Plus ça Change? South Korea’s Democratization and the Politics of the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the division of the Korean peninsula and domestic political contestation in South Korea after democratization. Even though mainstream analysis has tended to place the blame for the persistence of the division system squarely on the North’s provocations, this chapter suggests that a comprehensive understanding of the vicissitudes of inter-Korean relations requires analysis of how the South’s policymaking toward the North reflects post-war domestic political contestation and how South Korea’s administrations have differed in how they treat the nexus between inter-Korean policy and national development goals. As I argue, national division and the broader context of the Cold War led to the rise of a conservative historical bloc which oversaw South Korea’s process of catch-up industrialization under the auspices of an authoritarian developmental state allied to the US. Following the democratic transition, however, the emerging liberal-progressive camp sought to challenge the ideological underpinnings of the conservative historical bloc through establishing a new framework for inter-Korean relations in the form of the Sunshine Policy. As such, North Korea policy quickly became an intense issue of confrontation between the conservative and liberal/left camps. More recently, Park Geun-hye’s Trustpolitik represents the (re)subordination of the goal of improved relations with the North to domestic political considerations. As such, the relationship of democracy to inter-Korean relations is in a double bind, with negative implications for the quality of democracy in South Korea. It is highly questionable to what degree liberal democracy can properly function in South Korea in a state of continued national division. At the same time, however, domestic political competition means that the national division is becoming ever more intractable.

An earlier version of this chapter was published in the journal North Korean Review (Spring 2016), under the title of “Between Politics and Economics in Seoul’s North Korea Policy.”