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

Abstract

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary 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 has involved both illegal 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 by obfuscating 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.

KeyWords:

• South Korea
• post-democracy
• electoral interference
• Park Geun-hye
• democratisation
• post-politics

Notes

^1. Notably, the Ministry of Employment and Labour used an enforcement decree to deregister the KTU rather than a revision to the Trade Union Act itself, which would have required legislative approval. The Park administration’s public security politics have also targeted the Korean Government Employees’ Union (KGEU), for which the government has denied official registration for more than a decade.

^2. For instance, in 2013 a two day-workshop entitled “Post Democracies” at Cambridge University used the concept to explore political dynamics in Latin American, South Asian, African and East Asian contexts.

^3. There are some interesting comparisons here between the South Korean case of post-democratisation and the case of Thailand. In the latter, such politics pits conservative or royalist city dwellers in Bangkok against the countryside, often relying on romanticised and depoliticised and therefore disempowering representations of the peasant and the countryside to do so, as in the case of the “sufficiency economy” (see Connors 2003; Glassman 2001; Hewison 2008). Unlike in Thailand, voters in the South Korean capital city of Seoul tend to vote liberal-left while rural areas, especially the south-eastern province of Kyŏngsang-do, more often vote for the conservatives, with the exception of the southwest which tends to vote liberal-left, and thus gets its own chongbuk-style smear such as Cholla-do bbalgaengi, linking the term bbalgaengi (red or communist) to the name of the south-western province (Lee, Jan, and, Wainwright 2014). Furthermore, post-democratic politics in Thailand does not use anti-communist discourse in the name of public security as much as it uses the royalist discourse of lèse-majesté to silence popular, egalitarian forces.

^4. Glassman’s account bears some resemblance to the emergent literature on authoritarian liberalism (Bruff 2014).

^5. Choi’s analysis is close in spirit to that of Crouch (2004) in that Choi is concerned with the level of representative democracy and the limiting effects of elite, conservative power upon the achievement of a more substantive or maximal democratisation.

^6. Lee Jung-hee does have a record of refusing to critique the North Korean regime, earning the label Chusap’a – a “juch’e thought follower” – in both conservative and liberal commentaries.

^7. When the accusation of electoral interference against the NIS first surfaced just days before the election in December 2013, the police carried out a quick investigation only to exonerate the agency. The emergence of additional evidence months after the election cast doubt on police competency and raised the possibility of a cover-up.

^8. Conservatives use this term to represent not only suspected sympathisers with North Korea but anyone that they see as deferential to the wishes of the North. This includes even liberal politicians that favoured Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy.” The term chong means to obey or follow, with connotations of being slavish, while buk means North; chwap’a stands for left faction or leftist. The way in which chongbuk has been coupled with chwap’a as a compound term in contemporary conservative discourse erases the distinction between what were originally two very different concepts, such that in the current political climate the left becomes synonymous with chongbuk, and vice versa.

^9. The idea of allowing a teachers’ union was consistently suppressed by the various military dictatorships. The KTU was established in 1989 but even then did not become a legally recognised union until 1999 due to staunch conservative opposition that perennially portrayed the union as pro-North Korea.

10. This argument evokes earlier debates surrounding historical stagnation among South Korean historians, and in which Yi Yŏnghun – who has also co-ordinated the production of the New Right’s history textbook – was involved (Miller 2010, 9). The KTU, the country’s teachers’ union, has been at the forefront of contesting the revision of South Korean textbooks to paint the Park Chung-hee dictatorship in a favourable light, making it a prominent thorn in the side of conservative forces, who have sought to create an alternative, new-right aligned teachers union.

11. Further controversies thus remain over efforts of the conservative administration and the New Right Textbook Forum to produce educational materials on Korean history that cast the Park Chung-hee regime in a positive light. See, for example, the Asian Human Rights Commission’s recent criticism of Korea’s Ministry of Education (Asian Human Rights Commission, August 15, 2014; cf. SBS, September 2, 2014).