Is Liberalism Acceptable But Not Neo-Liberalism?
The Dilemma of South Korean Intellectuals in Liberal Social Governance
Jesook Song
University of Toronto, CANADA
April 23, 2005
Revised in July `4, 2005
Re-revised in July 25, 2006
Presented in a conference
Nation, Culture, New Economy of East Asia
University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University
***Working Progress. Please Don’t Quote or Distribute.
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Is Liberalism Acceptable But Not Neo-Liberalism? The Dilemma of South Korean Intellectuals in Liberal Social Governance
Jesook Song, University of Toronto
“…things around us, things inside us, things that seem trivial—those are the things we’ll tackle first, all right?” He said this with a smile on his face and a glow in his good-natured eyes. And then he fought those trivial things and went to jail, the sight of him dragged into court, gagged, in white traditional prison garb bringing us to tears…and he worked in a factory and married a factory girl with only a middle school education. And here I was, five years later, going to see this man, a man now quoted as saying, “there was no use risking one’s life for something trivial,” a man who had inherited his father’s bus company, who fathered two daughters and then separated from the factory girl with the middle school education, after which she was committed to a mental hospital (Kong, 1997 my emphasis).
Noticeably, in the last few years, South Korean state government policies on welfare, labor/industry, and education have tended to promote a certain kind of citizen — a citizen who is employable, self-sufficient, and globally conscious. Such attempts by the government to establish “deserving” citizens of various welfare/economic/education benefits reflect how people’s daily lives interact with newly emerging markets and a corresponding “well-being” of the consumer market (Song 2004), part-time and/or dispatch labor markets (Cho 1999), and the private, after-school educational market (Park and Abelmann 2004). It is thus reasonable to claim that these phenomena signify the neo-liberalization of South Korea, which, since the 1980s, has built infrastructure to optimize profits via the privatization of public services, a decrease in the stability of employment contracts, and the promotion of flexible human capital and labor (Shin 2002). However, this historicization is based on an understanding of neo-liberalism as merely a free-market, globalizing monetary system, rather than neo-liberalism as a political-economic and socio-cultural logic. I take the latter position to contextualize neoliberalization of South Korea and argue this position better explaining the growing potency of neo-liberalism in South Korea.
Despite many negative consequences of neo-liberalism, since the period of democratization (i.e. post-1987), forms of labor and welfare activism against government and corporate policies in addition to consumer activism against free-market tyranny did not garner wholehearted support from South Korean working poor class any longer. The liberalized political-cultural mood in South Korea emerged following the political transition over the last decade. This mood is characterized by inertia, lethargy, escapism and cynicism resulting from the appropriation of the radical ideals of collective social change by the liberal pursuit of individual happiness. South Korea has shifted from one of vibrancy and opposition against oppressive military regimes, to one in harmony with liberal government. Many subalterns lost faith in collective cries of resistance when resistance leaders appeared to disconnect from the struggle by acquiring values and material goods akin to the capitalistic practices they once claimed to abhor. For instance, we can recall the bitter experience of laid-off part-time workers of Korea Telecom Inc., whose struggle were turned back by full-time workers’ union during the Asian Debt Crisis. Prior to the Crisis, both groups of workers stood in solidarity against company owners, united in their opposition to middle-class values and bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat. However, after successful unionization and the acquisition of increased wages, many full-time workers obtained middle-class lifestyles and ultimately betrayed part-time workers who were contesting union policies that exclusively supported laid-off workers with full-time status (Lee 2003).
A related example can be made by examining the progressive intellectuals’ movement, as the opening narrative, illustrated in the sentiments by the narrator of Chi-Yông Kong’s short story “Human Decency.” Many formerly active and politicized intellectuals[1] were chased by riot police and tortured by detectives after ‘democratization.’ They had previously fought for the rights of laborers and peasants and married less-educated, poor, local people in an attempt of political devotion and class solidarity. However, many of them became office workers or business people pursuing profits for securing their families, losing passion for social movements and taking up a belief in freedom and the pleasure of economic stability and affluence. Many intellectuals also turned to mainstream politics, keeping company in chauvinistic bar/salons with older generations of politicians who they used to criticize. Moreover, it was not uncommon among intellectuals to divorce their marriage partners, whom they met through heyday of activism, including many less-educated partners from factory or peasant area because they are now deemed incompatible. The social, mental and physical wounds for the less-educated partners are illustrated in Kong’s story above. In the era of post-Democratization, social activism cannot overrule pursuit of individual happiness and interest. To make it worse, the Asian Debt Crisis did not help turning the direction: rather, the Crisis period amplified the individualistic liberal ethos through neo-liberal state and economic reform even with resurging conservative nationalism (Song 2003a, Kim and Finch 2001)
Elsewhere, I note “neo-liberal governmental policies in South Korea during the IMF Crisis [Asian Debt Crisis] were powerfully implemented because a liberal ethos and vision of the better life had historical roots and gained explanatory power from people’s daily and political lives throughout the 1990s” (Song 2003a, 17) As a way of comprehending the complex ways in which liberal ethos (as a result of anti-state leftist movement) and neo-liberal state governance (as a continuum of developmental state apparatus) cooperate each other and its individualistic logic gains hegemonic power in South Korea, and, most importantly in anthropological sense, to situate people’s changes in the complex contexts, it would be a useful tool to think of continuum and changes between; pre-democratization era (pre-1987), post-democratization era (post-1987), and the Asian Debt Crisis (1997 to 2001). Here, I conceptualize neo-liberalism as a political-economic and socio-cultural logic that operates through diverse social actors (with different degrees of valence) to engineer certain forms of social governance, rather than assuming that neo-liberalism merely consists of an economic system in which macro-monetary institutions and state governments are considered primary actors in constructing of a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 1976).[2]
In this paper, I attempt to explicate ways in which the discursive power of neo-liberalism is inadvertently reproduced and entrenched through its epistemological connection to liberal ideas and reasoning that circulate among urban populations. More specifically, I focus on the agency of intellectuals and its dilemma in the reproduction of neo-liberalism in South Korea and include an analysis of my own experiences conducting research on South Korean welfare governance. In my analysis, I examine how South Korean intellectuals (myself included) engineered forms of neo-liberal welfare governance by applying liberalist ideas (for example, the belief in efficiency as the golden rule of social/group management) as strategies of intervention during the Asian Debt Crisis. I discuss how South Korean intellectuals’ paradoxical participation in neo-liberal welfare governance is manifested through their relationship with the state government where they are simultaneously positioned as state agents and state subjects and where their integrity as critical thinkers/actors is caught between competing activist and academic discourses. Throughout my work, I maintain that if we do not locate our own positions in the process of knowledge production, we take for granted our ‘progressive’ and critical stance and dismiss our own complicities in constructions of neo-liberalism. Producing knowledge without reflecting on our own epistemological frameworks and daily practices reifies a dualistic schism of “us” verses “them” with an unequal power between the gazer and the gazed — those who see/write and those who are being seen/written of (Hall 1996).
1. A Ppolitical Llandscape of South Korea during the Asian Debt Crisis and the Kim Dae Jung Ggovernment
To begin with, I contextualize South Korean intellectuals’ agency and dilemma in the amplifying neo-liberalization during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea. Tracing the crisis in South Korea provides a characteristic illustration of how neo-liberal projects have transformed the operation of state power and shifted the paradigm of welfare to workfare (Peck and Theodore 2001). For example, South Korean neo-liberal social governance radically intensified at the level of social policy and public discourse when the Kim Dae Jung government implemented “Productive Welfarism” during the Asian Debt Crisis from 1997-2001.
The intensification of neo-liberalism through welfare governance involves three sets of entangled elaborations. Firstly, the definition of neo-liberalism in the context of South Korean society that I am deploying is two-folded: one is the epistemological genealogy of a liberal ethos, meaning individual notions of freedom to pursue goals and enjoy autonomous lives without collective surveillance, intervention and/or dependency on state machinery; the other is the establishment of a workfare/welfare system and restructuring processes of economy, industry, and finance through supranational projects of free-marketization and the privatization of state services. Second, I have highlighted that neo-liberal social governance was intensified during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea because during the process of implementing state unemployment policies, there was an amplification of self-governable, rationalized individuals who were responding to the Crisis. Moreover, for the first time in the history of South Korea, homeless policies were launched; however, only short-term street living homeless men were considered “deserving” citizens of government provisions along the assumption that they would resume their responsibilities as family breadwinners.
Thirdly, it is significant that welfare development in the context of South Korean neo-liberal governance became a complementary trope of economic development at levels of the state, society, and individuals and considered fundamentally separate and/or different from certain mind-sets and values of living (Cho 2000). Elsewhere, I have already analyzed how, under the name of “Productive Welfarism,” the first extensive welfare system in South Korea invokes a continuum that prioritizes economic prosperity despite claiming interests in social policy by referring to advanced capitalist societies’ cases of failure of welfare and the “wisdom” of “workfare.”(Shin 2002) When Kim Dae Jung implemented the welfare state, he invited civic groups to respond to the Asian Debt Crisis as partners. Initially, the invitation was well received not only because of the urgency to address the issues at hand but also because of the signification of welfare state as a symbolic entrance to social democracy and a commitment to economic justice. However, this welfare state, entitled “Productive Welfarism” in fact followed neo-liberal welfare models focusing on the economic prosperity of the state, rather than economic redistribution among society members. Since the Crisis, neo-liberal ideas have become much more concrete in the daily lives of most South Korean people, embodied in their narratives of self-management of health and life style (Abelmann, Park, Kim, forthcoming, Song 2003b) and in their perceptions of the value of “refined living” or “well-being” (Song 2004).
Here’s a brief description of how various intellectuals (for example, academicians, activists, and highly-educated people with social consciousness) became involved in collective response to the crisis under the rubric of the Kim Dae Jung government’s call for partnership between government organizations (GOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs). Major newspapers heralded November 21, 1997 as the “second national humiliation day” of Korea (the first being the Japanese colonization of Korea)—the day when South Korea became the object of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout due to a lack of dollars with which to repay debts to foreign financial institutions. South Korea’s national economy enjoyed market prosperity for several decades until 1997 with the steady growth of large corporations leading a prevailing sense of occupational stability in South Korea.
By signing the Stand-by Agreement with the IMF on December 3rd of 1997 as a condition for receiving the IMF bailout funds, the South Korean government agreed to restructure its economic, financial, and government management systems along “liberal” free market lines. These measures entailed the bankruptcy of many large companies and banks, leading to large-scale unemployment. Prior to the Crisis, the unemployment rate was quite stable at around 2.5% percent but jumped in 1998 to 1999 to 7-8%.[3] percent.[4] These figures for the new, higher rate of unemployment during the Crisis years excluded women-at-home and students who wanted and needed to work.[5] Therefore, although the massive lay-offs of stable workers that resulted from the downsizing of amalgamate corporations and collapse of small enterprises prompted enormous public attention and social anxiety, the loss of employment for part-time workers in unstable jobs during the Crisis was not immediately recognized.
The Crisis emerged in concert with South Korea’s political transition from government with military support to civilian government. In December 1997, a month following the declaration of the Crisis, Kim Dae Jung, a longstanding leader in the opposition party, was elected President. The need to improve the quality of life as an authentic concept of social well-being exploded during the Crisis (Wong 2003). Thus it was largely assumed that any candidate for the presidential election in 1997 had opportunity to bring about enormous social reform. Moreover, since the previous president, Kim Young Sam, was heavily criticized and ridiculed by the majority of South Koreans for his inability to prevent the Crisis, the moment was ripe for a political hero.
Kim Dae Jung’s achievement in this massive reform respect can also be attributed to his effective deployment of policies in welfare and education and liberal forces. During his exile in Britain and prior to gaining presidency in South Korea, Kim Dae Jung began to develop his commitments to economic liberalization and governmental restructuring that limited business-government relations and corruption, a focus that was in line with the advice of international financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank. These developments became more conspicuous during the Crisis. Even before he was inaugurated, Kim Dae Jung promptly executed a series of plans for reform and restructuring. Additionally, Kim Dae Jung expanded government funding for NGOs and non-profit organizations (NPOs) and elicited their participation in sharing the responsibility for managing social issues to help unemployed people and homeless people. In this context, Kim Dae Jung secured the support of many long-standing members of progressive civic groups by mobilizing partnerships between GOs and NGOs in response to the IMF Crisis. For instance, civil groups took major roles in promoting the Pan-national campaign for Gold Collection (Kûmmoûgi pôm kungmin kyôryôn undong) as a response to the Crisis, reminiscent of The Repay Debt Movement (Kukch’ae Posang Undong) or The Korean Production Movement (Chosôn Mulsan Changnyô Undong) that took place in 1920 during the Japanese colonial period. Deploying motifs of saving the nation from resurging disparity, the campaign resulted in a significant collection of gold not only from middle class citizens, but also from lower-income citizens, the campaign was handed over to respected delegates from the three most popular religions (i.e., Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism) to manage collected funds to distribute to people in need, which was named the National Movement for Overcoming Unemployment (Sirôpkûkpok kungmin udong).
The growth of civil group forces during the Crisis can be historically contextualized within the post-Great Democratization Movement of 1987 to better understand the political aura leading up to the Crisis. The Great Democratization Movement in 1987 engendered mass protests demanding the end to the period of a nearly three decade (1960-1987) military dictatorship. In the aftermath of the1987 mass protests, South Korea obtained electoral democracy and experienced a flowering of popular civil movements for women’s rights, sexual identities, environmental, and economic justice. These movements were distinct from pre-1987 political movements that featured collective oppositional activism against political oppression characterized by military dictatorship in addition to the capitalist exploitation of low-income laborers and farmers. More significantly, post-1987 socio-political movements cultivated diversified civil activisms that emphasized individualistic values and included the middle class as legitimate objects of social activism. In these civil movements, middle class citizens were largely considered as main supporters. In Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation, Hagen Koo (2001) attributes the legitimization of the middle class as deserving of social protection by civil organizations to the unprecedented contribution of white-collar workers to the Great Democratization Movement who joined blue collar workers, students, civil and political activists in their long-standing dissent towards the South Korean government. Thus, civil organizations that emerged in the post-1987 era were major social engineers.