Korean Democracy

One of my favourite writers on Korea Bruce Cumings (pictured) suggested that even though South Korea had attained "procedural democracy", it had not yet achieved "substantive democracy."

This meant that its people had attained "the forms of democratic participation", but not "the reality of daily participation in decisions affecting their lives." (Counting the Blessings of Democratic Politics, in Insight Into Korea, Herald Media 2007)

Even so, Cumings concurred that the problem is not unique to Korea, as "the system of American democracy and American justice tells you that if you follow electoral court procedure, the outcome will be democracy and justice."

"In fact the outcome can be an unelected president who gets into the Oval Office through the 18th century elitist device of an electoral college, or representatives who, judging by their own performance on television, are not qualified to run the country."

Cumings said that one of the most important achievements to have come out of the country's democratization in 1987 "was to open the way to the grandest Korean value, the reunification of the peninsula."

He argued that as long as dictators ruled, unification was impossible, adding that no South Korean leader before 1987 imagined unification other than the extension of the southern system to the north, which would invariably lead to the second Korean War.

"Moreover, as long as the dictators were in power, North Korea was under no pressure to democratize, and gained legitimacy from its history of anti-Japanese struggle, whereas all the southern regimes until the 1990s were full of people who had collaborated or cooperated with imperial Japan (or their sons and daughters)."

"By inaugurating a long period of reconciliation, peaceful coexistence, economic exchange and people-to-people contacts, Kim Dae-jung set in motion the only strategy that might actually change, open, and eventually democratize the North, if slowly."

Yes, we hope the "if slowly" part will materialize. And not at a sudden and destabilizing pace.