Keeping the lights on
South Korea has great economic strengths and a flourishing democracy. But both need protection from outside threats, says Brian Barry
NIGHT-TIME satellite photographs of the Korean peninsula show an expanse of light surrounded by darkness. Those eerie images from the heavens demonstrate starkly just how far Korea's two halves have diverged economically since its division more than half a century ago. In the early days of the cold war, South Korea, like its northern cousin, was a poor, war-torn country. But its alignment with America and the West has not only protected it from the communist North, it has also given it access to international markets of which it has made impressive use. By combining this with hard work, a willingness to take risks and an appreciation of market forces, it has rapidly built an advanced industrial nation of 48m people.
North Korea, meanwhile, has remained poor and internationally isolated. It continues to repress its underfed population of 22m, and cannot even muster enough resources to light the place at night.
For all South Korea's success, though, a couple of sharp divisions have appeared within the country itself. One concerns the country's approach to security. Many young South Koreans in particular believe that the best way to deal with North Korea's regime is to coax it out of isolation, by talking nicely to it and giving it the fuel and other resources it needs. In their view America is being too hawkish, making matters worse.
Their champion is Roh Moo-hyun, a previously little-known lawyer who became South Korea's president in February. Mr Roh (pronounced “no”) is a member of the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP), as was his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung. Mr Kim consistently advocated a “sunshine policy” of engagement with the North, and earned himself a Nobel peace prize. Mr Roh's critics, mostly older South Koreans, point out that the North is still run by a vile regime and remains a powerful enemy, with enough artillery to plunge South Korea into darkness too.
The other big division in the South hinges on the role of the rich and powerful, and the perceived injustices and inequalities that have emerged as the country has grown. Many of the new president's associates were human-rights advocates, labour activists or other dissidents during South Korea's authoritarian days, and in the past some of them have argued for redistribution of wealth. Mr Roh himself has criticised the chaebol, the giant family conglomerates that drove the country's rapid development and still dominate its business landscape. Neither the president himself nor most of his entourage have much political experience. All this stoked fears that Mr Roh's administration might turn the country too sharply to the left, endangering its status as an economic star in the region and a bulwark of Asian security.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that Mr Roh's election is another big step forward for Korean democracy. The country began to emerge from authoritarian rule in 1987, a year before it was due to host the summer Olympics. When the president of the day, Chun Doo-hwan, tried to rejig South Korea's constitution so that he could continue to pull the strings after his long-promised resignation, he was faced with a series of huge demonstrations. These forced him to allow the first genuine direct elections in more than three decades. Since then South Korea has taken successive strides towards more enlightened and representative government, with greater freedom for its citizens to participate and voice their views. Mr Roh's victory, like those of each of his three predecessors (Korean presidents serve a single five-year term), puts even more distance between the current political system and the authoritarian regimes of the past.
The winner of the 1987 election, Roh Tae-woo, restored full political rights to Kim Dae-jung, who at various times in the past had been silenced, kidnapped, exiled and nearly executed by the military regime. Roh Tae-woo also released a number of political prisoners and relaxed a few rules, but he continued to keep a close eye on dissidents and made sure they kept quiet. And because Roh Tae-woo would have been Mr Chun's chosen successor even without free elections, and was also a military man, his five-year presidency was only a partial move towards democracy.
The election of his successor, Kim Young-sam, was a clear improvement. Not only was he a civilian, but he had opposed the authoritarian regime in the past. Yet his democratic credentials were tainted because he won the 1992 election through an alliance with Roh Tae-woo's party. The election of Kim Dae-jung in December 1997, following South Korea's bail-out by the International Monetary Fund, marked yet another distinct step forward. But his administration, like those of his predecessors, was plagued by high-level corruption, and both his age (72 at the time he was elected) and, in an odd way, his long history of dissent and opposition still tied him to the past.
The election of Roh Moo-hyun, aged 56, represents a generational shift, giving South Korean democracy another lift. All the three political leaders who have ruled the country during the past 15 years were already established political figures back in 1987, and over the past decade the electorate has become bored with that older generation. Now South Korea is at last governed by a new man, breathing fresh air into politics, tapping new, younger supporters, bringing an array of outsiders into government, and getting his message across in all sorts of unusual and refreshing ways.
Fanfare for a simple man
That Mr Roh is a new sort of politician was evident during the campaign, which he won by a thin margin, with a sharp division along generational lines. He put himself across as a principled man for ordinary people, successfully labelling his opponent, Lee Hoi-chang, as an unprincipled defender of conservative elites. Mr Roh came from a modest background and passed the bar exam without going to university. He likes to compare himself with Abraham Lincoln, another self-educated lawyer with humble origins. Having built up a successful tax-law practice, Mr Roh gave it up along with his yacht-club membership and started to specialise in human-rights and labour law. Throughout the 1980s, he snapped at the heels of South Korea's authoritarian regime. By contrast, Mr Lee, 11 years older than Mr Roh and a member of the conservative Grand National Party (GNP), had got his law degree from Seoul's prestigious National University and had served as prime minister in the mid-1990s. Compared with Mr Roh, he was an establishment figure through and through.
While pitching for the presidency, Mr Roh used every prop he could lay his hands on to exploit these personal differences. He cradled a pig to promote a piggy-bank scheme for raising campaign funds from small donors. He played the guitar. He made well-publicised use of the internet, and cried on television. By comparison, Mr Lee seemed hopelessly stuffy and out of touch. On a visit to a farmers' market during the election campaign, he seemed unsure how to buy a cucumber.
But how good will the down-to-earth Mr Roh be at running South Korea? This survey will argue that the economic programme Mr Roh has launched is likely to be good for Korean capitalism in the long term, making it more stable, more efficient, more popular and more capable of generating growth. The survey will be less sanguine about the long-term future of South Korea's alliance with America, but slightly more hopeful that the Roh and Bush administrations can agree on how to deal with North Korea over the next few weeks and months.
The country's underlying economic strengths are already impressive. It developed rapidly into an advanced industrial economy by cashing in on globalisation. It boasts a highly skilled, technologically savvy workforce. Successive reform drives—prompted first by its push to join the OECD in 1996, and then by Asia's economic collapse in 1997-98—have opened it up further still. More recent achievements include the slimming down of the chaebol, vast improvements in the banking system and the development of a bustling information-technology sector.
A number of systemic weaknesses, however, still hold the economy back. The overly rigid education system stresses rote learning over a more creative approach, which not only frustrates many young Koreans but also makes it harder for the country to shift towards new forms of knowledge-based growth. The labour market and the trade unions remain inflexible, and many well-educated workers are either underemployed or insecure in their jobs. The chaebol may have shaped up their operations but they remain unaccountable to outside shareholders, whom they often swindle by manipulating their subsidiaries' finances.
Some of these problems, especially those involving the chaebol, do not hinge so much on issues of right versus left or, in South Korean political parlance, progressive versus conservative, but rather on the country's approach towards the rule of law. Mr Roh has talked consistently about the need to make the application of the law more thorough and less arbitrary, especially for the rich and powerful. If he delivers on this pledge, South Korea's business sector—and investors' faith in it—should benefit. The shortcomings of the education system also appear to be in Mr Roh's sights. Improving South Korea's labour markets will be trickier, especially given the support Mr Roh has received from trade unions in the past.
Yankee go home, but not yet
The other long-term challenge facing South Korea is more daunting: maintaining its own—and by implication the region's—security. There are two threats here. The first is the clear, present and perennial danger posed by North Korea, which is once again openly toying with the idea of going nuclear. The second, partly related but in many ways distinct, stems from South Korea's steadily worsening relations with the United States.
Even if the North Korean threat recedes, the American alliance is likely to remain crucial for decades to come. East Asia lacks institutions such as the European Union or NATO through which China, Japan, Russia and the Koreas might work out a safe and stable co-existence. Historical mistrust among these countries will be difficult to overcome. Toss in China's and Russia's nuclear weapons, and the need to keep America around becomes even more apparent. That will become much harder, though, if the two Koreas ever resolve their mutual differences. Many young Koreans do not accept that South Korea, or a united Korea, would continue to benefit from an alliance with America. According to Lee Chung-min, a professor at Seoul's Yonsei University, “national sentiment is colliding head on with the national interest.”
Some of the South Korean hostility towards the United States reflects the current global wave of anti-Americanism, but a number of local factors exacerbate it. First, America's long-standing presence in South Korea, and its willingness to underwrite the country's security under the authoritarian regime of the past, has led many young Koreans to see the United States as part of a system they are railing against. Second, during the cold war the warnings about the northern menace became so intertwined with domestic repression that, once the authoritarian order receded, many in the South started to indulge in wishful thinking about the North and became reluctant to view it as a potential attacker. Democratisation coincided with a renewed interest in traditional Korean values. Rather than attributing their new-found liberties to international pressure on the old regime, many young people looked to uniquely Korean explanations, in a process that an Australian history writer, Adrian Buzo, has labelled “the closing of the Korean mind”.
Third, there has been a dramatic shift in the nature of the stand-off with the North. The underpinnings of the conflict have shifted from the cold war to the war on terror. And many South Koreans view terrorism as America's problem, even if some of them hesitate to say so. So whereas the United States is alarmed by the prospect of North Korea selling weapons of mass destruction, many South Koreans would rather look the other way to avoid provoking their northern neighbour.
Since taking office, Mr Roh has publicly said that his country needs America as an ally. America, for its part, has been paying attention to his country's anti-American protests in recent months. But both countries will have to show much more willingness to compromise if they are to patch up their alliance. The new Korean president's popularity with young voters might help him to mediate between national sentiment and national interest if he wishes, but it will be a difficult balancing act. Meanwhile, he has plenty of things to worry about at home.