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Session 133: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Development, Democracy, and Citizenship in Korea

Jung-Sun Park, California State University, Dominguez Hills

The increasing transnational trends have changed the existing political, territorial, and cultural boundaries, thereby challenging the sovereignty of nation-states. Although the ways of dealing with this challenge differ, the issue of redemarcating boundaries is a critical agenda in the local politics of most nation-states. Based on South Korea’s changing notion of citizenship, this paper explores the current boundary-making and community-building processes in South Korea and their implications. Recently, the South Korean government proposed special laws for overseas Koreans, which virtually allow them to have dual citizenship. According to the proposed laws, select overseas Koreans (basically Korean-Americans and non-chongryon Koreans in Japan) will have all the rights of South Korean citizens, yet they will be exempt from certain duties such as military service. There are many ramifications of these laws, but I will focus on the following three aspects: first, how is a South Korean subject legally redefined and how is this going to affect South Koreans’ sense of identity and community? Second, how is the redefinition related to the South Korean government’s intention to construct a "deterritorialized nation-state"? Third, what kinds of legal, military and political tensions may arise between South Korea and its neighboring countries (including North Korea) if dual citizenship is granted?

Carl J. Saxer, University of Oxford

This paper will examine the democratic transition in South Korea that took place in 1987. First, I briefly evaluate different approaches to democratisation, and argue that the transition approach, with its emphasis on political choice and action, seems to be the most appropriate for the purpose of this paper. The theoretical discussion is then placed in a context of the South Korean situation at the time. I argue in the paper that democratisation in South Korea was the outcome of a political compromise, and not as has been claimed, a transition solely ‘forced’ through by a popular uprising. The student demonstrations and the increasing support they received from the middle class were very important, and together with international constraints and socio-economic development they certainly framed the choices available to the political elite both within and outside the government. However, it was the settlement negotiated by the ruling and opposition elites that created the institutional framework necessary for a democratic transition to commence. The paper argues that, precisely because of the elite settlement of 29 June, 1987 and the inability of the opposition to remain united, elements of the authoritarian regime were able to remain in power even under democratic rules. Finally, by analysing the settlement itself, the negotiations on a new constitution and the first presidential election held under the new constitution, I reach the conclusion that, what took place in South Korea was not a change in government from a ruling party to an opposition so often associated with democratic transition, but instead a ‘transplacement’ where the authoritarian government was able to control the transition process by compromising with the opposition.

Chulwoo Lee, Sungkyunkwan University

This study canvasses a particular aspect of the socio-legal landscape of southern Korea under Japanese rule, with special reference to Sunch’on County, South Cholla Province. First, it gives an overview of the constellation of legal rules relating to agrarian landlord-tenant relations under Japanese rule structured by the Ordinance on Civil Matters in Korea (Chosen minjirei) and the Japanese Civil Code. Second, it offers an account of the distribution of land and tenancy practices in Sunch’on County, and explains the background of the rural unrest that struck the area in the early 1920s. Third, it describes the ways in which landlords and tenants in the area mobilised legal and customary rules as resources in their struggles to maximise their interests in rural conflicts during the period 1920–34, and the means by which the governmental authorities intervened in tenancy disputes. This study is expected to fill a gap in colonial historiography, which has been caused by neglecting the civil-law side of the legal landscape in colonial Korea and the sway of the instrumental notion of law in looking at the use of law in the colonial situation, and to contribute to developing the processual perspective in social-scientific analysis of law.

David Ekbladh, Columbia University

The end of the Second World War brought partition to a Korean peninsula that had been a whole economic unit within the Japanese empire. In the southern half of Korea, occupied by the United States, there was considerable effort to establish a viable anti-Communist state. South Korea, seen as underdeveloped by the Americans because of what they considered Japanese imperial neglect, became a modernization project for the U.S. However, the program was fraught with the difficulties the separation of the industrial north from the predominantly agricultural south had wrought. American planners had to create a self-contained national economy where there had not been one before.

These goals were given added significance with the outbreak of international war in Korea in 1950. Through the United Nations, the United States launched a major reconstruction and rehabilitation program under the auspices of the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Program (UNKRA) that was to showcase multi-lateral non-Communist development. Projects sponsored by UNKRA and those independently supported by the U.S. deeply influenced Korean society in areas from housing to education to electrification. South Korea, throughout much of the 1950s, was the largest development project in the world. In American eyes, these programs were not only to rebuild Korea but to tie it to an emerging Eastern Asian regional system that served American Cold War aims. Activities in Korea were not a resounding success at the time, but nevertheless, similar practices were to serve as a model for the American attempt to build a viable state in South Vietnam.