From Authoritarianism to Democracy in Korea : 1979-97

Preface
Map of Korea
Figures and Tables
Acronyms
Transliteration

Part I _ Introduction

Chapter 1 _ Introduction
Chapter 2 _ The Setting: Structural Conditions and the Fifth Republic

Part II _ The Democratic Transition

Chapter 3 _ Liberalization and the Legislative Elections
Chapter 4 _ The Agenda Setting: Government and Opposition in the Protracted Struggle on the Constitution
Chapter 5 _ Grand Alliance, Mobilization, and Breakthrough to Regime-Initiated Transition
Chapter 6 _ Politics of Negotiated Constitution-Making
Chapter 7 _ The Divided Opposition and Presidential Election
Chapter 8 _ The Completion of Transition

Part III _ The Democratic Consolida
Chapter 9 _ The Military and Democratic Consolidation
Chapter 10 _ The Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation
Chapter 11 _ Presidents, Political Parties, and Assemblies
Chapter 12 _ Trials of the Past
Chapter 13 _ Conclusion

Appendix I. Details of Author’s Survey of Political Elite (ASPE)
Appendix II. List of Interviewees
Appendix III. Interview Questionnaire (in English)

Bibliography

Chapter 1

Introduction

1. Overview

Until 1987, observers questioned the chances for authoritarian South Korea to become democratic. The other half of this homogenous nation (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: DPRK) posing a constant and present threat, the South Korean state (Republic of Korea: ROK) is highly militarized and susceptible to an authoritarian pattern of governance. Indigenous political cultural aspects such as strong Neo-Confucianism, high centralism and factionalism were pointed as factors that would impede the development of democracy, originally imported from outside.1) Furthermore, the imperative of late industrialization to escape poverty and the necessity of strong leadership to achieve it both provided the political justifications of delaying full democracy.
The people of South Korea nevertheless strived to achieve democracy from time to time. The rigged national elections for president and vice president in 1960, conspired under the autocratic rule of president Syngman Rhee, was met with a massive popular protest and culminated in the April Revolution, which ended the semi-democratic First Republic (1948-60). The subsequent Second Republic lasted only 9 months; it was a fragile parliamentary cabinet system working under infant democracy conditions. The military coup of May 16, 1961 ended its brief existence. The Third Republic (1963-72), brought to existence by the military junta led by major general Park Chung Hee, was once again another semi-democratic system; the regime justified the breach of the constitution under the pretext of national security and development.
The Third Republic that introduced strong presidentialism and some modern forms of political parties with mass membership contributed not only to modernizing the society considerably but also to developing party politics. Nevertheless, president Park Chung Hee attempted to extend his rule by amending the constitutional limit on presidential tenure just as Syngman Rhee had attempted before. Facing mounting opposition, Park ultimately executed an autogolpe in 1972 to create a new straightforwardly authoritarian regime named Yushin system, or System for Revitalization, that institutionally enabled Park to be a permanent president and severely restrict political pluralism. The opposition, despite severe repression, did not stop challenging the dictatorship though. The Fourth Republic was eventually disintegrated in late 1979 as soon as president Park was assassinated by one of his closest confidants.
From this moment to May 1980, political actors as well as people in the street held a cautious optimism for a transition to democracy. Popular demand for democracy swept the streets of April and May. However, the Seoul Spring, dubbed in comparison to the Prague Spring of 1968, was abruptly ended by the successful brutal coup led by major general Chun Doo Hwan. The military junta quelled the opposition forces and established a new authoritarian regime, the Fifth Republic. In time, though, the opposition resurrected as soon as the regime began to implement some liberalization measures. Thanks to popular support, the opposition forces were ultimately able to form a grand alliance in 1987 to critically challenge the political course the government pursued. After weeks of remarkably intense street confrontations between opposition and government forces in June 1987, the authoritarian government surprised the nation by a wholehearted concession to the democratic opposition, and opened a path to the negotiated transition to democracy.
The democratic transition proceeded quickly and peacefully within a span of 10 months, from June 1987 to April 1988. Taking advantage of the opposition’s split, Roh Tae Woo, a former military general and co-builder of the Fifth Republic who was anointed as successor by the extricating dictator Chun Doo Hwan, was elected by popular vote as the new president of the democratic Sixth Republic. In the subsequent general elections, on the other hand, South Koreans chose to have the opposition parties hold control over the National Assembly. The opposition parties-dominated legislature led both the purge of authoritarian legacies and the building of democratic institutions. That situation continued by January 1990, when the government artificially gained a majority in the Assembly by merging its party with the second and third opposition parties.
The momentum for a total reform toward democracy came with the election of the next president, Kim Young Sam, an opposition-turned-government party leader. The widespread purge of authoritarian legacies, including the trials of former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, distinguished his five-year rule as well as installation of various democratic institutions. Democracy was finally consolidated in South Korea. The most conspicuous sign of it was the opposition party’s victory in the presidential election in December 1997, which had never been realized before.
By examining the period from 1979 to 1997, this study attempts to explain the causes for, and the distinctive path of, democratization in South Korea. As for the approach used in this study, I devote more attention to political actors and institutions rather than social movements or social structural change because I believe the former has a more direct influence on the final outcome of political change, which is contingent in nature. The next section of this introduction details the approach.

2. Approach

Analysts emphasizing structural factors in regime change believe that the likelihood of political change is embedded in the structure of the given system. “From this perspective, democracy is the political expression of the social order of modern industrial society.”(Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 20) In other words, socioeconomic preconditions determine the type of social class relations, which in turn determine the nature of the polity. Therefore, students of democracy building who followed this vein of thought have adopted a strategy to investigate social class relations. Barrington Moore produced the famous thesis of “no bourgeois, no democracy”(1966: 418) while Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, “no labor, no democracy”(1992). Drawing on the modernization paradigm (for example: Lerner 1958), some scholars, such as Lipset(1959; 1960), Diamond(1992) and Bollen and Jackman(1985), endeavored to quantitatively prove the correlation between socioeconomic preconditions themselves and the level of democracy. Aggregate data of wealth, education, industrialization, and urbanization were regressed on the level of democracy. The seminal sentence by Lipset, “The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”(1960: 31) was repeatedly proved by such series of statistical analyses.
There are merits of structural analysis. First, it is useful to explain long-term change of politics on a macro scale. That change of society leads to change of politics is undoubtedly true. Second, the emphasis by structural analysis on the relative power of institutional inertia over human behavior has an important implication. Structural analysis correctly assumes that “once constructed, institutional edifices have inertia - and social trends have momentum - that generally exceed human intent and control. It demonstrates that opportunities for political innovation are often constrained by the deadweight of inherited establishment.”(Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 22) However, an obvious insufficiency in explanations based on structural analysis comes from the fact that preconditions are not directly related to occurrences in real political process, and that short-term preconditions are not observed to affect the course of political actions. Between structure and specific process, therefore, something should exist to connect each other.
Elite-oriented approaches value perceptions, decisions, and behaviors of individual political agents. The analysts in favor of this approach see democratization as a contingent outcome from a generic process (Rustow, 1970) led by humans, regardless of, or only partially affected by, parameters of structure of the given society. Strategic choice and rationality by individuals or methodological individuals(Przeworski, 1991) are given emphasis. Democracy is crafted by humans.(Linz, 1990 ; Di Palma, 1990) Human transaction to craft democracy gains prominence.(Share, 1987) The influential volumes of Transition from Authoritarian Rules edited by O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986) contained many valuable contributions in this regard. This model assumes that an action by one side or one agent provokes related actions from the other side or agent, a process that repeats back and forth. The success of such a process hinges on how much political crafting is possible.(Di Palma, 1990) As Higley and Gunther(1992) argued, such a crafting in turn may depend on the extent of elite coalescence that makes bargaining and negotiation easy.
The advantage of elite oriented approach lies, among others, in its overcoming of the deterministic characteristic of the structure-oriented approach. This contingency-based approach liberates the possibility that democratic transition will produce innovative outcomes that are unrelated to habits and routines inherited from the system’s past. This merit is maximized when one focuses only on the dynamics of highly uncertain transition process, leaving aside the whole process of democratization, beginning from liberalization and ending with consolidation, both of which that tend to be still much influenced by structural conditions. Nevertheless, the weakness of such an approach is obviously found in its excessive voluntarism. (Karl, 1990: 6) At its extreme, contingency without direction rules over highly uncertain process of regime transition.(Levine, 1988) However, the regime transition process is never purely random but displays some regularities if one adds cases by cases. And such regularities are traceable to the context in which actors interact with each other. To use Bratton and van de Walle’s words, “Ironically, therefore, a contingency theory can gain analytic purpose only when placed on some kind of structural scaffolding that imparts a motif to political action.”(1997: 26)
Thus, an integrative approach that combines structural and elite-oriented analyses seems desirable for a monograph-type study of democratization.2) The approach I take to that end is a model of embedded interactions between structure and elite as agent. In this model, structure is understood as props that condition, constrain, and induce perception, decision, and behaviors of the agents (elites) who have a limited degree of freedom. Here in my thesis, the term, “structure,” does not mean only a socioeconomic configuration but includes the historically inherited conditions (such as the division of nation and the characteristics of the socioeconomic development) as well as a set of political institutions formed at historical junctures. In the case of the South Korean democratization, they structured the entire process of democratization, overarched elite transactions, and produced the results.
My approach, therefore, may be called a variant of “historical institutionalism,”3) or structural contingency model proposed by Terry Karl (1990).4) Central to Karl’s argument is that the structural conditions - including geopolitical position, socioeconomic development, and type of political institutions already present - play a significant role in constraining elite interactions. In Karl’s own word,

This is not to argue that individual decisions made at particular points in time or all observable political outcomes can be specifically and neatly linked to preexisting structures, but it is claimed that historically created structures, while not determining which one of a limited set of alternatives political actors may choose, are “confining conditions” that restrict or in some cases enhance the choices available to them. In other words, structural and institutional constraints determine the range of options available to decision makers and may even predispose them to choose a specific option. (1990: 7)

In examining the South Korean democratization, Kil-Hyon Yang (1995) makes an excellent contribution in this direction. Whereas other works on South Korea emphasized either structure (Robinson, ed. 1991; Seong, 1993; Scalapino, 1993; Sang-Jin Han, 1995; Cumings, 1989; Huntington, 1991), strategic choice (Im, 1989), political culture (Cotton 1989), or juxtaposition of those three factors (Sung-Joo Han, 1989a), Yang parsimoniously presented a case of elite choices bounded by structured contingencies at each critical juncture from 1985 to 1987. What is not sufficient in Yang’s work is both empirical depth and rigorous research on the relationships between those structured contingency and structure on the one hand and on the question of how those structured contingency actually affected the elite interactions. This study is to develop, extend, and enrich what Yang has pioneered to achieve, and by so doing complete a monograph that explains the whole venture of the democratization in a longer time span: from 1979 to 1997.
As for the empirical methodology, I have not only utilized documentary evidences but also a set of survey data (dubbed Author’s Survey of Political Elites: ASPE) from the 61 top political elites of the important time period. When I conducted the face-to-face interview with them, I also collected valuable qualitative data too. In addition, I interviewed several other elites of importance, including president Chun Doo Hwan. The interviews and survey were planned and executed by myself in 1996 and 1998. The details are provided in the Appendices.

This book has come out of my Ph.D. dissertation titled “From Authoritarianism to Consolidated Democracy in South Korea” completed at Yale University in December 2000. Ever since my graduation from Yale, I have repeatedly tried to get the chance to revise and publish it into a monograph like this, all in vain so far. My life as political science professor back in Korea has been so busy. Time flies indeed. Last year when I fortunately received financial support for publication from Chonnam National University which I am working for, I saw it the last opportunity for me to turn the rich contents of my dissertation into a book, so that they can be easily shared by both my colleagues and students of Korean Politics and Comparative Politics.
This size of research and writing would not have been possible without help from so many people, too many to mention here. But, I should record two, the most important. Without Juan J. Linz, this work cannot be born at all. He has masterminded this project, guided and prodded me to finish it. And I confess it is my wife, Hyang-In Cho Chung who has changed my life from a movement activist to a reformist student of democracy, and continues to strengthen me to complete this sort of daunting task.
Finally, I have to add that the following parts of this book have already been published as journal papers. I am grateful for the cited journals to permit me to republish the contents here.

- Various Parts of Chapter 9: 2001. “Taming the Military to Consolidate Democracy: The South Korean Experience.” Pacific Focus. 16:1. 117-148.
- Chapter 6: 2004. “The Politics of Constitution-Making During the 1987 Democratic Transition in South Korea.” Korea Observer. 35:2. 171-206.
- Chapter 12: 2006. “’Trials of the Century’ in Korea (1995-1997).” Korea Observer. 37:4. 565-604.
- Section 3 of Chapter 7: 2012. “A study of the founding Korean national assembly elections (1988): strategic choices and constraining conditions.” Taihan Chongchi Hakhoebo (Korean Journal of Political Science). 19: 3. 193-222.

Jung-Kwan Cho