democratization in south korea and inter-korean relations

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Democratization in South Korea and Inter-Korean Relations Author(s): Chien-peng Chung Source: Pacific Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 9-35Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British ColumbiaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40023987Accessed: 13-09-2015 19:37 UTC

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Democratization in South Korea and Inter-Korean Relations

Chien-peng Chung

Introduction

The purpose of this discussion is to highlight a central element that is often overlooked in studies on South Korea's policies toward North Korea: the profound effect on inter-Korean ties brought about by the political evolution of Seoul in the last 16 years from authoritarianism to democracy. South Korea crossed the threshold of democracy in 1987, when it held its first freely contested presidential election, although it was only in 1997 that a leader of an opposition party captured the presidency. This essay also wishes to address the thesis of whether democratization makes a country more likely to engage in an inter-state war.1

South Korea's Democratic Transition

Political liberalization in South Korea in the mid-1980s was not prompted by a fatal split between hard-liners and soft-liners within the power elite. If it were, reformers would have allied with moderate factions in civil society to attack the conservative forces within the state to effect a negotiated or "pacted" transition from authoritarian rule.2 Instead, the main impetus came from the authoritarian regime's overconfidence in, and miscalculation about legitimacy and stability,3 which induced the leadership to allow political openings that led to the unintended and unexpected consequences of rejuvenating and remobilizing a traditionally active civil society. Economic development, often considered an important though insufficient condition

1 This argument is the basis of the article by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, "Democ 2ratization and the Danger of War," International Security, Vol. 20, No.l (Summer 1995).

2 For an extended discussion of "pacted" transition, see Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and Lawrence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Adam Przeworski, "Problems in the Study of Transition to Democracy," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospect for Democracy, ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and Lawrence Whitehead (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 47-63.

3 Hyug-Baeg Im, The state, the market, and democracy: Democratic transition in South Korea and theories of political economy (Seoul: Nanam, 1994), pp. 269-71; and Kyong Ryung Song, "Social Origins of South Korean democratization: A social movement approach," in New currents in South Korean politics and society, ed. Institute for Far Eastern Studies (Seoul: Nanam, 1994), pp. 110-5.

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Pacific Affairs: Volume 16, No. 1 - Spring 2003

for democratization, created an articulate and prosperous middle class that demanded more political rights.4 In South Korea, by the mid-1980s, a quarter century of economic growth had increased the size of both the middle-income group and the wage-earning labour force,5 who were politically conscious, resentful of the government's influence over their lives and businesses, and assertive about their rights. Economic advances also positioned South Korea ahead of North Korea in terms of defense capabilities. In the minds of many Koreans, this change greatly reduced the possibility of a North Korean invasion, and accordingly raised questions about the government's frequent use of national security arguments for preserving societal peace, and to justify coups and repressive measures against civil liberties and popular political participation.6

In the presidential election of December 1987, which defined the country's transition to democracy, students, intellectuals, human rights and labour rights activists, clergymen, professionals and other civic groups supported two leading opposition candidates, Kim \bung Sam and Kim Dae jung, against the government candidate, Roh Tae-woo, but because the opposition vote was split, the ruling party secured a slim victory. However, even with the victory of Kim Young Sam in the 1992 presidential election, many in the urban poor, new-middle and working classes tended to be suspicious of the commitment of the old-middle and upper-middle classes to the defense of democracy and social justice.7 Activists from the first three classes thus hoped to guard against a potential return to authoritarian rule by arguing for engagement with Pyongyang, thinking this would reduce the ability of the state to use North Korea as a threat with which to manipulate public fear and perception. The election of Kim Dae-jung as president in December 1997 bolstered the confidence of those in political circles and civil society

4 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man - The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1960), chapter 2. Lipset finds a strong co-relation between economic and political development, but other theorists like Samuel Huntington caution that countries "do not automatically become democratic when they reach a certain level of material well-being . . . Institutional and political factors constitute a second influence on the process of democratization." See Samuel P. Huntington, "Foreword," in Political Change in Taiwan, eds. Tun-jen Cheng and Stephan Haggard (Boulder CO:Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. x.

5 Surveys in the mid-1980s showed that more than 70 percent of South Koreans identified themselves as members of the "middle class," while the wage-earning labour force included 49.5 percent of the total population. See Chung-si Ahn, "Economic Dimensions of Democratization in South Korea," in Democratization in Southeast and East Asia, ed. Anek Laothamatas (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1997), p. 246.

6 Sung-joo Han and Oknim Chung, "South Korea: Economic Management and Democratization," in Driven By Growth - Political Change in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. James W. Morley (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 216.

i A snapshot of the political behaviour, self-conceptions, views on democracy, support for social movements and ideas about society of the Korean middle class is provided in the results of a national survey conducted in 1992 by Kyong-Dong Kim. See Kyong-Dong Kim, " Social Attitudes and Political Orientations of the Korean Middle Class," in East Asian Middle Classes in Comparative Perspective, ed. Hsing-Huang Michael Hsiao (Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1999), pp. 243-56.

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who wanted to put out peace feelers to the North, but also augmented the suspicion of many in South Korea's government and security apparatus who were raised to regard North Korea as an implacable foe. Unsurprisingly, then, although relations with the North are on the whole less tense than they used to be, they have become more erratic, depending on who is in charge of democratized South Korea and its relations with the North at the moment.

Foreign policy making in post-change societies

Although the easing of tensions between the socialist and capitalist blocs in the late 1980s provided the external context in which the foreign and reunification policies of South Korea were carried out, foreign policy making in transitional democracies follow their own processes and dynamics. Hence it is necessary to clarify the relationship between alterations in regime type and foreign policy changes, especially the influence of the former on the latter. As explained by Tong Whun Park, Dae-Won Ko and Kyu-Ryoon Kim, democratization changes the power relations between state and society, the regime's political interests and security perceptions, and the country's legitimizing ideology and value systems, all of which in turn alter foreign policy decision-making structures and processes.8 This essay attempts to illustrate this argument by Park, Ko and Kim, by tracing the effect of democratization on changes to the foreign policy behaviour of South Korea towards North Korea. Unlike in the days of authoritarianism, foreign policy making could no longer be any of the following: de-politicized on the grounds of economic efficiency or military security; dominated by a single leader in a highly personalized fashion with limited input from intelligence agencies and the leader's own secretarial staff; or accorded top priority as a quest by the regime to seek out ideological friends or enemies to buttress its own insecure domestic moorings.9 Making foreign affairs decisions in the open, especially in times of change to long-standing international political and economic relationships, turned inter-Korean interaction into a more salient topic of public debate than it would otherwise be. This is particularly true for South Korea in a situation of reduced state autonomy vis-a-vis society, with the rise of social forces that could make their impact felt in the creation or revision of policies. [In the long term, democracy in Northeast Asia may very well bring about a more peaceful world. This accords with the democratic peace theory, which, in its crudest form, says that democracies do not fight

8 Tong Whan Park, Dae-Won Ko and Kyu-Ryoon Kim, "Democratization and Foreign Policy Change in the East Asian NICs," in Foreign Policy Restructuring - How Governments Respond to Global Change, ed. Jerel A. Rosati, Joe D. Hagan and Martin W. Sampson III (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 170-4.

9 Park et al., "Democratization and Foreign Policy Change in the East Asian NICS," pp. 169-70.

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each other.10 In the short term, however, making governments more accountable to interest groups and public opinion introduces new complications, uncertainties and limits to the practice of diplomacy. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have argued that democratizing states tend to be belligerent or war-prone, because members of both old and new elites often resort to nationalist/ideological appeals to mobilize the masses to help defend their threatened positions and to stake out new ones. They have then realized that the masses, once mobilized, are difficult to control.11 Elites exploit their power in the imperfect institutions of incomplete democracies to create fait accomplis, control political agendas and shape media content in ways that promote belligerent pressure-group lobbies or surges of militancy in the populace.12 While this essay draws on transitional South Korea as a case study to illustrate that democratization has a definite impact on foreign policy, it also shows that this impact may actually favour policies that reduce international tension, rather than exacerbate it, as posited by Mansfield and Snyder. This essay submits that whether a democratizing state will want to court conflict with another state does not depend only on the elite's efforts to shore up its legitimacy by playing the nationalist/ideological card (according to Mansfield and Snyder, this is the main mechanism through which democratization causes war) . Rather, it also depends on what exactly these nationalist/ideological positions represent, as they are articulated by the democratizing elite. This elite finds consonance with its mass constituents. The external policies of a democratizing state will become more cooperative if the elite promotes the pacific preferences of newly empowered constituencies. On the other hand, if the elite advocates the intransigently nationalistic or ideological views of politicized mass groups, these policies are likely to become more confrontational.

Before the followers of the two main pro-democracy figures, Kim Young Sam and Kim Daejung, joined forces in 1985 to form a sizeable opposition bloc in the National Assembly, political competition in South Korea was dominated by small and ineffective right-wing and centre-right groups which were sanctioned by the regime when they were not banned outright. The activities of civic groups that pressed for democracy, social justice and human rights were tightly restricted by the government, and class-based politics and the advocacy of detente with North Korea were strictly proscribed. Since then, participation by supposed "leftist" or "progressive" forces in the political process of South Korea has legitimized and popularized the hitherto

10 For a comprehensive review of the "democratic peace theory" literature, especially of its core proposition that democracies do not fight each other, see James Lee Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Rudolph J. Rummel, Power Kills (Newark, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), pp. 103-15; and Spencer Weart, Never at War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

1 1 Edward D. Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, "Democratization and the Danger of War, " International Security, Vol. 20, No.l (Summer 1995), p. 7.

12 Mansfield et al., "Democratization," p. 7.

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suppressed or muted calls for better relations with North Korea. Furthermore, intellectual, student and labour groups of social-democratic or socialistic orientations have always been seen by the public as the embodiment of the traditional spirit of South Korean pacifism and nationalism. Their political inclusion and the consequent competition among the political elites to win over their votes have led to the adoption of a more accommodating stance by Seoul toward the North. In democratized South Korea, as we shall see, Presidents Roh Tae-woo, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae^jung each pursued rather different strategies in hoping to engage North Korea and defuse tension on the Korean peninsula, not so much because public opinion on inter-Korean relations was radically divided, but rather because of the leaders' different political histories and support coalitions.

In addressing a related suggestion by Mansfield and Snyder that democratic peace may collapse in transitional states because one of its preconditions - stable, functioning institutions - is absent,13 it bears pointing out that South Korea already had rather well-developed state bureaucracies and representative institutions, which made the democratization process there a lot less chaotic than in many countries with similar settings. It also meant, arguably, that South Korean politicians needed to rely much less on reckless nationalistic or ideological appeals to the masses in order to establish or maintain their authority.

Sources of Change in Inter-Korean Relations

Since the promulgation of the Sixth Republic, with the inauguration of the Roh Tae Woo presidency in February 1988, South Korean democracy has met the criteria of a procedural democracy, as described by Joseph A. Schumpeter, or a polyarchy, as specified by Robert A. Dahl and other scholars: to wit, a political regime practicing free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, multiparty competition, civil liberties and a free press.14 However, many South Koreans aspire to a definition of democracy that is more comprehensive. They would subscribe to C. B. Macpherson's ideal of substantive justice, which posits that a truly democratic system must encourage

13 Mansfield et al., "Democratization," p. 22. 14 Robert A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942);

Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); Larry Diamond, "Consolidating democracy in the Americas," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 550 (March 1997): pp. 12-41. Samuel P. Huntington similarly defines a political entity as a democracy, "to the extent that its most powerful collective decision-makers are selected through periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes, and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote." An operational definition of the term "democracy," therefore, will require the presence of the regime and opposition forces in a society which is governed by the institutional rules and mechanisms for a peaceful and orderly transfer of political power via a process of elections. See Samuel P. Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 99 (1984), p.194.

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the full development of human capacities in all people, not just a few privileged ones, and that democracy must become the political means for the redress of human inequality, especially unequal economic distribution.15 They believe that, without economic democracy, political equality is mostly meaningless.

This belief is borne out in a pioneer nation-wide survey conducted in 1989, which found that the most popular definition of democracy to South Koreans, as subscribed to by fully one-third of the interviewees, was one of "equal opportunities," which can be interpreted as a society with fewer inborn privileges and less economic or political corruption.16 Three-quarters of the respondents wanted to see a "welfare state democracy" developed in South Korea, a cause championed at that time by the major opposition party headed by Kim Daejung.17 Seventy percent of the respondents accepted that the political influence of the US in South Korea constitutes a hindrance for democracy, as Americans are widely perceived to be supporters of the military dictatorships of the past.18

As Hyug Baeg Im pointed out, South Korea's political battleground has shifted from a "war of movement" - to replace authoritarianism with a democratically elected government - to a more drawn-out "war of position" - to construct accountable representative institutions and a sound civil society.19 The young, those on the ideological left, and people from the provinces of North and South Cholla who feel a sense of dis-empowerment with the old system which had favored the elite from the Taegu-Kyongsang region since 1961 support a national legislature that is more responsive to the electorate and more powerful vis-a-vis the presidency.20 Many would also like to reform South Korea's political parties, which still lack concrete organizational structures and specific programmes of action, and exist primarily to serve as platforms for their leaders, who operate regional political machines and more often than not have to fend off charges of corruption.

This is not the place to go into detail about institutional reform of the South Korean political system, or the development of civil society in general. However, it bears mentioning that forces on the left half of the political spectrum have always tied the realization of substantive democracy to the eradication of the vestiges of authoritarianism in the political, economic

15 C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 3-8, 78-96.

16 Geir Helgenen, Democracy And Authority in Korea - The Cultural Dimension in Korean Politics (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998), p. 73.

17 Helgenen, Democracy, p. 83. 18 Helgenen, Democracy, p. 86. 19 Hyug Baeg Im, "South Korean Democratic Consolidation in Comparative Perspective," in

Larry Diamond and Byung-kook Kim, ed., Consolidating Democracy in South Korea (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2000) p. 21.

20 Doh C. Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),p.l53.

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and social fabric of South Korean lives. These vestiges stem from the uneasy relationship with North Korea, the presence of American soldiers in South Korea, and the retention of the National Security Law, that still technically bans any praises of the North or criticisms of the US. In this reasoning, if relations with the North do not improve or indeed worsen, the US military, widely perceived as the most prominent backer of South Korea's past dictatorships, would have every reason to stay. This would provide fertile ground for the latent authoritarian tendencies of South Koreans to again manifest themselves, with the potential to stop or even reverse the achievements made so far on the democratization front. In order for the political left - which was given a voice after the democratic opening in 1987 - to realize its goal of protecting and reinforcing democracy, it will need a breakthrough in relations with the North.

South Korean civil society developed in reaction to the authoritarian rules at the national level. In such a context, it is natural for civic organizations to direct their activities to the democratization of national politics, either directly or indirectly. In the 1980s, Korean students, workers and youths brought into the public space an autonomous configuration of political and social protests through the mediation of minjung (people's) ideology and praxis,21 which is an eclectic blend of nationalism, neo-Marxism, left Catholic liberation theology, anti-dependency economic views, anti-nuclear and peace slogans, and national reunification demands, manifested in the form of militant mass action and civil disobedience aimed at overturning the American-supported military dictatorship.22 In 1987, minjung activists founded the prominent left-wing newspaper Hankyoreh Sinmun, an outstanding advocate of rapprochement with the North.

Examples of radical movements and organizations involved in promoting inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation that came into being with the resurrection of civil society after June 29, 1987 included the National Association for Democracy and National Reunification, the Korean Federation of Student Associations, the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice, and the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy.23 "Un- authorized" or "underground" trade unions, organized by labour activists seeking a more equitable share in the nation's economic growth and more rights for workers, had already made their appearance during the Chun Doo Hwan years. Seeing that their demand for democratization was finally bringing about changes, left-leaning and ultra-nationalist groups, including "progressive" umbrella labour groups like the Korean Confederation of Trade

21 Bruce Cummings, "Democracy and Civil Society in Korea," in James F. Hollifield and Calvin Jillson, eds., Pathways to Democracy: The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 143.

22 John Kie-chang Oh, Korean Politics. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.88. 23 See Dae-Yup Cho, A Study of Social Movements and Typological Changes in Movement Organizations

in Korea from 1987 to 1994, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Korea University, 1995.

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Unions, began to shift their attention to the issue of national unification, hoping also to use it as a moral compass to redirect or refocus the awareness and energy of the fracturing labour unions and civic groups with their ever- narrowing agenda. Members of the dissident intelligentsia and autonomous unions who led protests and strikes to raise a moral critique of the established order in South Korea continued well into the Kim Young Sam presidency, and some of the dissidents even embraced the juche (self-reliance) ideology of North Korea's Kim II Sung in a show of political protest and ideological defiance.24

In elections for the presidency and National Assembly since 1987, the political parties headed by the most "radical" or "populist" of South Korean political leaders, Kim Dae-jung, architect of the "Sunshine Policy" of rapprochement toward North Korea, consistently received between one- quarter to two-fifths of the popular vote, certainly a substantial minority. It seems that the regional factor is not only very salient to South Korean domestic politics; it also colours people's perception toward the North. Respondents from the Cholla region were more likely to respond favourably to a recent survey asking whether they trusted the North Korean government than were residents from outside of the region.25 Moreover, South Koreans who favour the North Korean government are found to be more likely to support NGOs and rely on NGO leaders, but are also likely to distrust government, political parties, the military, police, the courts, banks and industrial corporations.26 Obviously, NGOs and their leaders are perceived to be more pro-North Korea and "progressive" than the power holders in state, party and quasi-governmental institutions.

The endorsement of democratic institutions by South Koreans is more often than not accompanied by a choice of authoritarian solutions. Despite the advent of political competition in the central and local governments and the expansion of space for civil society, the informal practices of politicians exchanging favours, the authoritarian social and cultural norms, and the influence of the oligarchic chaebol (financial conglomerates) on the government have remained largely intact. The exclusion of labour from the governing coalition and the suppression of the non-violent left under the National Security Law continued until the Kim Dae-jung presidency. Even as late as 1997, Doh Chull Shin found that, among democrats who supported

24 On the ideological trends of South Korea's dissident intellectual movements after 1980, see Cho Hui Yeon, "Sahwae gusongche nonjaengui bansongkwa gusipnyondae nonjaengui chulbaljom" (A critical review of ideological polemics on the constitution of society and a new beginning of debates for the 1990s), Gil (December 1992), p. 187.

25 Chae-han Kim, "Who in South Korea Trust North Korea and Who Trust the United States?" The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Vol.XIV, No. 2, Fall 2002, p. 135. The survey data used here is conducted by Gallup Korea from June 22 through July 4, 2001, on 1002 randomly sampled South Korean adults interviewed face-to-face.

26 Kim, "Who in South Korea Trust," pp. 137-8.

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the electoral institutions of representative democracy, those who refused to reject authoritarian methods outnumbered those who did reject them by a margin of five to one.27 According to the Korean Democracy Barometer public-opinion survey of 1999,28 although nine out of ten Koreans are somewhat favourably inclined "in principle" to the idea of democracy,29 the public exhibits a residual preference for authoritarian non-democratic principles, akin to the portrait of traditional "Confucian" or "Asian" values. Only slightly more than half the Korean public considers democracy to always be the best form of government,30 and if the choice is either economic security or democracy, democracy fares even less well. Forty-five percent chose "rule by a dictator like Park Chung Hee" rather than a "democratically elected president" as the "best way to sort out the economic problems facing the country."31 It is among this group of "authoritarian democrats," who distrust North Korea and support the US forces' presence in South Korea, that critics of the "Sunshine Policy" are largely found.

The Impact of Democratization in South Korea on Inter-Korean Relations

Inter-Korean Relations Before Democratization

The Republic of Korea, or South Korea, was established in Seoul on August 15, 1948, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea, was proclaimed in Pyongyang on September 8, 1948. Throughout the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, and until the_end of the First Republic in 1960, the official unification policy of the South under President Syngman Rhee (Yi Sung Man) was pukchin t'ongil ("march north for unification"), with no compromises to the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea as the government of all Korea.32 The North Koreans' initial proposal for unification was that foreign troops first be withdrawn from South Korea, after which elections would be held throughout Korea to establish an equal number of representatives from both sides, who would attend a national conference to work out a unified administration.33 Subsequently, North Korean President Kim Il-sung suggested the formation of a Confederal Republic of Koryo, which would preserve the separate political systems and diplomatic standings

27 Doh Chull Shin, "Evolution of Popular Support for Democracy," in Larry Diamond and Doh Chull Shin, eds., Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in Korea (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999), pp. 246-7.

28 The Korean Democracy Barometer was launched in 1988. Since then, eight nation-wide sample surveys of the South Korean population have been conducted, focusing on the breadth, depth, duration, durability and stability of mass support for, and involvement in, democratic politics.

29 Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond and Doh Chull Shin, "Halting Progress in Korea and Taiwan," in Journal of Democracy 12 (January 2001), p. 127.

30 Chu et al., "Halting Progress," p. 124. 31 Chu et al., "Halting Progress," p.127. 32 Donald Stone Macdonald and Donald N. Clark, The Koreans - Contemporary Politics and Society,

3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 281. 33 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, pp. 280-1.

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of the two states, but would set up a Supreme National Committee to handle certain matters in common.34 This proposal was ignored by President Yun Po-son and Premier Chang Myon of the short-lived Second Republic, which was established following Rhee's toppling by student protesters in April 1960, and by General Park Chung-hee, who seized power through a coup d'etat in May 1961, and subsequently became president of the Third Republic from 1963 until his assassination in 1979. Park banned all public discussion of unification, on grounds that it interfered with the concentration of national efforts on rapid economic construction.35

The conservative reunification policies of these South Korean regimes were harshly criticized by student groups, intellectual organizations and "leftist" personages, who came out in favour of direct talks and contacts with North Korea, despite the obvious risks to the advocates' own lives, liberties and limbs in the form of the police, internal security agents and anti- communist vigilantes. The issue of national unification was crucial to the civil society groups pursuing the democracy agenda because the Rhee, Park and subsequent authoritarian regimes had frequently used the North Korean situation to justify their suppression of political opposition and the curtailment of civil liberties, and to generally desensitize South Korean citizens to these repressions and restrictions. The regimes would appeal to the "special" security situation on the Korean peninsula owing to the national division, and the need to guard against the ever-present military threat from Communist North Korea.36 From the perspective of civil society groups, as long as the nation was divided and the regime could appeal to the deep- seated insecurity and fear in the minds of the people, democracy in South Korea would either be illusory or fragile and susceptible to reversals. Hence, long after the government has ceased to inculcate the populace with anti- communist ideology and use the "pro-communist" label for democracy activists and people calling for better relations with the North, civic and political groups championing the cause of democracy, economic rights and social justice continue to be involved in the debate over national reunification, or at least reconciliation, and the pursuit of a foreign policy that would relax South Korea's dependence on the United States.

The visit by US President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China in February 1972 was a profound shock to both Seoul and Pyongyang, for each found that their best friend was talking to their worst enemy, and this made them decide to snub their respective allies and initiate contacts with one another. Following dialogue and the issuing of a joint statement in 1972 by both sides - vowing to strive for unification "through peaceful means

34 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, pp. 281-2. 35 Norman D. Levin and Yong-Sup Han, Sunshine in Korea - The South Korean Debate over Policies

Toward North Korea (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2002), p. 16. 36 Sunhyuk Kim, The Politics of Democratization in Korea - The Role of Civil Society (Pittsburgh, PA:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp. 39-40, 46-7, 102.

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without external interference" - an unprecedented exchange of Red Cross delegations took place between the two Koreas to discuss the plight of families divided by the Korean War.37 However, the dialogue and exchanges were soon terminated, because leadership on neither side was willing to seriously compromise the ideological policies or interest groups on which the legitimacy and support of their respective regimes were based to pursue the distant goal of national unity. While both Kim Il-sung and Park Chung-hee were in favour of unification, each was fiercely opposed to merger on the other's terms. The South wanted direct political talks with the North on unification issues, while the North wanted to circumvent the South Korean authorities in order to hold negotiations with the US on the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, and to replace the 1953 Armistice Agreement with a bilateral peace treaty.38 This would remain a key objective for North Korea even after the Cold War,39 until China's agreement in April 1996 to the US-South Korean proposal for what became the "Four-Party Talks" compelled North Korea to meet with the US. China and South Korea to draft a peace treaty for the Korean peninsula. These talks have so far produced no results.

After Park was assassinated by his security chief in 1979, another short- lived civilian government took power under Prime Minister Choi Kyu Ha, in the midst of labour unrest and student demonstrations. However, this Fourth Republic of South Korea was effectively ended later the same year by a military coup executed by General Chun Doo Hwan, who justified the intervention in terms of maintaining national security and restoring social order. Uncovering Pyongyang's "hidden hand" behind politicians and student leaders, Chun had prominent opposition leader Kim Dae^jung thrown behind bars, and then suppressed - with the loss of hundreds of lives - a pro- democracy students' uprising in Kim's hometown of Kwangjiu in May 1980.40 To muzzle debate over the regime's North Korea policy, Chun placed a ban on all political activities by the other two major opposition leaders, Kim %ung Sam and Kim Jong-pil, until 1985. At the end of his seven-year term as president of the Fifth Republic, which began in 1981, Chun anointed as successor his former colleague in the army, General Roh Tae-woo. Since the Electoral College charged with choosing the next president was packed with supporters of Chun, Roh was certain to succeed Chun under the current

37 Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas - A Contemporary History (Indianapolis, IN: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 23-31.

38 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, pp. 261-2. In 1984, North Korea dropped its objection to the inclusion of South Korea in such talks with the US.

39 North Korea's argument was that any future peace structure for the Korean peninsula should be negotiated by the original signatories to the 1953 Armistice, and South Korea was not a party to this agreement. See Selig Harrison, "Promoting a Soft Landing in Korea," Foreign Policy, Vol. 106, Spring 1997, pp. 57-76.

40 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, pp. 124-33.

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constitutional arrangement. Opposition members in the National Assembly then demanded a constitutional amendment to have the next president chosen by popular vote.

The ensuing public outcry led to massive demonstrations by students, workers, church groups, and, significantly for the first time, sections of the middle class that had hitherto acquiesced in the law and order rhetoric of military rule. Various autonomous organizations such as the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice, the Korean Women's Association for Democracy and Sisterhood, the Korean Federation for the Environment and the United People's Movement for Democracy and Unification (Mintongryun) organized as a national coalition of workers, farmers, youth, students, religious groups, writers and journalists, contributed actively to the democratization of South Korea.41 On June 29, 1987, with Chun's agreement, Roh came out in support of popular election of the presidency. Roh also agreed to free the long-time oppositionist Kim Dae-jung from political detention and relax press censorship, both of which, together with an elected presidency, were key demands of the opposition forces. Ironically, because the opposition vote was split between Kim Dae-jung and another opposition leader Kim \bung Sam, Roh was elected anyway by a plurality of 36.6 percent,42 and assumed office as the first president of the Sixth Republic in February 1988.

Inter-Korean Relations During the Roh Tae-woo Presidency

Perhaps because Roh Tae-woo was elected to the presidency without a majority in the popular vote, and was indeed regarded by many as "Chun with a wig" for his close association with the previous authoritarian regime, he knew that whatever domestic agenda he might have wished to push would have been stymied, at least for the time being, by a National Assembly dominated by the opposition. The April 1988 legislative election had given opposition candidates more seats in the National Assembly than the governing party for the first time in South Korea's history. This held until the move by Kim %ung Sam and Kim Jong-pil to merge their parliamentary groupings with the ruling party in 1990 restored the government's grip on the National Assembly. As such, in order to shore up the legitimacy of his regime domestically with the newly empowered political left and to affirm his political standing abroad, Roh executed a series of bold foreign policy initiatives. In July 1988, Roh initiated an open policy toward the North, and increased efforts to cultivate contacts and improve relations with Communist states by engaging in a form of diplomacy known in South Korea as nordpolitik.

41 Hye-Kyung Lee, "NGOs in Korea," in Emerging civil society in the Asia-Pacific community: Nongovernmental underpinnings of the emerging Asia Pacific regional community, ed. Tadashi Yamamoto (Tokyo: Japan Centre for International Studies, 1995), pp. 161-4.

42 Korea Annual 1998 (Seoul: Yonhap News Agency, 1998) p. 77.

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Nordpolitik was not only a strategic move by South Korea's democratizing regime to counter, through economic and diplomatic means, the pressure North Korea was putting on its socialist and Third World allies to boycott the Seoul Olympics in 1988. It was also a political tool to allay some of the popular discontent with the existing harsh anti-communist ideology.

In a "Special Presidential Declaration" in July 1988, Noh had urged his countrymen not to think of North Koreans as adversaries, but as potential partners in the pursuit of common prosperity.43 This reflected a significant change in the mindset of the South Korean leadership and represented a deliberate attempt to depart from the hitherto uncompromising policy line toward North Korea as the country's designated enemy. As part of Seoul's effort to pursue nordpolitik, Kim Young Sam was permitted by his government to visit Moscow in 1988 as leader of an opposition party in the National Assembly, and again in 1990 as chief of the newly formed governing Democratic Liberal Party.44 An official visit to a Communist country by a political leader of South Korea would have been unthinkable during the regimes of Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee, when rigid anti-communism was both a basic element of South Korean foreign policy and a source of legitimization for the maintenance of authoritarian rule. However, democratization changed all that, by opening up the domestic political space for reconciliation with a restructuring and democratizing USSR. Expanding the focus of his nordpolitik, Roh in September 1989 proposed a new reunification formula - a "commonwealth" proposal - that went further in implicitly recognizing traditional North Korean positions than any previous South Korean initiatives had.45 There was no response from Pyongyang to Roh's proposal.

Prior to 1989, no South Korean civilian was legally allowed to travel to North Korea, but Roh's nordpolitik would soon change that. Reflecting the relaxed political mood in South Korea, and with the agreement of the government of the other Korea, the late South Korean business tycoon Chung Ju-yung went to visit his North Korean birthplace in January 1989. As Chairman of Hyundai chaebol ox business conglomerate, Chung negotiated a joint venture agreement with Pyongyang to develop the Kumgang Mountain region near the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) for South Korean tourists. A masterpiece of North-South economic diplomacy, made possible by South Korea's democratic breakthrough, the resort has yet to make any money; in fact, the losses incurred were such that Hyundai had been delaying payment of the rent as promised to the North Korean government for the right to develop the mountain. Since Chung's failed bid for the presidency of South Korea in 1992 as the representative of the chaebol leaders, observers have

43 Levin and Han, Sunshine in Korea, pp. 7-8. 44 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, p. 252. 45 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, p. 283.

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concluded that they were disappointed with the government's slow pace of economic opening to the North,46 which only meant that they have become more enthusiastic than Roh in opening up trade and investment with Pyongyang.

Since the beginning of democratization in 1987, more and more people and reunification-related non-governmental organizations have come to believe that the process of policy formation on reunification must involve the people and not remain the preserve of the government. The more tolerant and less restrictive approach toward the North meant that the boundaries of what was permissible in the discourse on reunification and Korean national identity, as defined by the state, came under severe and very public testing. The National Security Law (NSL) , which prohibits South Korean citizens from visiting North Korea without government permission, was challenged by members of the Pan-National Alliance for the Reunification of Korea (Pomminnyon) , who were imprisoned on their return from a trip to the North.47 As well, several members of the Seoul Regional Alliance of the National People's Fine Arts Movement (Somiryon) were arrested and charged under the NSL for the crime of praising North Korea.48 However, popular pressure forced the Roh Tae-woo government to legalize Amnesty International and lift the ban on publications on North Korea and other Communist countries. Democratization also meant that the authorities were no longer able to suppress requests for public hearings, symposia and open discussions on the reunification issue.

The year 1990 saw a path-breaking series of three meetings between the prime ministers of North and South Korea. During the third meeting in December, then North Korean Prime Minister Yon Hyong-muk called on President Roh at the Blue House, official residence of the South Korean president. Yon became the first Northern Prime Minister ever to call on a Southern president. The year 1990 was also a watershed moment for South Korean international diplomacy, for nordpolitik paid dividends beyond the South Korean leadership's most optimistic expectations. South Korea and the Soviet Union had already established trade missions in each other's capitals in 1989. Even though President Roh met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time only in June 1990, the Soviet Union had recognized South Korea by September of that year, thus paving the way for a loan package of US$3 billion to Moscow and investments in Siberia from Seoul.49 By courting Gorbachev's friendship as a fellow reformer, Roh succeeded in sabotaging relations between Pyongyang and Moscow. Ties

46 Eun Mee Kim, Big Business, Strong State (Albany N. Y: State University of New York Press, 1 987) , p. 200; and Oh, Korean Politics (p. 122.

47 Amnesty International Report 1992 (London: Amnesty International Report Publications) , p. 1 63. 48 Amnesty, p. 167. 49 Park et al., "Democratization and Foreign Policy Change in the East Asian NICS," in Foreign

Policy Restructuring - How Governments Respond to Global Change, p. 178.

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between North Korea and the Soviet Union turned frosty - Moscow's security treaty with Pyongyang, entered into in 1961, was in tatters; and post-Soviet Russia began to demand hard currency for its exports, principally fuel and machinery, to North Korea, instead of allowing Pyongyang to pay for them with commodities or credit.50

During the campaign for the presidency in 1987, Roh had pledged at the west coast port of Inchon to "cross the "Vfellow Sea" to China during his term in office.51 Cultivating ties with China thus became the highest priority of Roh's nordpolitik policy. This pledge had an important domestic political logic to it, because the west coast of South Korea facing China was much less developed economically than the prosperous south coast facing Japan. As a result of his promises regarding trade with China, Roh carried Inchon, normally a stronghold of the political opposition, as the government's candidate in the country's first true democratic presidential vote. As a result of political liberalization, economic inter-dependence has replaced ideological affinity as the prime determinant of South Korea's foreign policy and the behaviour of its vote-maximizing leadership and foreign-policy- making elite. Political liberalization has led to changes in the normative basis for regime legitimization, and altered perceptions of threats and opportunities posed by neighbouring states.

According to Beijing's figures, Chinese trade with South Korea in 1990 was already seven times larger than its trade with the North and increasing rapidly.52 Initially, South Korea's opening toward China was complicated by Seoul's existing diplomatic ties with Taiwan, and by Beijing's backing for Pyongyang's position in opposing Seoul's advocacy of the dual admission of both North and South Korea to the United Nations (UN) , which Pyongyang argued, would be a hindrance to reunification. However, in 1991 China dropped its opposition to South Korean membership in the UN, and in August 1992, after South Korea broke off official relations with Taiwan, it was recognized by Beijing. In 1996, Seoul also managed to obtain Beijing's support in successfully urging North Korea to take part in the South Korea - US proposal for "Four-Party Talks." Reaching out to China as a friend and trading partner had won South Korea a coveted seat in the UN, diplomatic recognition from a major Asian power and hitherto principal backer of its archenemy, and the opportunity to pressure the North into entering dialogue with the South in a multilateral forum. The landmark "Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, and Exchange and Cooperation between the South and the North," signed in December 1991, capped Roh's efforts to encourage Pyongyang to accept some form of peaceful coexistence with Seoul. All these salient accomplishments of South Korean foreign policies

50 Macdonald et al., The Koreans, p. 252. 51 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 242. 52 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 231.

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undoubtedly flowed out of the shift in the basis of its elite's political legitimization, from anti-communist authoritarianism to the articulation of national interests based on democratic norms and international cooperation, under the presidency of Roh Tae-Woo.

Inter-Korean Relations During the Kim Young Sam Presidency Unlike Roh, Kim \bung Sam, his successor as president of South Korea

from 1993 to 1998, had no discernible overall strategy towards the North, but oscillated unpredictably between hard and soft lines. Kim, the former opposition leader who had joined the ruling party in 1990 and who became its presidential candidate in 1992, was apprehensive about the positive aspects of North-South relations. Kim and his political backers feared that a continuation of the North-South euphoria of the earlier months would benefit his old political rival, Kim Dae jung, who, backed by the opposition, was shaping up once again as his principal competitor for presidential candidate. This led Kim \bung Sam, in his ultimately successful campaign for president, to feature anti-communist attacks on his long-term adversary, whom he loudly but falsely accused of being endorsed by Pyongyang.53 From the 1992 presidential election onwards, political relations with, and economic assistance to North Korea became a regular issue of public debate in the politics of South Korean presidential and National Assembly elections.

In his February 1993 inaugural address, Kim Young Sam offered to meet his North Korean counterpart "at any time and any place," and declared that, as members of the same Korean family, "no ally can be more valuable than national kinship."54 Yet, in separate interviews with the British Broadcasting Company and the New York Times that July, Kim voiced harsh criticisms of the negotiations undertaken by Washington officials with Pyongyang. The negotiations were over the phasing out of economic sanctions against the North, if Pyongyang would agree to freeze its production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Kim charged that the North Koreans were manipulating the negotiations "to buy time to finish their project," and expressed hope that the US "would not be led on by North Korea."55

Unlike his legitimacy-conscious predecessor or his conviction-driven successor, what drove Kim Young Sam's Northern policies as president were above all the tides of domestic public opinion. Unlike Park, Chun or Roh, who had military backgrounds, Kim was a life-long professional politician with a keen interest in the shifting views of the public. Known for relying more on his feel for the political aspects of issues than any overall strategy,

53 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 287. 54 Kim Young Sam, Inaugural Presidential Address, February 25, 1993. See Han S. Park, Inter-

Korea Relations: Premises, Problems, and Prospects, Carolina Asian News, <http://www.ils.unc.edu/cann/ histcult.html> and <http://www.koreascope.org/english/sub/14/korea3 l.htm.>

55 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 287.

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he was reported as having cited newspaper headlines or television broadcasts more often than official papers in internal discussions, and for constantly referring to polling data, public opinion and the political positions of his friends and rivals in discussing his reactions to events, supposedly even in meetings and telephone calls with the US president.56 By the second half of 1993, after North Korea had announced its intention to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the pretext of unwarranted demands by the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect two sites at Yongbyon, and the decision by both South Korea and the US to conduct their annual joint-military "Team Spirit" exercise for 1993, following its cancellation the year before, the public mood in South Korea began to turn against Pyongyang. Accordingly, Kim %ung Sam's view of North Korea, never upbeat to begin with, hardened.

In the summer of 1994, there was a brief promise of a summit meeting between the presidents of both Koreas, when Kim Il-sung invited Kim Young Sam to visit Pyongyang, but the opportunity was lost when the North Korean leader passed away suddenly on July 8, before the meeting could take place. Then, as part of the Geneva Agreed Framework of October 1994, the administration of US President Bill Clinton agreed to provide two light water reactors to Pyongyang and supply fuel oil while they were being built with the expertise of South Korean engineers, in exchange for North Korea not continuing with its nuclear programme or withdrawing from the NPT. Although the Seoul government officially endorsed the agreement and promised to make it work, Kim Young Sam was openly displeased with Clinton at not being consulted beforehand. Kim and many South Koreans felt betrayed that their old ally, the Americans, dealt with their arch-enemy without their direct involvement, and believed that any American deal would shore up a Pyongyang regime wrecked by famine-induced starvation and on the verge of collapse, thus postponing reunification.57

From 1972, when Park Chung Hee promulgated the "Yushin" ("Revitalization") Constitution to ban all political parties and remove term limits on his presidency and the need for direct election to that office, to the decision by Chun Doo Hwan to relinquish power in 1987, the presidents of South Korea have constantly used the threat of North Korea to impose a "total security system" on the country. They did this by combining personal control of the armed forces with a quasi-military mobilization of society into a kind of garrison state, which contributed greatly to the strengthening of the authoritarian rulers' political power.58 With the perception of North

56 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 288. 57 Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, p. 358. 58 Yung Myung Kim, "Patterns of Military Rule and Prospects for Democracy in South Korea, " in

The Military and Democracy in Asia and the Pacific, ed. R. J. May and Viberto Selochan (Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing, 1998), p. 123.

25




Korea as a military threat greatly diminished on account of its economic difficulties, and on the urging of President Kim \foung Sam, South Korea's definition of its security was expanded from the physical protection of the state of ROK (gukga anbo) to the preservation of the political and territorial integrity of the entire nation of the Korean people, including both North and South Korea, as well as overseas Koreans (minjok anbo).59 Although the change is predicated on the realization of Korean reunification, it represents a significant attempt by a democratic government to de-link regime security from state security. Kim appointed two former university professors to head the National Unification Board and the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP) (formerly the Korean Central Intelligence Agency) , positions traditionally held by bureaucrats. In response to street demonstrations, sit- ins and a nation-wide signature campaign organized by civil groups, Kim also purged politically active officers from the military, and decreed the arrest and trial of former presidents Chun and Roh for ordering the Kwangjiu massacre and corruption while in office, which led to their subsequent imprisonment.60 He most likely did all this to show critical civil society groups that he did not betray the pro-democracy cause when he merged his party into Roll's ruling bloc in 1990 and sought its nomination for president in 1992. Whatever the reason, by so doing, Kim \bung Sam, the first civilian to be elected South Korean president in 32 years, managed to de-legitimize not only past and future seizures of political power through military coups,61 but also the justification of authoritarian repression in the name of preserving state security. He also removed many potential institutional obstacles to engaging North Korea for his successor.

A series of political scandals had put the ruling New Korea Party of President Kim \foung Sam in a difficult position for the National Assembly election of 1996, not least because his own son was alleged to have taken bribes from Hanbo Steel to arrange the financing by state banks of the chaebol,

59 Chung-in Moon, "South Korea: Recasting Security Paradigms," in Asian Security Practices - Material and Ideational Influences, ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 275.

60 Oh, Korean Politics, pp. 133-4, 169-81. 61 The military coups of 1961 and 1980 were conducted by a clique of "politicized" officers from

the ' Hanahoe' (one-heart / one-mind society) faction of the South Korean military, composed mainly of regular Korean Military Academy graduates from Kyongsang provinces. Throughout Park Chung Hee's presidency, members of Hanahoewere placed in such strategic positions as the National Military Security Command (NMSC), the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), and the Presidential Security Office. Chun Doo Hwan was both president of Hanahoe and commander of the NMSC when he took power. By pledging personal loyalty to Park, and subsequently Chun, Hanahoe members enjoyed his patronage in appointment and promotion, and this excessive preferential treatment extended to its members made the clique a source of friction within the military. It was this group of officers that were rotated out of high offices in the military following its purge by Kim Young Sam. See Chung-in Moon and Mun-Gu Rang, "Democratic Opening and Military Intervention in South Korea: Comparative Assessment and Implications," in Politics and Policy in the New Korean States -From Roh Tae- woo to Kim Young Sam, ed James Cotton (Melbourne: Longman, 1995), pp. 174-5, 187-8.

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which was in financial difficulties.62 However, a raid into the DMZ and subsequent withdrawal by North Korean soldiers in April 1996 turned voters conservative and helped the party win the election against all odds.63 Seoul's mass media said that a bukpung (north wind) saved the ruling party from certain electoral disaster.64 North Korea's provocative behaviour, which continued with the incursion of a North Korean submarine into South Korean waters on September 18, 1996, followed by two months of intensive search for North Korean infiltrators, enabled Kim Young Sam to adopt a policy of "benign neglect" toward the North by suspending contact and aid for the duration of his presidency to outflank the more moderate policy of engagement advocated by the party of his main rival, Kim Dae-jung.

At dawn on December 29, 1996, in the absence of opposition legislators, Kim Young Sam's New Korea Party rammed through the National Assembly several labour-related bills to weaken labour unions and facilitate massive layoffs, and a bill to expand the surveillance purview of the Agency for National Security Planning. Intense protests by labour unions, students, academics, lawyers, religious organizations and opposition parties ultimately forced the government to annul both laws. However, the use of undemocratic methods by the authorities to force the adoption of controversial legislation in the name of "fighting against communist forces" and "improving international competitiveness" demonstrated to civic and political groups in the country that even a reformist government was liable to back-sliding in its democratic commitments, and that there was still some way to go and much effort to be made toward exorcizing the spectre of North Korean subversion as government propaganda and realizing substantive democracy in South Korea.

Inter-Korean Relations During the Kim Dae-jung Presidency In August 1998, a three-stage North Korean missile known as Taepodongl

overflew the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 1200 miles from its launch site. The military rationale for the launch was deterrence, but diplomatically, it gave Pyongyang much potential leverage in bargaining with Washington, Seoul's principal protector, on issues of security and economics.65 An authoritarian South Korean military government would have in the past used the incident to argue against adopting a conciliatory position toward the North, but newly- elected president Kim Dae-jung was confident enough of his own democratic

62 Oh, Korean Politics, pp. 206-8. 63 Andrew Pollack, "South Korea's Ruling Party Trips but Does Not Fall in Elections", New York

Times, April 12, 1996, p.A3. 64 Moon, "South Korea: Recasting Security Paradigms," p. 716. 65 Selig S. Harrison, "The Missiles of North Korea: How real a threat?" World Policy Journal, Fall

2000. <http://ptg.djnr.com/ccroot/asp/publib/story.asp> Last verified May 2001.

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credentials and long-held pacifist ideals to eventually break ice with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il.

Unlike his predecessor, President Kim Dae-jung preferred to treat the North as a partner to reconcile and cooperate with, rather than an entity to be eventually overwhelmed or absorbed by South Korea. One may even say that the whole idea behind the Kim Dae-jung presidency's attempt to advance rapprochement with the North is to deconstruct South Koreans' image of North Korea as the enemy, and perhaps even vice-versa. The image of an enemy has been greatly facilitated by the almost total absence of knowledge and communication between the two halves of the Korean peninsula for decades. To challenge the state's existing monopoly on devising proposals for unification, Kim founded the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation in 1994 to promote Korean reunification, democratic change in Asia and world peace. As president, he wanted meetings for separated families in the North and the South to take place as soon as possible, and proposed a three-stage formula for reunification, advancing from confederation for the two Koreas, proceeding to federation, and then to a unified country.66 Since his inauguration in February 1998, Kim has pushed his "Sunshine policy" with calls for the South to adopt a more patient and accommodating stance toward the North, and take the initiative to engage it in dialogue and exchanges as often as possible.

To encourage South Korean private investors to start businesses in North Korea, Seoul lifted the ceiling on investment in the North.67 The Samsung group soon started a joint venture near Pyongyang to produce television sets and stereos for export.68 Following the summit of June 2000 between the South 's President Kim Dae-jung and the North's Chairman Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, widely considered a success for Kim Dae-jung and his "Sunshine policy," decisions were made between the governments of the two Koreas to reconnect a cross-border railway, establish a military "hotline,"69 and design investment agreements to protect South Korean businesses investing in the North from double taxation and nationalization without compensation at international market prices.70 In 2002, South Korea's trade

66 Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation, ed., KimDae-jung's "Three-Stage "Approach to Korean Reunification (Los Angeles: Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, University of Southern California, 1997).

67 Bonhak Koo and Chunghee Nam, "South Korea's Sunshine Policy and Inter-Korean Security Relations," in Korean Journal of Defence Analysis, Vol. XIII, No.l, Autumn 2001, pp. 82-3.

68 Lee Dong-han, Lee Kwang-hoi, and Seo Gyo, "Local Business Welcomes Inter-Korea Summit," Chosun Ilbo, April 10, 2000, <http://srch.chosun.com/cgi-bin/english/search?did=24694&OP= 5&word=SAMSUNG%20JOINT%20VENTURE%20PYONGYANG%20&name=english/ Business&dtc=20000410&url=http://english. chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200004/ 2000041 00294.html&title=Local% 20Business% 20Welcomes% 20Inter-Korea%20Summit> Last verified February 2003.

69 Kang Seok-jae, "Military Hotline in the Works - South, North Korea agree on defense safeguard, "

KOREA Now, December 16, 2000, p. 11. 70 Staff Writer, "S-N Business Advances into New Era - South, North Korea forge historic

agreements on economic cooperation," KOREA Now, November 18, 2000, p. 10.

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with the North reached $642 million,71 which, although insignificant to Seoul, amounted to one-quarter of Pyongyang's trade total.72 It was certainly a quantum leap from 1988, when commercial ties with the North were first established following South Korea's democratization, and bilateral trade amounted to less than $10 million.73 From 1998 to 2002, South Koreans provided $400 million in financial aid to North Korea, with three-quarters of the amount from the government and the balance from NGOs.74 One-third of all visits by South Koreans to the North took place in 2002; similarly, 40 percent of all visits by North Koreans occurred that year.75 To reduce military tension on the Korean peninsula, and to help the reclusive regime open its doors and become a responsible member of the international community, South Korea fully supported the North in establishing or strengthening diplomatic links with Western countries.

Unfortunately, Kim has failed to achieve bipartisan consensus for his policy approach toward the North. Kim's opponents were already attacking his "Sunshine Policy" early on as one of overgenerous appeasement, arguing that it had accomplished little, aside from wasting South Korean taxpayers' money by unilaterally giving aid to North Korea and offering to build infrastructure projects in that country. In return for their efforts, the critics said, they got only reticence and inaction.76 Even with the successful North- South summit of June 2000, opposition legislators have demanded that the Kim government ask North Korea to issue an apology for its 1950 invasion, and Lee Hoi Chang, who ran a close second to D. J. Kim during the 1997 presidential elections, insisted on the principle of "strategic reciprocity" and concrete benefits in dealings with North Korea, which, he said, have not been forthcoming.77 As mentioned, the Kumgang project continues to incur losses for South Korean developer Hyundai, the expected visit of Kim Jong- il to Seoul has not materialized, and South Korean plans to develop an industrial district in North Korea's Kaesong city are still on the drawing boards. Facing the need to restructure heavily indebted chaebols that require bailouts

71 Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification, <http://www.unikorea.go.kr/en/... /in terkorean. php?page_code=ue0302&ucd=eng020> Last verified February 2003.

72 Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification, <http://www.unikorea.go.kr/eg/load/C32/ C327.htm> Last verified February 2003.

73 Park, Ko and Kim, "Democratization and Foreign Policy Change in the East Asian NICS," p. 158.

"4 Conversation with Mikyoung Kim, of the US Embassy in South Korea, on February 26, 2003. Kim also pointed out that NGOs on Cheju Island donated $200 million worth of tangerines to North Korea from 1998 to 2002, which serves as a good illustration of non-government food aid from South Korea to the North under the 'Sunshine Policy."

75 Staff Reporter, Inter-Korean exchanges peaked in 2002, JoongAng Ilbo, , January 2, 2002. <http://english.joins.com> Last verified February 2003.

76 Korea Times, November 19, 2001. 77 STRATFOR, "Sunset for South Korea's Sunshine Policy?" <http://www.stratfor.com/asia/

commentary/01 03261 630> Last verified March 2001.

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from government banks, as well as the arrest of his two sons on corruption charges and the pending end of his presidential term, D.J. Kim could devote little attention, energy or political capital to pursue further engagement initiatives with the North during his last year in office. This became all the more evident with the removal of his first Unification Minister and architect of the "Sunshine Policy," Lim Dong Won, by a vote of no-confidence in the South Korean National Assembly. Still, inter-Korean ministerial talks held in August 2002 have resulted in an agreement to open two railway links across the DMZ, resumption of discussions on the Kaesong industrial project, and North Korean participation in the Asian Games in Seoul.

Without strong support for his "Sunshine Policy" from the Bush administration in Washington, which has characterized North Korea as a rogue state and part of an "axis of evil," D.J. Kim found it increasingly difficult to defend the policy at home. Pyongyang's inability or unwillingness to put to rest Washington's suspicions regarding North Korea's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction only reinforced domestic censure of Kim's Northern policy. Despite the resumption of contacts, the thought that Seoul were giving handouts to Pyongyang with little to show in the way of results weakened public support for Kim's policies, which opposition politicians were only too happy to attack in the run-up to the 2002 presidential election.78 Still, like three-quarters of the South Korean population,79 neither of the top two candidates who ran for president - Roh Moo Hyun of D. J. Kim's Millennium Democratic Party (the eventual winner) nor Lee Hoi Chang of the Grand National Party - were against engaging North Korea. While Roh would continue the present policy of wooing Pyongyang with unconditional aid, Lee insisted on reciprocity from the North and verification of North Korea's nuclear intentions.80 When pressed, opposition leaders will likely acknowledge that any other leader of the Republic of Korea would have little option other than to continue with D.J. Kim's programme of reaching out to the North, for the fear of war transcends party affiliation and ideological disposition. However, that will not prevent them from playing politics with inter-Korean relations for as long as a totalitarian North Korea regime exists in juxtaposition to a contentiously democratic South Korea.

78 Hong Nack Kim, "The 2000 Parliamentary Election in South Korea," in Asian Survey, Vol. XL, No. 6, November / December 2000, pp. 911-2.

79 A poll conducted by the South Korean Ministry of Unification on June 11-12, 2002, on a sample of 1500 adults, found that 73 percent of the respondents endorsed the government's policy of reconciliation and cooperation, 59.3 percent cited the reunion of separated families as the most remarkable development since the inter-Korean joint declaration two years ago, and 66.1 percent said that the current level of the South's aid to the North needed to be maintained or increased. Republic of Korea Ministry of Unification, Korean Unification Bulletin No. 44, June 2002, Public Opinion Poll on Policy Toward North Korea <http://www.unikorea.go.kr/.> Last verified February 2003.

80 The Economist, "The president apologises," May 11, 2002, p. 30.

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Findings and Conclusion

The field of study which addresses how regime changes relate to changes in foreign policy behaviour has yet to yield any meaningful general theory for testing across countries that have experienced democratization.81 There is an even greater paucity of research literature on the effects of socio- economic voting patterns on inter-Korean relations arising from the process of democratization in South Korea, particularly in the English language. Still, our case study shows that a democratic government must take into serious consideration the revealed preference of the median voter in the making of foreign policy. This essay engaged the debate on democratic peace a little, if only to qualify the Mansfield - Snyder proposition by showing that, depending on the particular type of ideological/nationalist stances connecting the elite to the masses, democratizing states need not provoke conflict. This was particularly demonstrated in the case of South Korea under the presidencies of Kim Young Sam, who continued to support the Geneva Agreed Framework even in the face of at times utterly uncooperative and even belligerent behaviour from North Korea; Kim Dae-jung, who had to weather cutting criticism of his "Sunshine Policy" whenever naval altercations occurred between the warships of North and South Korea; and Roh Moo Hyun, who made continuing engagement with the North his electoral platform, despite Pyongyang's admission to having a nuclear weapons programme.

In fact, our findings give support to the notion that, contrary to the claims of the dyadic version of the democratic peace theory, cooperative relations between democracies and states that use domestic coercion are possible, and are even sought out by the former.82 However, this study addresses only one country, and more research into investigating this democratization- causes-war link is certainly warranted. Democratic transition and consolidation in South Korea have undoubtedly furthered the politicization of foreign and security issues, by opening up the political space that allows for their articulation. Democratic changes have also widened the spectrum

81 Perhaps the most thorough analysis of the effect of domestic political regime change on foreign policy alteration for the purpose of deriving a theoretical framework was the attempts by Hagan to relate foreign policy realignment to regime fragmentation and orientation of the new leadership, among other factors. Although it represents the most current strain of inquiry in this field, Hagan's framework appears to require further refinement and simplification for a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the regime and foreign policy change to emerge. See Joe D. Hagan, "Domestic Political Regime Change and Foreign Policy Restructuring," in Foreign Policy Restructuring - How Governments Respond to Global Change, ed. Jerel A. Rosati, Joe D. Hagan and Martin W. Sampson III (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 138-63; and "Domestic Political Explanations in the Analysis of Foreign Policy," in Foreign Policy Analysis - Continuity and Change in Its Second Generation, Laura Neack, Jeanne A.K. Hey and PatrickJ. Haney (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1995), pp. 117-44.

82 Miriam Fendius Elman, "Testing the Democratic Peace Theory," in Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer, ed. Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 494-5.

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of ideological diversity to include "ethnic" and "class" issues, such that, with the destruction of the old linkage between authoritarian rule and state security, the rhetoric of anti-communism, reification and "rich nation and strong army," all of which embodied the dominant state security ideology during the Cold War era, have since been on the defensive.

Although there were ups and downs in inter-Korean relations over the past decade-and-a-half, the major foreign policy repercussions of democratization in South Korea have been such that relations between the two Koreas have on the whole improved. With the political ascendance of intellectuals, student groups, labour organizations and other torchbearers of Korean nationalist activism, and the induction of civil society activists into the Kim Young Sam government and subsequent administrations, perhaps the trend of decreasing antagonism in inter-Korean relations is to be expected. The concept of Korean homogeneity is a powerful one, and the narrative of the peninsula's division as a temporary disruption of Korean identity and national unity is widely accepted in South Korea, as well as in the North.83 In any case, participation by supposed "leftist" forces in the political process of South Korea has legitimized and popularized the hitherto suppressed or muted calls for better relations with the North, and even led to a change in the security thinking of the government in Seoul, from equating state security with regime security, to identifying it with the security of all Koreans, wherever they are. One unqualified positive aspect of democratization is certainly that trade and contact with the erstwhile "enemy" can now take place because the existence of the regime in Seoul no longer needs to be defined or justified with reference to the presence of, or threat from, the "Other." Another achievement of democratization, as Roh Tae- woo said in his inaugural presidential address, was that "the days when freedoms and human rights could be slighted in the name of economic growth and national security have ended."84

In assessing the impact of democratization in South Korea on inter-Korean relations, we are not arguing that strategic factors and the world political environment are less important than the will and skill of leaders in changing their country's political system or diplomatic posture, just that they are more like constraints on the actions of leaders that may be tighter or looser at different periods of time. A political leader like Chun Doo Hwan or Roh Tae Woo could hardly have made so much headway in effecting changes, if the external environment had not been as favourable as it was at the end of the Cold War, which showed that democratic changes could result even in totalitarian regimes. However, leaders pushing for inter-Korean detente were

83 Roy Richard Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 8-9.

84 Macdonald et al., I he Koreans, p. lbl.

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usually not passive, so at critical moments we saw them use political openings provided by democratization at home to achieve their foreign affairs or diplomatic objectives.

Of course, achieving democracy does not mean that Seoul's foreign policy direction toward Pyongyang is settled once and for all. Leftist groups in South Korea, such as the Association of Families of Political Prisoners and the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, continue to call for the repeal of the National Security Law, which still allows for detention without trial for persons deemed to act or express themselves in a way sympathetic to North Korea.85 Indeed, perception of a thaw between North and South Korea in the wake of the June 2000 summit has encouraged those who have always opposed the US troops' presence to promote their cause more fervently among the broad spectrum of the South Korean public.86 On the other hand, rightist forces would very much like to shut down the engagement process with Pyongyang, believing that by doing so they would force the collapse of a bankrupt North Korea. This conservative social mood within the country has been maintained through a variety of outlets: by rightist forces within the community of refugees from North Korea;87 by newspapers like the Chosun Ilbo and Donga Ilbo, which are strident critics of the "Sunshine Policy;"88 and by government agencies such as the Ministry of National Defense and the NSP. These voices tend to come alive in response to provocative acts from the North.89 Although the mood in the country for the past 15 years has been more in favour of engaging North Korea diplomatically and economically than ever before, opinion on how to deal with the North has been very much split since the advent of democratization in South Korea. There is a danger that an oscillation between a hard-line and moderate policy toward the North, depending on which president or party is in power, would be all sound and fury, signifying no lasting accomplishments for Seoul aside from some general relaxation of tension on the Korean peninsula. Stochastic personality-based policy making in regards to the North, reflecting to a certain extent the prevailing mood of the country, may be a regular feature of South Korean politics; however, it might well confuse the North as to the South's intentions. In that part of the world, where so much uncertainty prevails, this would be wholly unnecessary and unwelcome.

85 Macdonald et al., The Koreans., p. 138. 86 Han Sung-joo, "The value of U.S. Military - Despite Improved N-S ties, the South needs the

American troops," KOREA Now, August 12, 2000, p. 10. 8V B. C. Koh, "Foreign Policy Implications of Domestic Political Developments in the Two Koreas, "

in Koreans Options in a Changing International Order, ed. Hong Yung Lee and Chung Chonwook (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), p. 104.

88 Levin and Han, Sunshine in Korea, pp. 71-74. 89 Chung-in Moon, Arms Control on the Korean Peninsula: International Penetration, Regional Dynamics,

and Domestic Structure (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1996), chapter 5.

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Meanwhile, South Koreans who would like to see the policy of reaching out to the North continued, were heartened by the election of Roh Moo Hyun as their president. Roh has a popular image, especially among the young and the progressive, for being a human rights lawyer representing those opposing former President Chun's military dictatorship.90 Riding to electoral victory on a tide of anti-Americanism, Roh was also seen as labour- friendly and disposed to a fairer distribution of wealth.91 Almost half of the 35 million voters in the 2002 presidential election were in their twenties and thirties, and over 60 percent of them voted for Roh.92 The majority of voters obviously concurred with Roh 's judgment that cutting off all aid to the North until it abandons its nuclear programme, as advocated by Lee Hoi Chang and the US Bush administration, could provoke a crisis with disastrous consequences. During the election, Roh was portrayed by Lee's supporters as a "dangerous radical,"93 because he was seen by them as the North's preferred candidate for his past advocacy of American military withdrawal from South Korea. Indeed, although the North has repeatedly castigated Lee for his "Cold War mentality" in "instigating confrontation between the two Koreas," it did not make a single remark about Roh.94

Meanwhile, South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" continues to combine military vigilance with official encouragement of inter-Korean contacts by businesses and civilians. Despite North Korea's nuclear brandishing, Southern NGOs are still sending the North corn seeds, winter clothing and medicine as a show of goodwill.95 Roh has indicated a willingness to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to discuss the North's nuclear development,96 although he has also authorized a joint exercise between the US and South Korean militaries scheduled for March 2003. Roh opposed the imposition of any economic embargo on North Korea, stressing that "the more tense the situation, the greater the need for a Sunshine policy."97 Although Pyongyang's nuclear sabre-rattling and Washington's reluctance to engage North Korea on this issue have not made Seoul's efforts at rapprochement any easier, it also revealed the strength of the "Sunshine Policy" and the determination of South Korea's leadership to proceed with it. Even after the announcement by Pyongyang that it was removing IAEA cameras from the %ngbyon nuclear

90 Wu Jingjing, "From Commoner to President," Beijing Review, January 9, 2003, p. 10. 91 The Economist, "Sorry, no time for a honeymoon," December 21, 2002. p. 23. 92 Asialnt- Political Off Strategic Review, "Kimjong-il's Dangerous Brinkmanship, "January 2003, p. 7. 9^ The Economist, Sorry, no time for a honeymoon, December 21, 2002. p. 23. 94 Staff Reporter , "Nationalism the biggest factor in election: Chosun Shinbo, " JoongAng Ilbo,

February 5, 2003. <http://english.joins.com/.> Last verified February 2003. 95 Aidan Foster-Carter, "Dr. Corn continues to help Korea heal," in International Herald Tribune,

February 18, 2003. p. 7. 96 Staff Reporter, "Roh: foreign policy toward N.K., U.S. to remain the same," JoongAng Ilbo,

December 20, 2002. 97 Kim Chong-hyuk, Choi hoon, "President-elect Roh opposes containment policy," JoongAng

Ilbo, December 31, 2002.

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facility, which the US believed was used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, Roh pledged to find a peaceful solution to the situation.98 Choe Song-ik, the latest North Korean representative to the inter-Korean ministerial talks, said that two Koreas would continue with economic projects already underway, such as the cross-border railways and the overland route to Mount Kumgang." According to a recent poll, nearly 90 percent of South Korean college and high school students believe they could be friends with North Koreans, while four-fifths of them support reunification.100 Almost 55 percent of respondents to a Chosun Ilbo/Gallup Poll indicated that they did not believe that the North's nuclear weapons were targeted against the South, as opposed to less than 28% who did.101

The democratization of politics in South Korea also holds valuable lessons for North Korea in terms of dealing with the voters' emotions regarding their former "enemy." North Korean incursions across the DMZ were widely thought to have consolidated support for anti-Pyongyang candidates in the 1996 South Korean National Assembly elections. North Korea's proposal to restart talks with the South in September 2002, on the eve of a no-confidence vote against Lim Dong Won in the National Assembly and after a hiatus of six months, was seen by many legislators as a blatant attempt by the North to interfere in the South Korean political process, with the result that Lim lost the vote and was forced to resign. Ultimately, perhaps what decides whether the Korean peninsula achieves reunification will be if or when the process of democratization takes place in North Korea, thus making it politically attractive for South Korea to unite with the North. Meanwhile, North Korea will have to accept the reality that, whatever it offers, whether it be friendly dialogue or threats of aggression, and irrespective of its motives for doing so, the initiative will remain with the South Korean authorities to maintain, reduce or strengthen inter-Korean dialogue. And, to a large extent, they will be doing so in response to public opinion and voter preferences.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, February 2003

98 Asialnt, Political & Strategic Review, "Kim Jong-il's Dangerous Brinkmanship," p. 10. 99 Staff Reporter "North Korea's Inter-Korean policy for 2003,

" JoongAng Ilbo, 'January 2, 2003

<http://english.joins.com/.> Last verified February 2003. 100 Staff Reporter, "Poll: 90 percent of students say we can be friends with North Koreans, "JoongAng

Ilbo, (North Korea Net) , January 10, 2003. The poll was conducted by the Korean Institute of National Reunification on 1125 college and high school students, <http://english.joins.com/.> Last verified February 2003.

101 Hong Yeong Lim, "Polls Shows Divergent Generation Gap," Chosun Ilbo, December 31, 2002. The poll was conducted on December 24, 2002 on 1063 adults nationwide, with an error margin of 3 percent at 95 percent confidence level, <http://srch.chosun.com/cgi-bin/english/ search?did = 55241&OP = 5&word = HONG%20YEONG%20LIM%20&name = english/ National&dtc=20021231&url=http://english. chosun.com/w21data/html/news/20021 2/ 200212310018.html&title=Poll%20Shows%20Divergent%20Generation%20Gap> Last verified February 2003.

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democratization in south korea and inter-korean relations

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