Pursuing Post-democratisation:The Resilience of Politics byPublic Security in Contemporary South Korea

Forthcoming (2016) in Journal of Contemporary Asia. DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2015.1094119

Jamie Doucette

Geography, School of Environment, Education, and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, United Kingdom, M13 9PL

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Se-Woong Koo

MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, USA 06520-8206

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Abstract

This paper analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye andher administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first yearin office. We argue that the Park administration’spolicies resonate withcontemporary discussions of“post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges.Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.”This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and hasinvolved bothillegal interventions by state institutions —such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service—and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation byobfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.

Key words: South Korea, post-democracy, electoral interference, Park Geun-hye, democratisation, post-politics

In December 2012, Park Geun-hye, a daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee,won the presidencyof the Republic of Korea for the conservative Saenuri Party. Her campaign was based on the slogan of “economic democratisation,” which signalled unprecedented intentions on the part of South Korean conservatives totake on the country’s large business groups, chaebol, and expand social welfare. Park’selectoral success was the result of concerted efforts, beginning in 2011, to distinguish her from the incumbent conservative president Lee Myung-bak, whose pro-growth 747 economic plan (according towhich South Korea wouldachieve 7% in annual GDP growth, US$40,000 in percapita income and become the world’s seventh largest economy)had come to be seen by the public as a failure, and whose Four Rivers Project had sowed allegations of corruption and won notoriety for detrimental effects on the environment (see Kang 2011).In contrast to the unpopular Lee, Park presented herself as a maternal figure to the electorate, voicing concerns about inequality and appointing as her advisors moderate conservatives who promoted wealth redistribution, increased full-time employment, and even corporate governance reform. Debates between Park’s advisors, such as the moderateconservative Kim Jong-in, and those of the liberal-left candidate Moon Jae-in were therefore surprisingly amiable. While the two sides differed on the appropriateness of individual policies proposed under the slogan, neither camp disputed the fact that the next president needed to pursue some form of economic democratisation.

Thatsuch civil debate on economic issues came to rule the country’s famously raucous political landscape was seen as representing an important new phase in the culmination of South Korean democracy (seeKang, Leheny and Cha 2013).This straightforward narrative was however complicated by events following Park’s electoral victory and inauguration as the first female president of South Korea:Park’s promise of increased welfare and economic reform went unfulfilled as she quickly backtracked on her core pledges and failed to offer key administrative posts to the moderate conservative advisors that had helped organise her election campaign (Doucette 2015). Afterintroducing corporate governance reforms that did little to challenge the chaebol’s entrenched economic power and revising her promises to create a universal pension system, she declared that her economic democratisation drive had been successfully completed and that her economic policies would now centre on fostering a “creative economy” — an euphemism for economic deregulation and privatisation of state-owned industries.The discourse of economic democratisationvanished overnight.

To the dismay of moderate conservatives as well as the liberal-left, Park reshuffled her cabinet in early August 2013 to include a number of elderly advisors from her father’s dictatorial regime and former prosecutors-turned-politicians who had held positions related to anti-communist activities and the maintenance of “public security” in past military and conservative governments. Rather than pursuing economic democratisation or taking on the chaebol, Park shifted her attention towards the country’s labour unions, de-registering the Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union (KTU)on the ground that it retained a handful of fired or dismissed workers as members, and attacking the Korean Railway Workers’ Union (KRWU) who went on strike to protest Park’s attempt to privatise thevaunted high-speed rail system, the KTX.[1]By February 2014, Park introduceda“Three-Year Innovation Plan” that was reminiscent of Lee Myung-bak’sneo-liberal 747 plan: Park promised to “smash regulations” and introduce a “competitive system” into the public sector with the goal of achieving a 4% growth rate, 70% employment and per capita income of US$40,000 by 2017—in other words, hers would be a 474 plan.

On a more sinister note, in June 2013,it was confirmed that allies of Park’s presidential campaign in the government sector had engaged in anti-democratic actions for two full years prior to the election. The National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s main spy organisation, and other state agencies were revealed to have conducted a massive internetcampaign using social networking sites and other online platforms to discredit liberal-left politicians as chongbukchwap’aor “pro-North leftists.” The NIS chief Won Sei-hoon was subsequently convicted of violating a law that bars his agency from interfering in domestic politics. But to public outcry, he was initially found innocent on a more serious charge of violating election laws, which forbid public officials from influencing elections. Although an appeals court found him guilty on both counts, the Supreme Court later reversed that ruling on technical grounds and ordered a new trial in July 2015. In his defence,the agency and its political allies presented such electoral intervention as being in the interest of public and national security and therefore legitimate. Conservative forces were dismissive during months of ensuing protests that decried the electoral interference,calling efforts to initiate a full investigation as destabilising to the state and therefore unpatriotic. Put another way, this “politics by public security”—the labelling of dissent and activism as a threat to national security—was used by Park’s government to lend legitimacy to the actions of state agencies involved in the electoral interference and thus ward off questions into the manner in which the president had come into power.

Moreover, recalling the tactics of past conservative regimes that used exaggerated public security threats to tarnish oppositional forces and to divert public attention from broader issues of social justice, Park’s government brought charges of treason and National Security Law (NSL) violation against a sitting lawmaker from the small, oppositional United Progressive Party and his associates. This occurred just as the NIS chief was served with the indictment for facilitating the agency’s electoral interference.

In this article, we argue that the contemporary politics of Park’s administration represents a South Korean version of post-democratisation, a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logic and state power insulated from popular challenges. While the literature on post-democracy is varied, in general the term has been used to denote a process of depoliticisation that occurs under ostensibly democratic regimes where elections are held, governments rotated, and where there is formal guarantee of freedom of speech. This process represents an erosion of democracy in the sense that key political and economic decision-making powers as provided within the democratic framework are monopolised by a small elite. Political participation is confined to processes that do not contest established political-economic configurations and/or is replaced by techno-managerial governance. In other words, post-democracy functions as a process of disempowering the electorate. Furthermore, this process can take place through a variety of means, among which includetactics like “politics by public security” that targetpolitical conflicts and disagreement asan “an ultra politics of radical and violent disavowal” to be penalised through exclusion and containment(Swyngedouw 2011, 370) — that is,political disagreementis treated asa disturbance to public order and targeted withthe same logic as a police operation (seeRancière 1999; Stravrakakis 2011).

Much of the literature on post-democracy highlights the following hallmark features: the establishment of a neo-liberal consensus between dominant political parties (in most cases due to the rightward drift of social democracy), the commercialisation of public services, the re-orientation of political parties from their core ideologies to the vagaries of public opinion polls, and the resilience of the national security state apparatus (Crouch 2004; Rorty 2004; Rancierre 1999). However, these features are not, by any means, universal; post-democracy is not a one-size-fits-all process but rather one that has heterogeneous, differentiated and uneven dynamics (Swyngedouw 2011, 372).What unites authors associated with the concept of post-democracy is that each sees it as a process that abuses democratic institutions and erodes democratic control and accountability, and thus works towards reducing democracy to a minimalist form.In Crouch’s words, “a post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy but in which they increasingly become a formal shell” (Crouch 2013).

In this article, we posit that a parallel yet contradictoryaffirmation and subversion of democracy has animated the process of post-democratisation in contemporary South Korea.First, while South Korean conservatives formally recognise the validity of the country’s existing democratic institutions, the very same figures have attempted use state institutions to stifle criticism of anti-democratic and illegal actions committed by state agencies, such as the recent electoral interference by the NIS. Furthermore, these agencies have cast their activities as legitimate and/or legal actions against threats to democracy, in the name of national or public security. Second, this politics by public security has been used to undermine popular calls for maximal or egalitarian democracy that are embraced by liberal-left politicians and social movements tracing their legacy to the earlier popular democracy struggles. Conservative forces are uneasy about the emancipatory legacy of the democracy movement, and prefer to posit former dictatorial regimes as having established the necessary foundations – national security and capitalist development – for democracy. Thus, politics by public security may be seen as a mode of post-democratic politics in as much as it affirms a minimalist conception of democracybyobscuring the legacies of democratic struggles against authoritarianism and, by extension, misrepresenting the current demands of popular forces associated with this legacy.

In particular, we assert that the contemporary politics of post-democratisation in South Korea is animated by a unique alliance between political forces associated with the so-called “New Right” movement and remnants of prior authoritarian regimes, such as the former prosecutors who were at the centre of past public security scares and now occupy prominent positions in the Saenuri Party, in addition to serving as ParkGeun-hye’s core advisors. Meanwhile, the New Right, which includes a number of former left-wing activists, has supplied older conservative forces with a narrative that posits democratisation largely in terms of market democracy and as a linear outcome of the modernisation policies pursued by former authoritarian regimes: a teleological narrative that denigrates political struggles and hard-fought accomplishments of past democratic movements. The New Right, much like the old right to which it claims to be heir, are critical of efforts to revisit past injustices committed by the authoritarian regimes, seeing such initiatives as undermining the legitimacy of the South Korean state.They are also suspicious of demands for social rights that might disrupt the operation of the free market.In summary, the conservative interference in democratic politics finds its justification in revisiting the history of South Korean military dictatorships, conferring greater legitimacy on contemporary conservative forces, conflating national security with public securityso as to contain dissent,and presenting itself as the very medium of democratic rule while casting democratisation activists as anti-state and therefore anti-democracy.

This article is organised as follows. In the following section we briefly survey some of the recent literature on post-democratisation. The section that follows examines commensurate argumentsabout South Korean democratisation made by South Korean scholars. We then analyse the recent turn towards politics by public security as a symptom of post-democratisation. In the ensuing section, we examine the historical roots of this politics in the Yushin-era policies of the Park Chung-hee regime and the careers of key figures who have helped shape these politics and now occupy key posts in Park’s administration. We then examine how the New Righthas sought to legitimise politics by public security by painting a positive picture of the legacy of former dictatorial regimes, and by extension the conservative political elite as legitimate democratic forces in South Korea. In the final section we provide some comments on the potential limits of Park’s sharp turn towards post-democracy.

Uneven geographies of post-democratisation

In recent years there has been a diverse but growing literature on post-democratisation. This literature has used the term to draw attention to methodological concerns about the study of democratic politics as well as to a particular social and political process that is animated by the depoliticisation of popular politics. Both of these senses are useful for our argument.

As a methodological problem, post-democratisation has been used by several scholars to call into question mainstream accounts of democratisation that focus too narrowly on the regularity of democratic elections as the criterion for successful democratisation—as important as these may be—and on teleological, unilinear narratives of democratic consolidation that ignore the reverberation of past political struggles into the present (seeTeti 2012; Valbjørn and Bank 2010; Valbjørn 2012). Here the term post-democratisation implies a sense of a duration of politics after “democratisation” or after a democratic event such as a popular uprising or accomplishment of electoral democracy,for democratisation is not simply a one-off event or unilinear transition to an isomorphic ideal-type. Post-democratisation is thus posited as an alternative to both mainstream andconservative approaches to democratisation that are often animated by a teleological logic that posits electoral democracyor an idealised understanding of Western liberal democracy as the end-point (seeHahm 2008; Fukuyama 1992). By doing so, mainstream accounts tend not to look into the fate of other democratic demands, such as demands for maximal or egalitarian democracy, or other historical and geographically specific demands such as, in the South Korean case, demands for historical reconciliation, gender equality and peaceful engagement with North Korea, among others. In this sense, moving beyond the mainstream “democratisation” frame entails an analysis that extends beyond a simple focus on the generalinstitutional elements of democratictransition in order to examine the various particular democratic demands in a variety of geographic spaces.This focus resonates with recent scholarship in human geography that critiques the narrow purview of the democratisation literature (Bell and Staeheli 2001) and calls instead for “contextual studies of substantive democratisation” (Stokke 2009). At the methodological level,then, the sense of post-democratisation as a scholarly effort oriented towards overcoming both theteleology and lacunae associated with the modernisation approach is useful for our purposes here, in as much as the effort focuses scholarship on the contextual rather than generic aspects of democratisation, and removes the latter from its unilinear assumptions.

Secondly, as discussed in the introduction, there is a sense of post-democratisation as a social and political process. This process results in a condition, post-democracy, represented by the preponderance of, as Offe (2012, 3) puts it, “accumulation, profit, efficiency, competitiveness, austerity and the market over the sphere of social rights, political redistribution, and sustainability, as well as the defenselessness of the latter sphere against the former.” For Crouch (2004), this is a condition where elections have largely been turned into spectacles and politics primarily negotiated in private between politicians and the business elite. Nonetheless, post-democracy is not a concept that is limited to the study of elections. Rather, it is oriented to how, within an ostensibly democratic institutional context, political power becomes insulated from or seeks to contain popular political struggles and social conflict.Politics seems driven by a consensus that there is no alternative to the rule of the market. Political conflict and disagreement are treated as pathology and operationalised as a threat to public order.

While the context in which Crouch (2004),Swyngedouw (2011) and other authors who theorise on post-democracy are writing is often, but not exclusively, Western Europe—where social democratic parties have adopted a neo-liberal consensus that the market cannot be challenged—we believe that post-democratisation is not a process that isconfined simply to that region or to established liberal democracies as such.While Crouch describes post-democracy primarily as a process of democracy turning back towards patterns of elite rule associated with pre-democratic times (that is, as a parabola-shaped process), this trajectory, as we seek to understand it, does not require liberal democracy as its prerequisite. We contend that it is applicable to other contexts characterised by greater and lesser degrees of liberal democracy – such as in fledgling democracies such as South Korea–and where politics has become closely identified with the prerogatives of the elite(seeBrockington 2014, 36-40).[2]Furthermore, as discussed above, geographers have argued that post-democracy should be seen as a process with spatially uneven and heterogeneous dynamics rather than a static, ideal-type condition.As the political struggles that it targets are always specific and particular, so too are the geographies of the process. Applying the concept to any specific context thus requires that attention be paid to the ways in which post-democratisation grafts itself on to existing hegemonic structures of political economic power and trajectories of development and democratisation rather than assuming that it will follow a pre-ordained path with the same actors and institutional context in each place.