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Abstract
This study analyzes the major trade talks on films between South Korea and the US since the mid-1980s. It starts from the puzzle that South Korea could successfully maintain its screen quotas until it decided to cut them by half in 2006. The study argues that South Korean chief negotiators have used the US pressure to cut screen quotas as leverage in bilateral talks. This proves the point that heightened foreign pressure can enhance the policy autonomy of domestic chief negotiators, by consequence if not by design. Amid the US pressures to scrap the screen quotas, inter-ministry frictions arose among the Ministry of Strategy and Finance (formerly the Ministry of Finance and Economy), the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (formerly the Ministry of Culture and Tourism), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (formerly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade). While bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism have tenaciously adhered to a preservation of the screen quotas, those from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have continuously cast doubt on this protectionist policy. On the other hand, bureaucrats from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, far from the other two ministries’ consistent preferences, have altered their actual policy preferences with respect to the screen quotas in the same period. A key goal of this study is to test the following statement: the greater the US pressure to cut the screen quotas became, the wider the range of policy autonomy South Korean chief negotiators would exercise.
Notes
* This article is mostly drawn from the author’s master’s thesis.
1. This study investigates the years from 1985 to 2006. South Korea has witnessed a direct distribution of US movies since its enactment of a screen quota in 1966. On the other hand, 2006 is the very year that the South Korean government announced its intention to reduce by half its obligatory days for screening domestic movies before commencing FTA talks with the US.
2. In essence, this study is based on exclusive interviews with two incumbent bureaucrats and four retired ones who had experienced actual screen quota negotiations with their US counterparts. Out of these six South Korean elites, two respondents played a key role as chief negotiators who made a critical contribution to the conclusion of the KORUS FTA. Except for one phone interview, the interviews were conducted by a firsthand visiting of their offices. Based on comments given by six interviewees in total, the actual ideas of chief negotiators are developed into some pieces of inferences and thereby it is possible to carry out process tracing in causal relations. A data collection with six elite interviews played a significant role in reconstructing the events that this study is to undertake. With open-ended answers, it was possible to avoid subtle nuances in most of the questions. In addition, by providing the list of questions to interviewees beforehand, this study could obtain well-formulated and rich responses within an assigned time.
3. Putnam himself acknowledges the fact that he relaxes the assumption and thus a chief negotiator in his research is simply an honest broker, without any independent policy preferences (Putnam Citation1988, p. 436).
4. The Motion Picture Association of Export of America (MPEAA), currently known as the Motion Picture Association (MPA), represented the core interests of the major six motion picture studios in the US. The MPEAA was one of subsidiaries of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which administers the film rating system in the US. According to a website of the MPAA, its core mission is to ‘advance the business and the art of filmmaking and its enjoyment around the world’. http://www.mpaa.org/about/history
5. Valenti once complained that only 14 Hollywood films were imported into South Korea in 1984 while 92 were brought to Japan, 80 to Singapore, and 108 to Argentina, respectively, in the same year. In September 1985, a statement by the MPAA required South Korea to deregulate foreign currency and to withdraw the financial burden of foreign film importers in South Korea. The statement released by the MPAA fundamentally aimed to give the same rights to South Korean film production companies in the US and Hollywood film buyers in South Korea.
6. The year 1988 witnessed another lawsuit against South Korea filed by the MPAA on the basis of US Section 301. Compared to the previous lawsuit in 1985 as a measure of the administration, the suit in 1988 mainly focused on Hollywood movie piracy in the film market in South Korea. In the late 1980s, Section 301 along with Super 301 and Special 301 were trade retaliatory measures. For industries and interests groups, they could only initiate Section 301 among the three.
7. In the same vein, a retired bureaucrat from the MFA who participated in BIT talks coincidently picked exactly the same number of conflicting points from 1998 to 2003.
8. Concerning an indirect expropriation, there is no established definition but is called either a disguised expropriation or a creeping expropriation.
9. US Trade Representative Rob Portman made a remark in a press conference at the meeting of APEC in 2005, saying negotiations on KORUS FTA ‘can start only if a substantial progress is made in unfinished issues between the two countries’. In Portman’s words, so-called substantial progress means US pressure on South Korea to resume import of US beef and scrap the screen quota that disadvantages Hollywood films (Chosun Citation2005b).
10. Under President Kim’s presidency from 1998 to 2003, economic recovery was the most pending issue to get over the financial crisis since 1997.
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Notes on contributors
Ah Rum Chang
Ah Rum Chang is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University, South Korea. Her research focuses on Comparative Politics of East Asia, Political Economy, Government Bureaucracy, Policy Ideas and Institutions, and East Asian Developmental States.