The Development of Modern South Korea

State Formation, Capitalist Development and National Identity

Kyong Ju Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134355280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Development of Modern South Korea provides a comprehensive analysis of South Korean modernization by examining the dimensions of state formation, capitalist development and nationalism. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach this book highlights the most characteristic features of South Korean modernity in relation to its historical conditions, institution traditions and cultural values paying particular attention to Korean's pre-modern civilization.

Part I
Korean civilization and cultural tradition

1 The configuration of Korean civilization

1. A stocktaking of historical sociology of Korean civilization

Korea, once called ‘the hermit kingdom,’ has undergone rapid and often drastic change in the twentieth century. At the core of such change has been the ‘rocky’ road to modernity from the centuries-old tradition. From its turbulent history, Korea’s modernization was forged with the backdrop of colonization, conflicting ideologies, compromised national identity, civil war and poverty. All of these factors have continued to invigorate Koreans’ determination for rapid modernization and economic development and at the same time, have been the sources for much of the tension and conflict in modern Korean society.

To the contemporary observer, South Korea is a complex mixture of startling contrasts: the coexistence of its cosmopolitan, striving in the global order and frantic nationalism; rapid economic development alongside the enduring patriarchal attitude and institutions; democratizing movements and authoritarian cultural traditions; an increasing inter-generational gap; widening disparities between the rich and the poor, and continuing animosity between regions and with the north. Such dual characteristics of Korean society have stemmed not only from particular historical conditions and events, such as Japanese colonialism, Korea’s civil war and the partition of the Korean nation, but also from the cultural, social, political and economic transformation of Korean society. All of this opens up the possibility of competing interpretations of the nature of its modernity and the dynamics of its modernization.

The narratives of the modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s have dominated the scholarly investigations of South Korean modernity and modernization.

The application of these theories comes with their well-known intellectual pre-percepts, often in a simple dichotomy: modernity versus tradition – a dichotomy that often leads to oversimplifications. Many sociologists take the existing frameworks for granted. They tend to think deductively from the modernization theories to the reality of modern development in South Korea. The Western meta-narratives of modernization have dominated every sphere of social and intellectual life to such an extent that it has often led to equating development with Westernization (Mason et al. 1980).

It is often argued that, in Korea’s modernization, the ‘form’ of social structure has been modernized, while the ‘content’ of traditional legacies remains in contemporary Korea in general, and in its culture in particular (MacDonald 1988). The Korean world view is thought to be based on an infrastructure that was accumulated over many thousands of years, which consolidated along with the Korean mode of subsistence (Hahm 1980: 2). It was subsequently developed into a pattern of world interpretation and has manifested itself in Korean daily life. The cultural background of Korea has thus not completely adjusted to the new Western values and institutions. MacDonald calls this the confrontation between tradition and modernity (1988: 2). While Korean development today seems to move towards the strengthening of the elements of modernity, the pre-modern tradition has worked to deepen as well as to challenge the modern features of Korean society.

Rapid change is another characteristic of modern South Korea. Many people wonder why South Korea took only 25 years to achieve the level of production that Japan took 90 years to reach (Chang 1989a: 237). Furthermore, modern Korean society has shown some quite complicated social, economic and political patterns characteristic of the so-called ‘postmodern’ tendencies, beginning in the late 1980s. All Koreans have experienced quite dramatic changes in every sector of their daily lives – family, working place, the environment, law and politics. Many Koreans have personally and/or collectively been undergoing an identity crisis.¹

In this context, it is not appropriate to explain the South Korean experience of modernization in terms of standard (Western) modernization theories.² Analysts in various disciplines have long been concerned with the story of development of South Korea from their own points of view. Up until the financial crisis in 1997–8, scholars in general and neoclassical ones in particular formed a cheerful chorus for the ‘miracle’ the ‘South Korean economic model’ had produced and believed this was what the rest of the developing world could learn. In the view of some, the so-called Korean economic model is a vindication of the modernization theory. Global markets provide the conditions for export-led economic growth by which South Korea was integrated into world capitalism. Due to the experience of successful industrialization, Korea has been metaphorically described as ‘a Tiger Cub Growing’ (Moos 1988) and one of the ‘Four Little Dragons’ in East Asia (Vogel 1991). Neoclassical economists, based on its economic performance, argue that the role of the state must be recognized, even though Korea’s late industrialization is attributed, in the final analysis, to the working of market mechanisms. Limited state involvement and ‘getting the price right’ played a critical role in the rapid industrialization and economic growth (Berger 1986; Hughes 1988; Balassa 1981; Krueger and Ito1995).

From a critical perspective of this argument, more ‘broad-minded’ scholars describe a unique pattern of South Korean development in which the role of the state in the economy is not only prevalent but also rational (Amsden 1989; Wade 1990; Deyo 1987; Haggard and Moon 1990). Active state intervention, they argue, brought about export success and upward mobility in the world system. Korea’s dramatic economic development is attributable to an export-promotion strategy led by the state, which developed to upgrade the domestic economy via an explicit, systematic industrial policy.

Many scholars also draw our attention to education and schooling, linking economic growth to a highly educated workforce. While this point may be disputable in a broad historical perspective of education in Korea, prima facie it would seem that education has been a very important underpinning of South Korea’s economic success (Seth 2002).³ Amsden, for example, emphasizes the state’s educational and training policies in connection with traditional social relations. She argues that both factors are main contributors to economic success.⁴

Alternatively, Kyong-Dong Kim, a Korean sociologist, attempts to isolate the ‘distinctive’ features unique to the Korean experience, in which he includes ‘the human element’ in social organization (1988). For him, Korea’s economic growth is a consequence of the adaptive change of Korean people and society to modernization forces. In his analysis, the so-called rationality of Confucianism is questioned. Instead, some non-rational forces such as tenacity, adaptability and the psychology of han are seen to have provided the impetus for economic success.⁵

All these views mentioned above are positive and optimistic, and bring the ‘orthodoxy’ frameworks into the interpretation of modern development in South Korea. Such positive views, however, do not explain the price paid for modernization and economic growth. They fail to fully recognize the full range of effects and consequences of modernization. The one-sided emphasis on economic development leaves gaps in their arguments. To close these gaps, critical approaches with different perspectives and theoretical frameworks began to appear in the 1980s. Included among them are the leftist or Marxist theorists. According to them, South Korea’s growth model is far from a success story as commonly told. The unstable and exploitative aspects of the South Korean economy and the unbalanced development of Korean society as a whole are identified along with uneven distribution of wealth and deterioration of the quality of life (Hart-Landsberg 1989, 1993; Lie 1991; Bello and Rosenfeld 1990).

These critical views have effected a revision of the one-sided ‘orthodox’ economist’s view of Korean modernization, with more interest and attention to the social and political costs of late industrialization. Yet these critical approaches are as well inadequate as an explanation for South Korea’s modernization, not least because of their economism. Economic disparities are one of the key features in understanding the modernization process of South Korea. Nevertheless, those who lean towards the new-left ideology often underrate a cultural space in which society expresses its self-problematization.

The problems with the theories and approaches to Korean modernity and modernization that I have just discussed are not unique to Korean studies. Indeed, they are part of the whole modernization paradigm. To understand the real problem of these theories and approaches, we need to have a further look at major modernization theories from a broader spectrum. To begin with, most historians perceive modernity as a quantitative concept rather than a qualitative one. Although their attempts are ‘holistic,’ the quantitative concept of modernity is limited to historical periodization in which the term ‘modern’ is used primarily in a chronological sense.⁶ However, as Peter Osborne convincingly argues, modernity is qualitative not chronological (Osborne 1992). For economists, be they of the neoclassical or the neo-left, the primary interests reside in the interpretation of how development has been achieved and the practical implications of the South Korean case in development theories.

Sociologists, who may lack ‘historical imagination,’ tend to neglect the important questions of the relationships between structure and history, between social structure and human agency, and between culture and social structure. Their interests seem to be preoccupied by modernizing forces. Contrary to this, cultural studies, mainly conducted by anthropologists, have been more concerned with particular aspects of traditional legacies without referring to the modern structure until the late 1980s.

Finally, from the 1980s, political scientists have introduced theories of state formation in the developing world: developmental dictatorship, ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ (Han Sang-Jin, borrowed from O’Donnell), ‘developmentalist state’ (Johnson 1980, 1987; Evans 1987; Lim 1985), and ‘soft-authoritarianism’ (Bedeski 1994). While reflecting the social formation debates in the early 1980s,⁷ these theories collectively lack attention to an important element in modern state formation: civil society. Many of them treat the authoritarian state as largely a theoretical construct and tend to emphasize a rather closed and static view of the state.

In sum, there are four general approaches concerning modernity and modernization: historical (modernity understood only as a chronological category), economistic (modernization understood as economic growth, often defined in purely quantitative terms), sociological (modernity defined as structural, i.e. ahistorical and acultural terms), and political (working with ideal types and dichotomies of authoritarian versus democratic regimes).

In the late 1980s and 1990s, there were new attempts seeking to bring the state and civil society together in a dialectical analysis (Koo 1993, 1998; Evans 1995). While admitting that the directive state intervened in all areas, they go further to examine how and why state intervention works in relation to civil society. However, taken together, various theoretical and practical questions about Korean modernity remain unanswered by the existing paradigms.

If we understand modernization as a long-term process of social formation rather than a specific historical event, we need to investigate the concrete forms in which the uniqueness of Korea’s historical situation can be articulated in terms of colonialism, foreign occupation, civil war and the division of the nation. This approach might be able to show the motivating forces behind the spectacular advance of South Korea, enable us to abandon unhelpful categories of classical social theory, and allow us to move beyond dichotomous notions of tradition and modernity or agricultural and industrial society. Such an attempt has not only an analytic and theoretical meaning for the explanation of the distinctive experience of Korean modernity, but also normative significance for the practical purpose of seeking the autonomy of Korean society.

These considerations suggest that an adequate analysis of the Korean experience of modernity requires a comprehensive multidimensional approach to the processes of modernization. It should go beyond a narrow explanation of the structure of South Korea’s economy and political structure. Given the complexity of Korean modernization, developmental, functional and evolutionary theories of modernization are not well equipped to explain the changes that have occurred in Korea over the past four decades. These theories tend to overlook the complex history and organizational mechanisms of non-Western societies, and fail to recognize the central importance of historical and cultural contingency in social transformation. If Korea’s modernization is seen as a historical transformation of the social world, the constellation of its modernity drives its distinctive features from its own past and the present conditions. The continuation of premodern tradition and a selective convergence of Western modernity have been an integral part of the dynamics of Korea’s modernity. The approach proposed in this book, which centers on a primary reference to Korea’s long-term civilizational processes, can deal with these problems and thus provide a better understanding of South Korea’s modernization and emergent social, economic and political formations. Civilizational approach helps to understand modernization theories in a broader interpretive framework, in which points of reference go beyond capitalist development and liberal democracy.

Outlining the civilizational background to Korean modernity and how conventional (Western) modes of discourse regarding modernization fall short of explaining South Korea’s path to modernity are the main tasks for the remainder of Part I of this book. It is not only appropriate but also necessary to take into account the historical and social conditions of premodern Korea, including the relationship between culture and structure, state and society, and the transformative force of particular elite agents. Chapter 1 will first examine how historical and civilizational forces set the preconditions to South Korea’s modernization.

2. Civilization theories

The emergence of a ‘world society’ (Luhmann 1997)⁸ has accompanied the processes of globalization and the increasing interdependence of different nationstates. For some, the process of globalization assumes modernization, which is a singular, linear, positive or equalizing force, and incorporates non-Western countries into a homogenized world civilization, which is ‘Western.’⁹ The tendency to analyze globalization and modernization in terms of the homogenization of political and economic systems is countered by a perspective that emphasizes the proliferation of differentiating conceptions or alternative models of modernity.¹⁰

This debate reflects the fact that, while most of the world’s societies have endorsed to some extent modern (Western) configurations such as capitalism, liberalism and democracy, no single civilization or basic ideological principle has become dominant. Modernity may appear to constitute a world civilization at one level, but the wide range of alternative expressions of modernity in different parts of the world is evidence of the persisting regional, national and cultural differentiation in today’s geopolitical configuration. This suggests a need for a new approach to the problem of the relationship between civilization and culture in the modernization process. More specifically, it calls for an analysis of the dialectics between Western forms of modernity and other civilizational features.¹¹

Civilization is the largest known unit of socio-cultural study. Its sociological study contributes to the understanding of social action and social structure in terms of the symbolic order and its interrelations with power structures. The civilizational framework combines a specific religious or secular world view with a civilization’s ideational value hierarchy, integrating textual symbols of the civilization, such as religious doctrines and political manifestos. A civilizational approach is useful for understanding major long-term sociological processes such as state formation and shifts in self-understanding (Elias), religious and economic rationalization of the world (Weber), and symbolic and material power balances within and between civilizations (Eisenstadt).

Definitions of civilization vary widely (Rundell and Mennell 1998). Since the eighteenth century, Western scholars have often cited the existence of cities as a primary indicator of civilization. Perry Anderson (1996: 28) provides the following useful etymological distinction between ‘civilization’ and the related term ‘culture’: ‘The term “civilization” comes from the city and the urban world of citizens, while the term “culture” stems from the countryside and the world of peasants.’ Modern usage of the term ‘civilization’ can be traced back to the Western Enlightenment where ‘civilization’ connoted development in evolutionist terms.¹² Civilization has been related to particular institutional dynamics and cultural paradigms, although it was often used interchangeably with culture. Perhaps the best way to understand the concept is to discuss two contrasting approaches to the study of civilizations, each with its own particular emphasis and point of reference: the materialist (or structuralist) approach and the culturalist approach. The former looks to an economic explanation of history in order to interpret and characterize the major world civilizations (Braudel, Wallerstein). By contrast, the latter seeks to understand civilizations in terms of their aesthetic, intellectual and ideational components (Huntington, Weber, and Eisenstadt). Let me explain these two approaches in more detail.

(1) Materialist approach

Braudel and Wallerstein provide broad dialectical and historical theories of the emergence of a capitalist world system. They regard production for extended market exchange as a sufficient definition of capitalist activity. Braudel (1986) focuses on the natural-geographic base of history and economic factors that, for him, confine the course of history. He stresses long-term trends (longue durée) to reveal the deep structure of material civilization as the basis for world history. While conceiving history as totalizing and global, Braudel regards civilization as relatively open-ended, being constantly constructed and reconstructed. He is aware of the problem of ambiguity in definitions of civilization and relates definition to historical processes (1993: 3–8).

Braudel uses the idea of civilization as a conceptual framework for understanding the pluralism and heterogeneity of the world system. While Braudel analyzes civilization in terms of geography, cultural zones, cities and towns, societies and economies, his focus is on the economic and geographical factors, which he thinks fashion the course of world history. Furthermore, Braudel distinguishes a world-economy from the world economy (1986: 22). ‘The world economy’ is the economy of the whole world, while ‘a world-economy’ is an economically autonomous region whose internal linkages and exchanges yield a degree of economic unity. From his long-term perspective on material civilization, Braudel identifies a number of world-economies. He observes that the number of such world-economies declined over time as more successful world-economies expanded and absorbed former world-economies. Braudel’s historical overview begins with an analysis of a series of merchant cities, including Venice, Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam, that dominated Europe’s world-economy in the early modern period. From there he theorizes the development of nation-state markets and the eventual domination of European capitalism over other world-economies.

To understand this transition to European domination over other civilizations it is worthwhile examining ‘early modernity’ a little more closely, as it helps illuminate modernization in both European and other civilizations. Many scholars tend to confine the notion of early modernity to European societies, which emerged from a feudal past from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century (Goldstone 1998: 253). This kind of conceptualization concentrates on the social, political and economic transformation of Europe during these periods, and defines development elsewhere in relation to Europe. In so doing, this approach neglects the existence of early modern societies outside Europe.

Braudel’s analysis is useful for understanding the global dynamism of human civilizations, but his view on the rise of the capitalist system in societies outside Western Europe is limited.¹³ As Goldstone points out, if we apply Marxist criteria (i.e. market-oriented production and profit-oriented merchants) to the concept of the early modern, ‘early modern’ societies are found all around the world much earlier than the sixteenth c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Korean civilization and cultural tradition
• Part II State formation
• Part III Capitalist development
• Part IV Nationalism and reunification
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography