America Must Not Hinder Korea’s Growing Pluralism With Push for Open Market

In South Korea’s last popular presidential election in 1971, former Gen. Park Chung Hee narrowly defeated a young congressman, Kim Dae Jung. This week another former general, Roh Tae Woo, defeated Kim Dae Jung and his one-time colleague, Kim Young Sam, largely because the egos of the opposition candidates prevented their submerging individual aspirations for common goals.

In the 16 years between the earlier contest and the vibrant campaign that culminated in Wednesday’s election, fundamental forces have altered the dynamics of both the Korean political process and the formation of economic policy. However the military, the government or a disaffected opposition may react to Roh’s victory and to the disturbances that may follow, Korea will never again be the same. These basic changes are masked by the mass outpouring of political enthusiasm that appeared so dramatically on our television screens. They indicate profound shifts in Korea that have vital implications for U.S. policy.

In 1961, when Park Chung Hee came to power in a military coup, Korea was three-quarters rural, one-quarter urban. Today these figures are essentially reversed in one of the most remarkable voluntary demographic shifts in Asia. Seoul alone now has almost one-quarter of the country’s total population. In less than two decades Korea has become an urban nation, one in which campaign rallies sometimes brought out more than 1 million participants. As important as the unresolved issues of fairness emanating from the elections are, and as vital for Korea as the aftermath of this remarkable event will no doubt be, urbanization will more fundamentally alter Korean society.

Urbanization has resulted in the growth of pluralistic institutions--a product of demographic change, education, access to international media, economic development and the growth of the middle class.

Pluralism is the result of the flowering of autonomous civic institutions, not political parties that have been the means to fulfill the ambitions of their leaders. Neither traditional nor modern Korean governments, nor Korea’s Japanese colonial rulers before World War II, ever allowed the development of independent and influential voluntary or professional associations. Between the family or clan and the state there was a vacuum. The organizations that the government feared, it suppressed; those that it liked or could use, it co-opted.

The immediate effect of urbanization makes the blatant use of coercion more difficult for any incumbent government. The record of Korean parliamentary elections demonstrates that opposition candidates almost always were elected from urban constituencies.

The longer-range and more important result of urbanization, and the economic growth that was both a cause and an effect, was for civic and professional groups to become more influential and to demonstrate independence of spirit. They are not made up of students, who as nascent literati are the vocal and publicly self-elected standard bearers of political morality. They are church and religious groups, labor organizations, women’s associations and a variety of professional groupings that had been quiescent and lacked public influence. With the growth of the middle class--to which well over half of all Koreans believe they belong--and increasing self-confidence, these groups have flourished.

This new pluralism has important implications for U.S. policy, which has three essential objectives in South Korea: the maintenance of security relationships, the growth of democracy, and economic liberalization--including the opening of Korean markets to American goods and services.

Security is not now an issue; it has bi-partisan U.S. support, and no major Korean political party wants to see the ties severed, although their mechanisms require adjustment. There is tension, however, between the U.S. objectives of the growth of democracy and open Korean markets.

Korea’s economic success is to some significant degree a result of the past ability of Korean governments to insulate their economic policy-makers from popular pressures. This will no longer be possible in a more pluralistic society, one in which the executive and legislative branches will have to be more responsive to public needs. Yet, at the same time, in a rising nationalistic tide no Korean government or political party can be perceived to be acceding to blatant U.S. pressure to open markets. The days when a Korean president could decree sweeping changes without political debate and public inquiry are over.

There will be new parliamentary elections in April, 1988. The new Korean government and its political party will have to be responsive to public pressures, as will all opposition parties. As Korean society grows more pluralistic, it will be more difficult for any executive to implement economic liberalization by fiat.

Democratization (or pluralism) and economic liberalization may be compatible over time, but not at this point in the new Korean context. At this critical juncture in Korean history, with Korea in internal ferment, American pressures for needed economic liberalization should be deft and cautious. Congress and the executive branch are pushing for liberalization, which is especially important and understandable in an American election period. It would be tragic, however, if the democratic process that America has advocated in Korea should result in increasing anti-Americanism because of democratic practices in the United States.