions, using metaphors of vision: clear, blurred, and double vision, and also the complex vantage point afforded to a person who is poised between two cultures, reflecting critically on both of them.¹

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Western communism, a ubiquitous trope has emerged in American scholarship on the meaning of these critical events: civil society, as in the title of this book. This term, which was central to an older political sociology but had fallen into disuse, reappeared in two contexts: (1) what the former communist countries needed most was what the communists had respected least, namely civil society; and (2) what Americans needed was to repair and restore their own civil society. Meanwhile, in the Republic of Korea a strong civil society emerged for the first time in the 1980s and 1990s, as a product and also a gift of the extraordinary turmoil of Korea’s modern history. And few if any Americans noticed. It is this theme that I wish to dwell on, primarily from an abstract or theoretical perspective.²

For much of the past decade the American political spectrum from right to left was suffused with an assortment of concerns about American civil society. Most commentators pointed to the same symptoms: the pathologies and dangers of cities and (remarkably) the suburbs where the majority of Americans now lived, but where astonishing and unprecedented events occurred (like the killings at Columbine High School); high rates of crime amid a more general breakdown of morality, with arguments on both the right and left about what caused this presumed moral breakdown; the disintegration of nuclear families, amid increasing divorce rates, growing numbers of Americans choosing to remain unmarried, and the rise of gay rights movements; citizen apathy and lack of interest in politics, symbolized by less than half the people voting in national elections; the decline of the “group life” that Alexis de Tocqueville and others had thought so character istic of American democracy, and the like.

A symbol of this kind of thinking was Robert Putnam’s famous article (and subsequent book), called “Bowling Alone.” A Harvard political scientist, Putnam gained national renown for his argument that Americans had become a nation of alienated individuals, lacking in public spirit and a willingness to join civic groups; they even went bowling by themselves, instead of joining the bowling teams that were a staple of American life in the 1950s, when Putnam grew up. If this discourse waned somewhat during the years of economic boom in the late 1990s, the fractured outcome of the 2000 presidential election brought it back. Indeed, President George W. Bush and his advisors fret about the problems of American civil society almost as much as their predecessors did, in the Clinton administration. As one article on this presidential commonality put it,

It has been difficult to pin an ideological tail on the nascent Bush White House. One day the president is called a staunch conservative … and the next he’s labeled a bleeding heart for helping prisoners’ children and promoting literacy programs. The problem, some Bush advisers and friends say, is that conventional political definitions do not adequately explain what the president is trying to do. His actions have less to do with the left vs. right, they say, than with his embrace of many of the ideas contained in the movement known as “communitarianism,” which places the importance of society ahead of the unfettered rights of the individual.

“This is the ultimate Third Way,” said Don Eberly, an adviser in the Bush White House, using a favorite phrase of President Bill Clinton, who also sought, largely unsuccessfully, to redefine the debate with an alternative to the liberal-conservative conflict.

The writer went on to link communitarianism, to “‘civil society’ thinking,” which he said is a term with many interpretations:

but at its center is a notion that years of celebrating individual freedom have weakened the bonds of community and that the rights of the individual must be balanced against the interests of society as a whole. Inherent in the philosophy is a return to values and morality, which, the school of thought believes, can best be fostered by community organizations. “We need to connect with one another. We’ve got to move a little more in the direction of community in the balance between community and the individual,” said Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University, a leading communitarian thinker.

Bush’s inaugural address “was a communitarian text,” according to his advisors, using key words like “civility,” “responsibility,” and “community”– and that was “no accident,” because Bush’s advisors consulted Putnam about the speech. Another advisor said that Bush wanted to move Republicans away from the libertarian idea that individuals are “lone atoms” apart from their community: the President, he said, “is a civil society guy .” ³

This wave of concern about American civil society coincided with a quite different idea, namely, that civil society is inherently a Western concept, and that it is absent in the remaining communist countries, that it is the thing most in need of creation in post-communist countries, and the thing mostly absent in East Asia – whether in authoritarian Singapore, democratic Japan, or rapidly democratizing South Korea and Taiwan. Samuel Huntington, also a political scientist at Harvard, made this view notorious in his essay (and subsequent book), The Clash of Civilizations, which sought to fashion a new paradigm for post-Cold War global politics. His assumption was that several distinct bodies of inherited ideas and practices existed in our world, and that they either already had or soon would constitute themselves in opposition to each other; as they did so, the new axis of global politics would spring forth.⁴ On closer reading, one finds in this account a nostalgic reprise of 1950s modernization theory and a disillusioned lament on the passing of the Eastern establishment and its Anglo-Saxon counterparts in Europe, thus yielding a plea for a renewed Atlanticism. For Huntington there is but one great civilization, the West’s, and a host of competing civilizations that are, or may become, threats to Western civilization.

Francis Fukuyama had a similar perspective in his influential book, The End of History.⁵ Fukuyama sprinkles criticisms of American liberalism through his text, especially the American inability to come to agreement on moral issues, the failures of American leaders (if mostly those from the Democratic Party), and the perils of community in a time of atomized individualism. But like Huntington he privileges the West, and the United States: “a contemporary liberal democracy like the United States permits considerable scope for those who desire to be recognized as greater than others.” He ended the book with his hope that “the idea of a universal and directional history leading up to liberal democracy may become more plausible to people”; human history will come to seem like “a long wagon train” that finally reaches the end of its journey, which is, for him, free-market liberalism. Like other celebrants of liberalism and “the West,” Fukuyama substitutes for actually existing liberalism an ideal version, drawn from the fine words and high-minded phrases of iconic figures like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

In Karl van Wolferen’s Enigma of Japanese Power⁶ this comparison between the West and all-the-rest is explicitly related to the failings of East Asian politics. Essentially his argument is that East Asia modernized without civil society and without an Enlightenment. For van Wolferen “the West” connotes a site of “independent, universal truths or immutable religious beliefs, transcending the worldly reality of social dictates and the decrees of power-holders”; Japan, however, is a place where people adjust their beliefs to situations, in “a political culture that does not recognize the possibility of transcendental truths.” As in nineteenth century accounts of “the Orient,” for van Wolferen Japan is an enigma, opaque, led by a mysterious “System,” and “single-mindedly pursuing some obscure aim of its own.” The System “systematically suppresses individualism,” he writes, and the Japanese do not accept Western logic or metaphysics, going all the way back to “the Greeks.” The “crucial factor” that proves these generalizations is “the near absence [in Japan] of any idea that there can be truths, rules, principles or morals that always apply, no matter what the circumstances.”⁷ Koreans might think the same thing of Japan, but van Wolferen does not like any of the East Asian political systems: “The Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese experiences show that a third category of political economy can exist, beside the Western and communist types.” These states represent “a largely uncharted economic and social-political category.”⁸

In this discourse, which is quite common in the U.S., the ills and pathologies of American civil society curiously disappear, to be replaced surreptitiously by an idealized construction drawn from Locke and Tocqueville. Of course no one can claim that East Asian countries have the social pathology obvious on almost any street in any American city, and recent elections i...