Title: Democratization and Social Movements in South Korea: Defiant Institutionalization
Abstract: Even those who are familiar with the analysis of or have experience in protests are awed each time Seoul’s wide Sejong Avenue, from Kyŏngbok Palace to City Hall plaza, fills up with demonstrators. As I write this book review, in November 2016, some of the largest demonstrations in South Korea’s history are taking place across the country. The protesters demanding the president’s resignation are remarkably diverse. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Korean Peasants’ League, the two consistently important political challengers in the past two decades, are of course there, but so are artists, celebrities, middle-school students, part-time workers, and both underrepresented and privileged groups who at other times have few common interests. The fast organizing of large-scale events and the immediate sharing of slogans, banners, candles, and other resources, all witnessed in the November demonstrations, are what the sociologist Sun-Chul Kim would still recognize as the cohesive and autonomous character of South Korea’s social-movement sector.In fact, cohesiveness and autonomy are parts of Kim’s original concept of “defiant institutionalization,” the defining quality of South Korea’s social-movement sector since the 1987 June Uprising. The concept describes the social movements’ institutionalization as a “routine part of everyday politics” but “not entirely assimilated into the norms and practices of the political establishment, thereby allowing political challengers to be more contentious and less compliant” (p. 8). While internal cohesion enables diverse social-movement groups to connect and act in unison, their autonomy allows them to “formulate agendas and carry out campaigns relatively free from the constraints of powerful political actors” (p. 8).In recognizing social movements as important political challengers, Kim’s study provides a balanced critique of South Korea’s party politics and procedural democracy in the past three decades. Defiant institutionalization (and its components of cohesion and autonomy) is, hence, the outcome of a political system that largely excluded the movement sector from parliamentary politics, an exclusion that forced social movements to rely on each other for resources and to become a party-like entity providing a voice for marginalized people. Included here is the incisive critique of minjung, however crucial they were in igniting various social movements. On the one hand, Kim is cautious about attributing South Korea’s 1987 democratic transition to the mass power of minjung because the organizational capacity of underrepresented groups like the workers prior to 1987 was actually low and because the high economic growth rate had shifted the focus of protests to antiauthoritarianism, not improving labor rights or working conditions. On the other hand, minjung groups were misused by individuals and political parties to gain popular support and attain political power, a repeated process that often left minjung groups out of elite politics. Kim Young Sam’s and Kim Dae Jung’s political ascensions serve as bitter lessons here. Sun-Chul Kim’s assessment of 1980s social movement is therefore one of hard truth: “South Korea’s democratic transition in 1987 was a conservative one, mainly because critical decisions were made by political elites from the top-down without incorporating voices from the bottom-up. . . . Lacking proper mechanisms of interest mediation, the only option they had was to take their issues to the streets” (p. 43).What happens in the streets is the most captivating part of this concise and well-written book. Sun-Chul Kim’s narrative is supported by detailed examinations of protests from 1984 to 2002 (through government documents, police reports, activist groups’ documents, and newspapers). The changing patterns are illuminating: the decline and rise in violent protests in the 1990s (p. 5), the conceptual space of institutionalization showing the relationship between autonomy and cohesion (p. 9), major shifts in protests from struggles for political and labor rights to struggles against neoliberal reforms (p. 60), and the growing importance of formal coalitions since the 1990s (p. 62). From an array of data emerges Kim’s notion of “protest campaign,” defined as a “sustained political challenge over a salient issue that involves the mobilization of multiples sectors of society in a delimited time period” (p. 59). This notion explains how South Korea’s diverse social-movement groups come together for a cause and how their coalition efforts forge deep and wide bonds that enable future protest campaigns. It is also in this sense that Kim sees the emergence of the “citizen movement” in the late 1990s as a continuation of the minjung movement (pp. 68–73).The analysis of popular contention since the late 1990s, the last section of the book, introduces the situation of “double transition” in which the continued struggle for political democratization is confronted with the problems arising from neoliberal globalization. The three case studies—the anti-Uruguay Round campaign of 1994, the antiausterity campaign of 1998, and the antiprivatization campaign of 2002—provide an insightful look at the changing, paradoxical landscape of South Korea’s social movement today in the face of global capital. As political challengers like the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions continue to fight for democracy and labor rights, the global neoliberal condition reduces the South Korean government’s capacity to address domestic affairs. Kim’s conclusion, however, is that defiant institutionalization will be protracted, not retracted: “Social movements will continue to challenge the status quo and operate as a key mechanism for social change” (p. 150).South Korea’s history of democratization is widely discussed and taught, but revisiting it today as a serious topic of study—as the June Uprising’s thirty-year mark approaches and as large protests in South Korea are once again challenging the established power structure—is a much-needed exercise. And I think Sun-Chul Kim’s book is one of the best to date. Kim is an activist-scholar who was in the streets of South Korea during momentous times of protests, and he is honest about what the social movements have earned and what they have not. I do feel that an additional treatise on the theoretical debates within social movements would have made a compelling chapter. What really is the influence of the National Liberation/People’s Democracy debate? Does it have actual bearing on coalition work? Or what does the fact that harsh criticism of each other’s theoretical camp does not prevent joint protest campaigns say about the relationship between theory and practice in activism? Still, this book has arrived at an appropriate moment, and more than that, this book offers prescient concepts and patterns that help us understand the process of social change, what activists already engage in practice. Whatever the outcome of the November protests may be, they are a testament to the ongoing importance of defiant collective life.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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