Foreign aid and discourses of National Social Responsibility: evidence from South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article analyses a recent discourse of responsibility that accompanies states’ foreign aid provision. States adopt this discourse of National Social Responsibility (NSR) to show their compliance with globally accepted ethical standards by providing aid. This ethical behavior is underpinned by a political-economic logic, which derives from the promotional literature exhorting states to maintain national competitiveness by mimicking firms’ behaviors. While discourses of aid responsibility are not new, in the NSR discourse, the state communicates its ethical compliance with aid norms to promote economic competitiveness. This discourse is not a benign rhetorical device; it reproduces development inequalities and leads to the marketization of development policies. The article’s theoretical arguments are then used to analyze South Korea’s communication of its foreign aid. The case of South Korea exemplifies the patterns and tensions highlighted in the discussion of the NSR discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• foreign aid
• responsibility
• marketization
• branding
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A previous version of this article was presented at the International Studies Association.

2 By ‘promotional policies’ I refer to all the strategies that states implement in order to improve their reputation abroad.

3 I choose to use the term ‘National Social Responsibility’ rather than ‘Governmental Social Responsibility’ to adopt a critical distance from Anholt’s work and because this discourse is not limited to the responsibility of the government, but also targets citizens as contributors to the nation’s socially responsible identity.

4 It measures a country’s goodness through a large series of indicators ranging from the number of Nobel prize winners relative to GDP to freedom of the press, number of peacekeeping troops sent overseas relative to GDP, percentage of population that gives to charity, international trade volume and FDI and foreign aid in proportion of GDP, as well as a series of environmentally damaging behaviours as negative indicators.

5 The index evaluated the measure of freedom in the country, life expectancy and political transparency. Korea ranked 34th in the Index in 2008 (no index is available after 2008, suggesting a sporadic initiative). MHCi. 2017. Accessed April 14 2017. http://www.mhcinternational.com/images/stories/national_social_responsibility_index.pdf.

6 MOFA. 2019. Accessed May 22 2019 http://www.mofa.go.kr/eng/brd/m_5676/view.do?seq=319778.

7 Prime Minister’s Secretariat. 2019. Accessed November 25 2019 http://www.opm.go.kr/opm/news/press-release.do?mode=view&articleNo=119931&article.offset=0&articleLimit=10.

8 MOFA. 2017. Accessed March 2 2017 www.odakorea.gov.kr.

9 MOFA. 2019. Accessed May 22 2019 http://www.mofa.go.kr/eng/brd/m_5676/view.do?seq=319912&srchFr=&srchTo=&srchWord=&srchTp=&multi_itm_seq=0&itm_seq_1=0&itm_seq_2=0&company_cd=&company_nm=&page=1&titleNm.

10 Saemaul Undong is a rural development program that was implemented in Korea under the Park Chung-hee regime. It was revived and globalized by Park Geun-hye as a development solution that Korea could share with its development recipients.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliette Schwak

Juliette Schwak is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Franklin University Switzerland. She received her PhD from City University of Hong Kong in 2017. A political economist, she is a specialist of the Republic of Korea and her work on Korea's nation branding and foreign aid policies has been published in leading peer–reviewed journals.