Jinha Kim
Keimyung University

[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 8.2 (2005): 182-184. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]

Professor Kihl has written many books and articles on Korean politics. Among them, Politics and Policies in Divided Korea published in 1984 still remains one of the most comprehensive works on Korean politics today. This new book, Transforming Korean Politics: Democracy, Reform, and Culture, is in some ways the second volume of Politics and Policies in Divided Korea. The book deals with Korean politics in the Sixth Republic and four regimes; namely, the Roh Tae-Woo, Kim Young-Sam, Kim Dae-Jung, and Roh Moo-Hyun regimes. Professor Kihl analyzes the politics and economy in Korea with the three theoretical frames of reference of democratization, institutionalization, and culture. The author is not only an international relations specialist but also a comparativist of East Asian politics. As these various scholarly interests imply, he writes this book from the perspectives of a political economist, a comparativist, and an international relations specialist.

 This book consists of an epilogue and three parts with a total of nine chapters. In the first part, “Historical Context,” the author explains Korean political history within three classic paradigms of comparative politics; modernization, democrat-ization, and culture. As an international relations specialist, the author analyzes globalization, international political economy, and foreign policies in the second part, “Policy Patterns and Processes.” The third part, “Future Prospects” provides an analytical framework for Korean political transformation with the consoli-dation of institutionalization and culture. The epilogue seems to have been put into the final part after he witnessed the historic impeachment of President Roh Moo-Hyun.      

Basically this book is a revival of the cultural theories which were dominant in the comparative politics field in the 1940s and 1950s. The classic topics for the comparativist were democratization and economic growth through modernization. In the modernization paradigm popularized by American and Western European perspectives, economic growth and democratization are dependent variables, while modernization (or westernization) is an independent variable. However, modernization or westernization did not bring democratization or economic growth but authoritarian regimes, corruption, underdevelopment, and dependency to the Third World. The fact that modernization did not result in democratization or economic growth inspired scholars to approach these issues from the standpoint of the dependency school in the 1960s and 1970s, 

East Asian success made dependency theory void. At the end of the 1980s, scholars investigated why South American countries failed to achieve economic growth whereas East Asian countries achieved economic success. Some of them indicated that culture is the crucial factor in economic development and political stabilization. The most commonly used example to the culturist was East Asian economic growth. Unlike South American, African, or other Asian countries, East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan experienced rapid economic growth. A peculiarity of East Asian economic growth was attributed to the legacies, norms, and value systems of Confucianism.

A series of seminars in Harvard University harbinger an astonishing return of this culturist viewpoint. Samuel Huntington cited Korean economic development in Culture Matters, a result of a seminar project at Harvard University, as a vivid example of cultural factors in comparative politics. This book is part of this newly revived culturist trend, and as such is perhaps the first meaningful work to analyze Korean politics in the age of the renaissance of “culture.”            

Professor Kihl explains the transformation of the political economy in the Sixth Republic as a process of conflict and compromise between the traditional values of Confucianism and the Western ideology of democracy. He explains institutionalization as being the key to avoid a fatal conflict between the traditional values of Confucianism and the Western idea of democracy. The author understands that ideas of modernization, democratization, and globalization are the key to the transformation of Korean politics as well as economics.

However, we could raise two issues that are not discussed in this book. First, where do these ideas come from? For instance, the idea of modernization might be common in the Third World regardless of cultural heritages in the modern era. It was not rare for the state to pursue modernization to catch up with advanced industrialized countries. In many cases, the idea of modernization was driven by capitalist interests and state preferences. In Korea, the bureaucratic authoritarian government drove modernization and economic development. The capitalist interests were allied with industrialization policies to restrict wage increases and to discourage unionization of labor. However, the state has autonomy from capitalist interests in Korea. Unlike South American countries, the state in Korea was not an apparatus of capitalists to serve capitalist interests. So the author should have given much more attention to institutional settings as independent variables.   

Second, the author should have been more cautious to figure out causality. He was so fascinated by the driving forces of ideas that he did not distinguish cause from effects. For instance, the institutional reform for democratization might not be a result of the confrontation between democracy—or a transparent system of Western ideas—and the hierarchy and paternalism in Korean traditional values. Looking at the history of Korean democratization and the equalization of economic redistribution, sometimes institutional changes preceded value changes or behavioral changes. For instance, wage increases and economic struggles by laborers were not a cause but a result of democratization and the birth of the Sixth Republic. In Korean political economy, it is not easy to find out the exact causality between ideas and institutions. Therefore, the author should have been careful to declare that ideas matter.

However, to witness the renaissance of culture in this book is a good thing for the diversity and richness of the study of Korean politics. Obviously this book deserves our attention and appreciation. 

Citation:
Kim, Jinha 2007
Review of Transforming Korean Politics: Democracy, Reform, and Culture, by Young Whan Kihl (2005)
Korean Studies Review 2007, no. 11
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr07-11.htm