"Pursuing Post-democratization: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South...

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics byPublic Security in Contemporary South KoreaJamie Doucette a and Se-Woong Koob

aGeography, School of Environment, Education, and Development, University of Manchester, UK;bMacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist poli-ticians and other social movements during her first year in office.We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate withcontemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a processwhereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to marketlogics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Underthe conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontationknown in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politicstargets social conflict and political dissent as threats to nationalsecurity and has involved both illegal interventions by state insti-tutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agenciesincluding the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politicsthat affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation byobfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and byattempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associatedwith former dictatorships. In order to better understand this con-juncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between bothformer public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politiciansand a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the NewRight.

KEYWORDSSouth Korea;post-democracy; electoralinterference; Park Geun-hye;democratisation;post-politics

In December 2012, Park Geun-hye, a daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee, wonthe presidency of the Republic of Korea for the conservative Saenuri Party. Hercampaign was based on the slogan of “economic democratisation,” which signalledunprecedented intentions on the part of South Korean conservatives to take on thecountry’s large business groups, chaebol, and expand social welfare. Park’s electoralsuccess was the result of concerted efforts, beginning in 2011, to distinguish her fromthe incumbent conservative president Lee Myung-bak, whose pro-growth 747 economicplan (according to which South Korea would achieve 7% in annual GDP growth, US$40,000 in per capita income and become the world’s seventh largest economy) hadcome to be seen by the public as a failure, and whose Four Rivers Project had sowedallegations of corruption and won notoriety for detrimental effects on the environment

CONTACT Jamie Doucette [email protected] Geography, School of Environment, Education,and Development, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, United Kingdom, M13 9PL.

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ASIA, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2015.1094119

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(see Kang 2011). In contrast to the unpopular Lee, Park presented herself as a maternalfigure to the electorate, voicing concerns about inequality and appointing as heradvisors moderate conservatives who promoted wealth redistribution, increased full-time employment, and even corporate governance reform. Debates between Park’sadvisors, such as the moderate conservative Kim Jong-in, and those of the liberal-leftcandidate Moon Jae-in were therefore surprisingly amiable. While the two sides differedon the appropriateness of individual policies proposed under the slogan, neither campdisputed the fact that the next president needed to pursue some form of economicdemocratisation.

That such civil debate on economic issues came to rule the country’s famouslyraucous political landscape was seen as representing an important new phase in theculmination of South Korean democracy (see Kang, Leheny, and Cha 2013). Thisstraightforward narrative was however complicated by events following Park’s electoralvictory and inauguration as the first female president of South Korea: Park’s promise ofincreased welfare and economic reform went unfulfilled as she quickly backtracked onher core pledges and failed to offer key administrative posts to the moderate conserva-tive advisors that had helped organise her election campaign (Doucette 2015). Afterintroducing corporate governance reforms that did little to challenge the chaebol’sentrenched economic power and revising her promises to create a universal pensionsystem, she declared that her economic democratisation drive had been successfullycompleted and that her economic policies would now centre on fostering a “creativeeconomy” – a euphemism for economic deregulation and privatisation of state-ownedindustries. The discourse of economic democratisation vanished overnight.

To the dismay of moderate conservatives as well as the liberal-left, Park reshuffledher cabinet in early August 2013 to include a number of elderly advisors from herfather’s dictatorial regime and former prosecutors-turned-politicians who had heldpositions related to anti-communist activities and the maintenance of “public security”in past military and conservative governments. Rather than pursuing economic demo-cratisation or taking on the chaebol, Park shifted her attention towards the country’slabour unions, de-registering the Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union(KTU) on the ground that it retained a handful of fired or dismissed workers asmembers, and attacking the Korean Railway Workers’ Union (KRWU) who went onstrike to protest Park’s attempt to privatise the vaunted high-speed rail system, theKTX.1 By February 2014, Park introduced a “Three-Year Innovation Plan” that wasreminiscent of Lee Myung-bak’s neo-liberal 747 plan: Park promised to “smash regula-tions” and introduce a “competitive system” into the public sector with the goal ofachieving a 4% growth rate, 70% employment and per capita income of US$40,000 by2017 – in other words, hers would be a 474 plan.

On a more sinister note, in June 2013, it was confirmed that allies of Park’spresidential campaign in the government sector had engaged in anti-democratic actionsfor two full years prior to the election. The National Intelligence Service (NIS), SouthKorea’s main spy organisation, and other state agencies were revealed to have con-ducted a massive internet campaign using social networking sites and other onlineplatforms to discredit liberal-left politicians as chongbuk chwap’a or “pro-North lef-tists.” The NIS chief Won Sei-hoon was subsequently convicted of violating a law thatbars his agency from interfering in domestic politics. But to public outcry, he was

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initially found innocent on a more serious charge of violating election laws, whichforbids public officials from influencing elections. Although an appeals court found himguilty on both counts, the Supreme Court later reversed that ruling on technicalgrounds and ordered a new trial in July 2015. In his defence, the agency and its politicalallies presented such electoral intervention as being in the interest of public andnational security and therefore legitimate. Conservative forces were dismissive duringmonths of ensuing protests that decried the electoral interference, calling efforts toinitiate a full investigation destabilising to the state and therefore unpatriotic. Putanother way, this “politics by public security” – the labelling of dissent and activismas a threat to national security – was used by Park’s government to lend legitimacy tothe actions of state agencies involved in the electoral interference and thus ward offquestions into the manner in which the president had come into power (Doucette andKoo 2013).

Moreover, recalling the tactics of past conservative regimes that used exaggeratedpublic security threats to tarnish oppositional forces and to divert public attention frombroader issues of social justice, Park’s government brought charges of treason andNational Security Law (NSL) violation against a sitting lawmaker from the small,oppositional United Progressive Party and his associates. This occurred just as theNIS chief was served with the indictment for facilitating the agency’s electoralinterference.

In this article, we argue that the contemporary politics of Park’s administrationrepresents a South Korean version of post-democratisation, a process whereby socialrights are increasingly subordinated to market logic and state power insulated frompopular challenges. While the literature on post-democracy is varied, in general theterm has been used to denote a process of depoliticisation that occurs under ostensiblydemocratic regimes where elections are held, governments rotated, and where there isformal guarantee of freedom of speech. This process represents an erosion of democ-racy in the sense that key political and economic decision-making powers as providedwithin the democratic framework are monopolised by a small elite. Political participa-tion is confined to processes that do not contest established political-economic config-urations and/or is replaced by techno-managerial governance. In other words, post-democracy functions as a process of disempowering the electorate. Furthermore, thisprocess can take place through a variety of means, among which include tactics like“politics by public security” that target political conflicts and disagreement as “an ultrapolitics of radical and violent disavowal” to be penalised through exclusion and con-tainment (Swyngedouw 2011, 370) – that is, political disagreement is treated as adisturbance to public order and targeted with the same logic as a police operation(see Rancière 1999; Stravrakakis 2011).

Much of the literature on post-democracy highlights the following hallmark features:the establishment of a neo-liberal consensus between dominant political parties (inmost cases due to the rightward drift of social democracy), the commercialisation ofpublic services, the reorientation of political parties from their core ideologies to thevagaries of public opinion polls, and the resilience of the national security stateapparatus (Crouch 2004; Rorty 2004; Rancière 1999). However, these features are not,by any means, universal; post-democracy is not a one-size-fits-all process but rather onethat has heterogeneous, differentiated and uneven dynamics (Swyngedouw 2011, 372).

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What unites authors associated with the concept of post-democracy is that each sees itas a process that abuses democratic institutions and erodes democratic control andaccountability, and thus works towards reducing democracy to a minimalist form. InCrouch’s words, “a post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use allthe institutions of democracy but in which they increasingly become a formal shell”(Crouch 2013).

In this article, we posit that a parallel yet contradictory affirmation and subversion ofdemocracy has animated the process of post-democratisation in contemporary SouthKorea. First, while South Korean conservatives formally recognise the validity of thecountry’s existing democratic institutions, the very same figures have attempted to usestate institutions to stifle criticism of anti-democratic and illegal actions committed bystate agencies, such as the recent electoral interference by the NIS. Furthermore, theseagencies have cast their activities as legitimate and/or legal actions against threats todemocracy, in the name of national or public security. Second, this politics by publicsecurity has been used to undermine popular calls for maximal or egalitarian democ-racy that are embraced by liberal-left politicians and social movements tracing theirlegacy to the earlier popular democracy struggles. Conservative forces are uneasy aboutthe emancipatory legacy of the democracy movement, and prefer to posit formerdictatorial regimes as having established the necessary foundations – national securityand capitalist development – for democracy. Thus, politics by public security may beseen as a mode of post-democratic politics in as much as it affirms a minimalistconception of democracy by obscuring the legacies of democratic struggles againstauthoritarianism and, by extension, misrepresenting the current demands of popularforces associated with this legacy.

In particular, we assert that the contemporary politics of post-democratisation inSouth Korea is animated by a unique alliance between political forces associated withthe so-called “New Right” movement and remnants of prior authoritarian regimes, suchas the former prosecutors who were at the centre of past public security scares and nowoccupy prominent positions in the Saenuri Party, in addition to serving as Park Geun-hye’s core advisors. Meanwhile, the New Right, which includes a number of former left-wing activists, has supplied older conservative forces with a narrative that positsdemocratisation largely in terms of market democracy and as a linear outcome of themodernisation policies pursued by former authoritarian regimes: a teleological narrativethat denigrates political struggles and hard-fought accomplishments of past democraticmovements. The New Right, much like the Old Right to which it claims to be heir, arecritical of efforts to revisit past injustices committed by the authoritarian regimes,seeing such initiatives as undermining the legitimacy of the South Korean state. Theyare also suspicious of demands for social rights that might disrupt the operation of thefree market. In summary, the conservative interference in democratic politics finds itsjustification in revisiting the history of South Korean military dictatorships, conferringgreater legitimacy on contemporary conservative forces, conflating national securitywith public security so as to contain dissent, and presenting itself as the very medium ofdemocratic rule while casting democratisation activists as anti-state and therefore anti-democracy.

This article is organised as follows. In the following section we briefly survey some ofthe recent literature on post-democratisation. The section that follows examines


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commensurate arguments about South Korean democratisation made by South Koreanscholars. We then analyse the recent turn towards politics by public security as asymptom of post-democratisation. In the ensuing section, we examine the historicalroots of this politics in the Yushin-era policies of the Park Chung-hee regime and thecareers of key figures who have helped shape these politics and now occupy key posts inPark’s administration. We then examine how the New Right has sought to legitimisepolitics by public security by painting a positive picture of the legacy of formerdictatorial regimes, and by extension the conservative political elite as legitimatedemocratic forces in South Korea. In the final section we provide some comments onthe potential limits of Park’s sharp turn towards post-democracy.

Uneven geographies of post-democratisation

In recent years there has been a diverse but growing literature on post-democratisation.This literature has used the term to draw attention to methodological concerns aboutthe study of democratic politics as well as to a particular social and political process thatis animated by the depoliticisation of popular politics. Both of these senses are usefulfor our argument.

As a methodological problem, post-democratisation has been used by several scho-lars to call into question mainstream accounts of democratisation that focus toonarrowly on the regularity of democratic elections as the criterion for successfuldemocratisation – as important as these may be – and on teleological, unilinearnarratives of democratic consolidation that ignore the reverberation of past politicalstruggles into the present (see Teti 2012; Valbjørn and Bank 2010; Valbjørn 2012). Herethe term post-democratisation implies a sense of a duration of politics after “democra-tisation” or after a democratic event such as a popular uprising or accomplishment ofelectoral democracy, for democratisation is not simply a one-off event or unilineartransition to an isomorphic ideal-type. Post-democratisation is thus posited as analternative to both mainstream and conservative approaches to democratisation thatare often animated by a teleological logic that posits electoral democracy or an idealisedunderstanding of Western liberal democracy as the end-point (see Hahm 2008;Fukuyama 1992). By doing so, mainstream accounts tend not to look into the fate ofother democratic demands, such as demands for maximal or egalitarian democracy, orother historical and geographically specific demands such as, in the South Korean case,demands for historical reconciliation, gender equality and peaceful engagement withNorth Korea, among others. In this sense, moving beyond the mainstream “democra-tisation” frame entails an analysis that extends beyond a simple focus on the generalinstitutional elements of democratic transition in order to examine the various parti-cular democratic demands in a variety of geographic spaces. This focus resonates withrecent scholarship in human geography that critiques the narrow purview of thedemocratisation literature (Bell and Staeheli 2001) and calls instead for “contextualstudies of substantive democratisation” (Stokke 2009). At the methodological level,then, the sense of post-democratisation as a scholarly effort oriented towards over-coming both the teleology and lacunae associated with the modernisation approach isuseful for our purposes here, in as much as the effort focuses scholarship on the


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contextual rather than generic aspects of democratisation, and removes the latter fromits unilinear assumptions.

Second, as discussed in the introduction, there is a sense of post-democratisation as asocial and political process. This process results in a condition, post-democracy,represented by the preponderance of, as Offe (2012, 3) puts it, “accumulation, profit,efficiency, competitiveness, austerity and the market over the sphere of social rights,political redistribution, and sustainability, as well as the defenselessness of the lattersphere against the former.” For Crouch (2004), this is a condition where elections havelargely been turned into spectacles and politics primarily negotiated in private betweenpoliticians and the business elite. Nonetheless, post-democracy is not a concept that islimited to the study of elections. Rather, it is oriented to how, within an ostensiblydemocratic institutional context, political power becomes insulated from or seeks tocontain popular political struggles and social conflict. Politics seems driven by aconsensus that there is no alternative to the rule of the market. Political conflict anddisagreement are treated as pathology and operationalised as a threat to public order.

While the context in which Crouch (2004), Swyngedouw (2011) and other authors whotheorise on post-democracy are writing is often, but not exclusively, Western Europe –where social democratic parties have adopted a neo-liberal consensus that the marketcannot be challenged – we believe that post-democratisation is not a process that is confinedsimply to that region or to established liberal democracies as such. While Crouch describespost-democracy primarily as a process of democracy turning back towards patterns of eliterule associated with pre-democratic times (that is, as a parabola-shaped process), thistrajectory, as we seek to understand it, does not require liberal democracy as its prerequisite.We contend that it is applicable to other contexts characterised by greater and lesser degreesof liberal democracy – such as in fledgling democracies such as South Korea – and wherepolitics has become closely identified with the prerogatives of the elite (see Brockington2014, 36–40).2 Furthermore, as discussed above, geographers have argued that post-democracy should be seen as a process with spatially uneven and heterogeneous dynamicsrather than a static, ideal-type condition. As the political struggles that it targets are alwaysspecific and particular, so too are the geographies of the process. Applying the concept toany specific context thus requires that attention be paid to the ways in which post-democratisation grafts itself on to existing hegemonic structures of political economicpower and trajectories of development and democratisation rather than assuming that itwill follow a pre-ordained path with the same actors and institutional context in each place.

The geographical variability of post-democratisation means that, in some contexts,it might resonate with or correspond to processes of authoritarian reversal: a termthat some may feel provides a more accurate description of the South Koreansituation. Nonetheless, we feel that post-democratisation serves as a useful heuristicfor understanding the contemporary South Korean conjuncture in as much as thepolitics described in this article are oriented more towards reducing democracy to amanipulatable, minimalist form than reversion to fully fledged authoritarian rule assuch. Since post-democratisation is considered to be a parabola-shaped process,however, an outcome such as authoritarian reversal is not precluded by the analysiswe present here. Indeed, the two may correspond to each other. For instance,Glassman (2010, 1303) describes the lead-up to the Thai coup of 2006 and itssubsequent reverberations as a slide towards post-democracy understood as a


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condition animated by both the subversion of democratic political forms achievedthrough previous social struggles as well as explicit attempts to rein in popularinfluence: in the Thai case it is the influence of up-country and poor people’smovements – and the mild extension of social rights via affordable health careprogrammes and rural development schemes promoted by Thaksin Shinawatra –that was being targeted by the wealthy and influential royalists and aligned politicalforces.3 In order to understand this predicament, Glassman provides an analysis ofthe forces of uneven development that underlie the status quo, which has sought todefer long-standing democratic demands for equality by Thai poor peoples’ move-ments that have participated in a variety of democratic mobilisations against royalistand military rule over the past four decades. Here the sources of post-democratisa-tion have less to do with the rightward drift of social democratic parties, which arebarely fledgling in the Thai context, than with the enduring legacy of Cold Wardevelopmentalism which has allowed royalist elites to continue to exercise a con-siderable capacity to mobilise the coercive institutions of the state, even when there isa functioning multi-party parliament (Glassman 2010, 1319).

Glassman wrote his analysis at a time when it appeared that Thailand wouldcontinue along a post-democratic trajectory characterised by a “functioning multipartyparliament but in which governments elected by the majority cannot effectively func-tion or carry out policies because of Bangkok-based and royalist opposition” (Glassman2010, 1319). The electoral victory of the People’s Power Party in 2007 and Pheu ThaiParty in 2011 seemed to confirm this assessment. Following the crackdown on the redshirts in the events leading up to the May 2014 coup, however, Glassman (2013) hasplaced much greater emphasis on the explicitly authoritarian dimensions of the Thaisituation.4 In this case, the concept of post-democratisation, which symbolises anerosion or hollowing out of democracy, loses its efficacy as a description of the currentsituation, but not necessarily the processes that led up to it.

Its limits in describing the Thai situation notwithstanding, we believe that post-democ-racy is a useful concept for exploring political processes that seek to contain politicalconflict under a minimal semblance of democracy, such as the current Korean conjunc-ture. Once that semblance has been breached, as in the Thai case, a shift in conceptualfocus may be necessary depending on what aspects of the situation are under study.However, given that authoritarian interruptions of democratic rule are often justifiedthrough a post-democratic logic, the concept may yet have traction in distinctly author-itarian contexts where military intervention is justified as necessary to preserve the socialorder so that a functioning democracy can be established or maintained. It is best, then, tounderstand post-democratisation as a process that operates along a continuum rangingfrom relatively liberal to authoritarian contexts. For the present article, we find the conceptto be crucial to exploring contemporary politics under South Korea’s Park Geun-hyeadministration, which has consistently emphasised its respect for the rule of law butresorted to tactics that speak little of conviction in the importance of upholding demo-cratic principles, most notably freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the indepen-dence of the judiciary and prosecution service.


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Post-democracy in the South Korean context

Critical South Korean scholars have made arguments that are commensurate withmuch of the post-democratisation literature, but situated in the context of SouthKorea’s development and democratisation. For instance, in Democracy afterDemocratization: The Korean Experience, Choi Jang-jip (2005) argues that SouthKorean democratisation has been a conservative process that has failed to developsubstantive institutions and political parties that adequately represent the socio-eco-nomic interests of the working class (see also Song 2013; Shin 2010; Suh et al. 2012;Gray 2013). Choi’s theory of “conservative democratisation” concerns both the liberaldemocratic governments of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003–08)as well as the earlier post-1987 conservative regimes of Roh Tae-woo and Kim Young-sam.5 After the election of the conservative president Lee Myung-bak, Choi furtherdeveloped his ideas in response to the changes he saw taking place. Lee Myung-bak’sgovernment attacked, undermined or closed down a number of the new institutionsestablished by the preceding liberal administrations and strongly oriented towardsaddressing past wrongs, such as the National Human Rights Commission, Truth andReconciliation Commission, and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, all ofwhich were restructured, disbanded or largely subordinated under Lee’s tenure(Doucette 2013; Kim, D. C. 2010; De Ceuster 2010). In response to these changes,Choi shifted his attention to the frailty of political liberalism. He advanced the thesisthat due to ideological confrontation between the “conservatives” of the old develop-mentalist regimes and the “progressives” who fought for democracy in the 1980s –which continued under the regimes of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun – liberalismin South Korea was poorly established. One consequence of that prolonged confronta-tion is the hitherto impossibility of consolidating the country’s new democracy andenacting substantive political reforms. Choi (2009, 6) argues that changes in “author-itarian bureaucratic apparatuses and their behavioural norms” have taken place at anextremely slow pace. And under Lee Myung-bak, some of the former repressiveapparatuses of the state, notably the judicial and police agencies, expanded their“functions and power in a manner with which the citizens were quite familiar duringthe authoritarian rule” (Choi 2009, 6).

The source of this problem, for Choi, dates back to the Cold War and post-liberation period. Choi argues that while the values and institutions of liberalismprovided the “raison d’état” for the establishment of a separate South Korean stateafter emancipation from the Japanese, anti-communism came to be seen as a moreurgent task than building a democratic state. The architects of the separate SouthKorean state felt that “under the circumstances, the realisation of liberal democracywas not possible without the realising of national security and internal politicalstability.” From Choi’s perspective, the two processes – “materializing liberal democ-racy and building an anti-Communist bulwark” – became virtually identical as statebuilders chose to consolidate “the political order and stability of the regime by makingit [the regime] a solid anti-Communist bulwark prior to building liberal democracy”(Choi 2009, 2). The result was the displacement and deferral of liberalism as theultimate goal of the state’s foundation:


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[W]hile the ultimate goal of the newly created state was the establishment of liberaldemocracy, the means to attain it was Cold War anticommunism. In reality, the goaland its means were displaced. Also, it accompanied an obvious discrepancy betweenreality and rhetoric, and between formal institutions and practices (Choi 2009, 2).

From the perspective of Choi, this legacy continues to shape contemporary politics. Thenational security issue remains an imperative that cannot be overridden by otherprinciples and norms, “even those of democracy and liberalism,” such that “the endsand the means are hardly allowed to be distinguished” (Choi 2009, 6). In other words,the frailty of liberalism leads to a lack of moral restraint on the way in which thegovernment deals with political conflict and security pressures.

Cho Hee-yeon advances a complementary argument to Choi’s analysis of conserva-tive democratisation and the nature of the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak.Cho (2012a, 7) agrees with Choi that liberal democratic regimes have failed to sub-stantively represent the working class and thus aided the conservative trajectory ofdemocratisation (see also Cho 2009, 2012b). In this sense, the appeal of Lee’s pro-growth politics stemmed in part from the failure of the preceding liberal governmentsand presidents to address fundamental problems in society such as income inequality,the influence of the chaebol, and the power of public security agencies. However, Choadds that the more recent neo-conservative government of Lee Myung-bak in particularrepresents a more distinct post-democratic threshold as it is composed of both neo-conservative forces as well as remnants of the old dictatorial regime (Cho 2012a, 16). InCho’s (2012a) view, the Lee government was post-democratic in that it did not involve“regime reformers” or “regime challengers” as did previous liberal-democratic govern-ments, and relied instead on traditional pro-business and regional interests, as well asthe neo-conservatives of the New Right movement, while undermining state institutionsdesigned to safeguard democratic norms and promote social equality.

Published in 2012, however, Cho’s analysis of the post-democratic turn under Leedid not have the opportunity to anticipate and interpret the electoral interference bystate agencies surrounding Park Geun-hye’s election nor the policies of her adminis-tration, which together represent a deepening erosion of the gains made by thedemocracy movement. Park’s appointments favoured remnants of the old militarydictatorships and her administration has sought to recuperate the old guard and castgreater doubt upon the legacy of democratic forces. For instance, in the place of popularmovements as historical agents of South Korean democratisation, prominent conserva-tives in Park’s administration position former dictatorial regimes as establishing thenecessary structural features for a healthy democracy (particularly by nurturing amiddle class and preventing the spread of communism), and, in contrast, portrayprogressive social movements and democratic political forces as a threat to publicsecurity, and ultimately, democracy itself. Aligned with the use of public securitymechanisms for containing dissent and in some cases even merely mild criticism andpolitical competition, this cultural politics seeks to obfuscate the nature of the bona fidedemocracy movement and restore the honour of former authoritarian regimes as a wayof reinvigorating contemporary conservative political forces. As we discuss below, thishas been an ongoing project for conservative groups that began during their time inopposition under liberal governments and gained momentum with the rise of conser-vative civic organisations and continued under Lee Myung-bak, focusing in particular


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on the revalorisation of Park Chung-hee’s legacy in several sectors, from economicpolicy to foreign aid to reproductive health (see Hur 2013; Shin 2012). But this politicshas reached a new apogee under Park’s regime with the pervasive smearing of theopposition as pro-North leftists and the containment, in the name of public security, ofpopular social movements: especially those that have demanded greater labour rights,inter-Korean engagement, and public oversight of the state apparatus following theelectoral intervention by state agencies and regulatory failures such as the tragic sinkingof an illegally overloaded passenger ferry, the Sewol, in April 2014.

The current conjuncture thus requires exploration in greater detail. We first examinethe recent NIS electoral intervention and accompanying cases of public security politics.Following Choi and Cho, we then locate the historical sources of this style of politicswithin the Cold War anti-communism as personified by senior members of both Park’sfather’s and her current administration. While many of the actions we describe, such asthe recent electoral intervention by the NIS, can be fittingly labelled as illiberal,authoritarian or simply anti-democratic, what we seek to draw attention to here isthe particular post-democratic logic through which they have been justified. In thisprocess, the reasoning of the New Right and the group’s collaboration with members ofthe old regime are particularly troubling and likely to remain a challenge for progressivepolitical forces for the remainder of the Park administration.

The 2012 electoral interference and the case of the United ProgressiveParty

In order to better understand the current conjuncture under Park Geun-hye, it isimperative to first review the contemporary use of politics by public security beforeexamining the ways in which this politics has served to obfuscate the legacy of forcesassociated with popular democratic politics. Although not widely detected at the time,the re-amplification of politics by public security began in the late stages of the 2012presidential election. After the United Progressive Party (UPP)’s candidate, Lee Jung-hee, confronted Park Geun-hye in the televised debates, declaring that Park’s partyrepresented the roots of Japanese collaboration and dictatorship, Lee, in turn, wasportrayed as a North Korean sympathiser and attacked in the conservative media.6 Inorder to tar the main opposition Democratic Party with a similar slander, ChungMoon-hun and Kim Moo-sung, lawmakers from the ruling Saenuri Party, used aclassified transcript – illegally obtained and allegedly supplied by the NIS – to spreada false claim about former president Roh, for whom presidential candidate Moon Jae-inhad served as chief of staff. They claimed that Roh had secretly agreed to abandon theNorthern Limit Line – the de facto western maritime boundary between the two Koreas– during his summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2007. Finally, inthe final days of the election campaign, evidence of electoral interference by the NISand other state agencies appeared.

Following the arrest, in June 2013, of former NIS chief Won Sei-hoon on charges ofviolating the Public Official Election Act, prosecutors began slowly disclosing informa-tion about the political activities of the NIS and other state agencies. By December 2013,it was revealed that the NIS had produced, over a period of two years, some 1,900online posts and approximately 22 million tweets with political or election-related


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content – roughly 30% of all election-related content that was generated on Twitter.This content was circulated by agents of the NIS’s psychological warfare team and hiredcontractors. In addition, subsequent parliamentary audits revealed that the Ministry ofPatriots and Veterans Affairs as well as the Ministry of National Defense’s CyberwarfareCommand had similarly worked to assist Park’s campaign.7 But as can be seen inTable 1, the ultimate penalties suffered by those in charge of the state security apparatuswere light and even non-existent at times.

The electoral interference carried out by these agencies consisted of the expansiveuse of popular internet forums and social networking sites to create and circulatemessages intended to discredit key opposition figures as chongbuk chwap’a: a termthat is commonly translated as “pro-North leftists.”8 The overall online message fromthese state organs was that South Korea required defending from those who collaboratewith the regime in Pyongyang to undermine the nation-state from within. That is whythe NIS’s revelation at the height of the electoral interference scandal on August 28,2013 – that it was investigating an opposition lawmaker from the UPP, Lee Seok-ki, andhis associates on charges of sedition and plotting an armed rebellion, as well as charges

Table 1. Actions by state agencies during the 2012 presidential election campaignState agency/actor Interventions Judicial outcomes

NationalIntelligenceService (NIS)

22 million tweets related to politics andelections between January 2011 and December2012 from 2,270 twitter accounts. Of these, 1.2million were retweets of tweets by conservativefigures.a Alleged illegal release of statedocuments concerning inter-Korean summit

Arrest and trial of ex-chief Won Sei-hoon andhis two subordinates; convicted on the chargeof interference in domestic politics butacquitted on the charge of electoralinterference in the lower court; All three werefound guilty on both counts on appeal; theSupreme Court, however, voided that rulingand ordered a new trial.d A tentativeagreement on reforming the agency reachedin the National Assembly, but one that doesnot set strict limits on domestic intelligencegathering and investigative powerf

Ministry ofDefenseCyberwarfareCommand

7,100 online postings in favour or againstspecific politicians and political partiesb

21 current or former officials charged withviolation of the military criminal act thatstipulates an obligation to stay neutralb

Ministry ofPatriots andVeterans’Affairs

Conducted extensive national security trainingsessions using a manual that criticisedopposition parties as a national security threate

Subjected to parliamentary audit

Ministry ofSecurity andPublicAdministration

Distributed national security training manualsdepicting former president Park Chung-hee aslaying the foundation of South Korea’sdemocratisatione

Subjected to parliamentary audit

SeoulMetropolitanPolice Agency(SMPA)

Hastily concluding investigation into electoralinterference. Allegations of evidence of a cover-up

SMPA Chief Kim Young-pan indicted forviolating the Election Law and the PoliceOfficers Law; acquitted February 2014c

Sources: ahttp://www.hani.co.kr/arti/infographic/info_politics/614303.html?_ns=r5;bhttp://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20140819000609;chttp://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/02/116_151171.html;dhttp://minbyun.or.kr/?p=26366; http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/politics/politics_general/700522.html;ehttp://www.peoplepower21.org/English/1128957; http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20131014000769&mod=skb;

fhttp://minbyun.or.kr/?p=24226.


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of violating the National Security Law – appeared to be aimed at distracting the publicfrom the agency’s own criminal activities.

The case against Lee can be summed up in this way: the NIS argued that Lee and hisallies had planned to sabotage the government in the event of war. Speaking to what theNIS called a “Revolutionary Organisation” (RO) – a gathering that included hissupporters, their families and UPP members – Lee allegedly stressed the need toprepare to fight against American imperialism and by extension the South Koreangovernment, if a war broke out between the two Koreas. The English acronym “RO” isshorthand for this group’s alleged Korean name, Armed People’s RevolutionaryOrganisation (Mujang Inmin Hyŏngmyŏng Kigu). The term reportedly appeared inthe NIS arrest warrant for Lee and other members of the UPP but no other sourcesare known to the public. The transcript of the meeting leaked by the NIS showed thatthe RO discussed strategies to attack transportation, energy, communication and otherkey state infrastructures (Hankook ilbo, September 2, 2013; September 3, 2013). Despiteconcerns about the quality of the prosecution’s evidence, on February 17, 2014, Lee wasconvicted on most charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. In an appeal at theSeoul Superior Court, he was found not guilty of plotting a rebellion against the state.In its acquittal, the court declined to acknowledge the existence of the RO, much less itscapacity to plot an insurrection, but allowed other convictions, namely NSL violationand sedition, against Lee to stand, meaning that Lee would still have to serve nine yearsof his original 12-year sentence.

Lee’s arrest, indictment and trial took place at a pivotal moment of the NIS electoralinterference scandal. Given his infamy even among the South Korean left as a championof a particular strand of left-nationalism popular in the 1980s but in decline since, manyin South Korea and abroad expressed their belief that the NIS was pursuing the caseagainst Lee to avoid scrutiny of its own misconduct and resist pressures for the agency’sreform. The NIS took advantage of the potent association between Lee and North Koreain the public imagination to reiterate communist threats and to legitimate the resurgentpublic security politics. That Lee and his associates could be convicted on NSL violationsimply for singing “revolutionary” songs from North Korea was deemed especiallytroubling by liberal-left commentators as it called into question the limits of freedomof speech in what was supposed to be democratic South Korea in the twenty-firstcentury. The Constitutional Court’s later dissolution of the UPP in December 2014 oncharges that its principles supported North Korean-style socialism and thus violatedSouth Korea’s basic democratic order – the first forced dissolution of a political partysince 1958 – led to further troubling questions about Korean democracy.

The Park regime’s reliance on public security rationale was not confined to the caseof Lee and the UPP, however. As briefly discussed in the introduction, Park’s admin-istration has actively confronted the labour movement. It deregistered the 60,000-member KTU and attempted to privatise the KTX, the country’s high-speed railwaysystem, provoking intense labour strikes.9 This confrontation itself was also groundedin the rationale of public security. For instance, when the public opinion of the KTXprivatisation increasingly turned negative, the police searched the homes of the KRWUleaders, who were at the forefront of the anti-privatisation protests, accusing them ofviolating the National Security Law by forming an organisation within the railway


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corporation that “plotted to expand chongbuk forces” and spread pro-North propa-ganda (Yonhap News, April 29, 2013).

The style of this politics may best be described as “paranoid,” for conservatives use itto justify their policies in exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims. For instance, in aNovember 2013 meeting of the ruling Saenuri Party’s supreme council, party leaderHwang Woo-yea (who served as a judge under the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship andnow is the minister of education as well as vice prime minister) argued in response todemands by members of Catholic Priests for Justice in the Chŏnju diocese for Park’sresignation due to electoral interference: “We must be cautious and pay careful atten-tion to allegations that efforts to reject the results of the presidential election reallypicked up after North Korea recently issued orders for an anti-government campaign inthe South” (Hankyoreh, November 26, 2013). While statements to this effect may soundgroundless, it is important to remember that the conservatives’ seemingly paranoid styleis a force in South Korean politics not because conservatives have profoundly disturbedminds. Rather, as Hofstadter (1964, 77) pointed out long ago, “the use of paranoidmodes of expression by more or less normal people” makes the phenomenon signifi-cant. The fear it produces helps facilitate the leveraging of power, protection ofoligarchic interests, and even aggressive pursuit of further neo-liberalisation.

The origins of politics by public security

For the liberal-left press, the actions of conservative politicians, the NIS and other stateagencies before and after the presidential election were a clear sign that under Park’sleadership, state agencies were returning to a mode of governance described as konganchŏngch’i and kongan chŏngguk. These terms are translated as “politics by publicsecurity” or “the political climate of public security.” These phrases denote the use ofpublic security rhetoric, often but not always framed around Cold War understandingsof “national security” but certainly implying a logic of “public order,” by politicians andstate institutions to stifle popular dissent and criticism. Hong Yung Lee (1991, 65) notesthat this phrasing dates from the Roh Tae-woo administration (1987–92) and describesthe old elite’s attempt to reconcile political democratisation with the preservation ofvested interests. Amidst growing popular demands for chaebol reform, peaceful recon-ciliation with North Korea, and the recognition of labour rights, former prosecutors-cum-politicians in Roh’s administration selectively utilised the legal system to “impose atense political situation” (Lee, H. Y. 1991, 65). In other words, they characterisedpopular protests as a threat to both public order (by depicting student and labourprotests as riotous) and national security (by insinuating an alliance between liberal-leftpolitical forces and North Korea). Roh’s government jailed over 1,000 union andstudent activists engaged in political activities under the pretext that they were engagingin violent demonstrations or subversive activities that threatened public security.Observers noted at the time that the Roh government was deliberately vague whenhandling student and labour activism about what constituted subversive activity andhow it threatens national security (Park 1991).

While the usage of the phrases “politics by public security” and “political climate ofpublic security” was especially frequent during the Roh era, the repressive tactics thatfall under their umbrella have their ultimate antecedents in the earlier phases of the


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Republic of Korea. The repressive and corrupt measures of the Syngman Rhee regimeduring the First Republic (1948–60) found justification as being necessary in the face ofa communist foe to the North. The perceived legitimacy of the Park Chung-heedictatorship’s anti-labour policies was firmly based on anti-communist propagandaand super-constitutional laws and emergency powers emboldened by it (see Chang2009, 96). Deliberate fear-mongering facilitated state intervention that allowed the stateto select, cultivate and protect oligarchic economic forces such as the chaebol andregiment labour relations to the benefit of the business elite. Emergency measureswere also used to silence other forces that might interfere with Park Chung-hee’s exportdrive that was dependent on heavy foreign borrowing, creating tremendous pressure tokeep domestic labour costs low to facilitate loan repayment. As Park’s economic planbecame crisis-prone, he increasingly ruled by decree and used the logic of nationalemergency to silence not only labour but most of the political opposition. The bestexample of his rhetorical attack on dissidents was the notion of pan’gong – anti-communism – as well as wide circulation of terms intended to heighten a sense offear among the population, such as ppalgaengi or “Reds,” and kanch’ŏp or “spies.” Theywere discursive antecedents to the less colourful but nonetheless potent chongbuk andchwap’a of today’s state usage.

As Suh Sung (2001, 98) notes, Park revived the very laws used by the Japanese torepress political opposition: the Public Order Preservation Law, the Korea IdeologicalCriminal Security Surveillance Law, and the Korea Ideological Criminal PreventiveDetention Law. After liberation, these laws resurfaced in the form of the NationalSecurity Law, the Anti-Communist Law, the Security Surveillance Law, and the PublicSecurity Act. Park Chung-hee used these laws during the Third and Fourth Republics todemobilise the opposition and to further strengthen his power under the Yushinconstitution. Although Yushin stands for revitalisation (Yushin Hŏnpŏp: Constitutionsfor Revitalising Reforms), legal scholars considered it to be the death of constitution-alism, allowing the president to unlawfully rule by decree, not law (Won 2001, 60).Yushin provided for an indirect election by an appointed “national conference forunification,” and for the president to appoint one-third of the national assembly, reducethe power of the legislature and extend the power of the executive branch. In 1975 Parkdeclared that Yushin could not be amended until the threat from the North was gone:to return to the old constitution was tantamount to endangering national security (Oh1976, 72–73). Observers at the time discussed how the Park regime aimed to transformpolitical democracy into what it called an “administrative democracy” (Han 1974, 43).

The charges against the left-nationalist lawmaker Lee Seok-ki and his associates –NSL violation, sedition and plotting an armed rebellion – and the ConstitutionalCourt’s dissolution of the UPP evoked for many the experience of exaggerated nationalsecurity threats during the Cold War era, when the NSL and Yushin constitution wereused to target activists from South Korea’s student, labour and grass-roots movements.For example, Decree No. 1 of the Yushin constitution made it illegal for any person to“deny, oppose, misrepresent or defame the Constitution” as well as to “assert, intro-duce, propose, or petition for revision or repeal of it,” including fabricating or dis-seminating “false rumours” (Kim 1990, 158).

The current president’s advisors – her so-called “Group of Seven Men” – tracetheir lineage back to the public security politics of Park Chung-hee’s Yushin system


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and are familiar with the style of administrative democracy practiced under the elderPark. Park Geun-hye’s first Chief of Staff, Kim Ki-choon, who left his post after twoyears, is an important persona here in the Gramscian sense of embodying an “inter-penetration and concentration of social relations in a determinate, particular indivi-dual” (Thomas 2009, 435). Kim helped draft the Yushin constitution and from 1974he was in charge of the bureau responsible for anti-communist investigation in theKorea Central Intelligence Agency, the predecessor to the NIS. From 1980 until 1982,he was the head of the public security team of the Seoul District Prosecutors’ Office,and as such, has been connected to high-profile political cases. Between 1988 and1990 Kim was credited with devising a chimerical prosecutorial strategy that activelypursued major criminal cartels in the name of “public safety” (minsaeng ch’ian), withthe knowledge that the resulting arrests would cause a sensation and obscure thestate’s simultaneous and vigorous prosecution of cases against opposition and labourorganisations in the name of “national security” (kukka anbo). One key event heengineered was the indictment of 443 people, including Kim Dae-jung, then leader ofthe Peace and Democracy Party, on charges of threatening national security. On theheels of such achievements and also his handling of anti-corruption cases involvingprominent figures of the Fifth Republic, Kim was appointed prosecutor-general inDecember 1990 and minister of justice two years later (Hankyoreh April 10, 1992). Asa cabinet minister he was at the centre of the notorious 1992 “Ch’owŏn BlowfishRestaurant Incident.” Kim met with the mayor of Pusan, along with officials from theprosecution, police, the Agency for National Security Planning (the name of the NISat the time), the Defense Security Command and municipal education office as wellas executives of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in a plot to drum upregional support for the ruling party candidate Kim Young-sam ahead of the pre-sidential election later that year (Joongang Daily, October 23, 2012). Finally, Kim ledthe campaign to impeach liberal President Roh in 2003 after Roh made remarksduring a trip to Japan that “permitting the existence of a communist party will bringtrue democracy to Korea” (Korea Times, June 12, 2003). Kim argued this statementundermined the principles of the Republic of Korea and used his position as chair-man of the National Assembly’s legislation-judiciary committee to lead theimpeachment.

In addition to Kim, Park Geun-hye has filled other high-ranking posts in thegovernment with former prosecutors. The Saenuri floor leader Hwang Woo-yea –later appointed as minister of education and deputy prime minister in 2014 – was anassociate judge presiding over public security cases in the Chun Doo-hwan regime(1980–87), such as in the case where workers’ rights activists were tortured andcharged with violation of the National Security Law in what became known as theHangnim Scandal of 1981 (Kang 2013). There are also Hwang Kyo-ahn, the Ministerof Justice; Park Han-cheol, the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court; and HongKyung-shik, the Senior Secretary for Civil Affairs, among other former prosecutorswho have been posted to powerful political positions. Other former prosecutorsoccupying prominent positions in Park’s administration and Saenuri Party are HongJoon-pyo, Kim Jin-tae, Kim Hwang-sik and Ahn Sang-soo. The prominence of thesefigures as well as the actions of the NIS and other state agencies conjure memoriesof past authoritarian governments and confirm the fears surrounding Park’s election


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that were expressed in the pre-election statement by the National Association ofProfessors for Democracy (NAPD), who warned that the old regime has a history of“justifying their oppressive rule by exaggerating security threats, expanding themilitary and militarism, equating domestic dissident views as national threats, andemploying illegal methods of exercising violence against citizens, only to monopo-lise power, wealth and media into a few hands” (NAPD 2012).

The New Right and the revised history of democratisation

The promotion of former public security prosecutors and restoration of political figuresassociated with the dictatorial regime of Park senior would not have been possiblewithout the favourable representations of the older regime, and disparagement of pro-democratic forces, by a new generation of conservative intellectuals known as SouthKorea’s New Right: a movement initiated on the heels of Roh Moo-hyun’s electoralvictory in 2004. Rather than staunchly defending dictatorship against democracy, theNew Right affirms democracy as a desirable system. However, ignoring the history ofdemocratic political struggle, the New Right has sought to explain democratisation bystressing the contribution of the Park Chung-hee regime. They credit Park for layingthe foundations of the market economy, which they see as the necessary precursor fordemocracy. Furthermore, they regard the efforts of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations to come to terms with the crimes of past dictatorships and seekreconciliation with North Korea as having impaired the identity of the Republic ofKorea, damaged its national interests and broken its national unity (Lee 2008). TheNew Right was particularly known for its labelling of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun years as “the lost decade,” a phrase that caught on in the conservative imaginationand was repeated by its ideological allies in the media as an apt description of liberalgovernance’s policy failures.

The contemporary politics of post-democratisation under the Lee and Park admin-istrations is thus both a repressive and productive politics that seeks to contain politicalcompetition, criticism and dissent, not only through the exaggeration of public securitythreats, but also through the production of an alternate, depoliticising narrative of thehistory of democratic politics that is used as a backdrop against which to projectparanoia and win justification. The New Right’s affirmation of democratisation thusprovides a more sophisticated justification for conservative attempts to limit substantivepolitical reforms and roll back the progressive initiatives of previous liberal adminis-trations. Despite the similar usages of the politics of public security, it is the effort putinto this affirmation of a minimal narrative of democratisation that distinguishes thecurrent moment from the earlier Roh Tae-woo administration and marks it as more ofa post-democratic moment, relatively speaking – though certainly the concept can beapplied to both periods. In particular, the New Right’s attempts to restrict the ability ofstate institutions to address past wrongs, and to influence the high school curriculum,public broadcasting and academic research have been essential for projecting itsdepoliticising narrative of South Korean democratisation.

Against critical historiographies of national division, imperialism and class divisionassociated with the liberal left – perspectives that “undermine” the integrity of the state– New Right historians have produced a sophisticated historical account of the South


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Korean state as an expression of rational self-interest and the historical precondition fora market society. For instance, New Right historians such as Yi Yŏnghun prescribe astate-centred history oriented towards instilling patriotism in a manner that, as deCeuster (2010, 17) aptly puts it, “lifts the state to an absolute outcome of historicaldevelopment that should be proudly cherished rather than critically questioned.” Yi is aself-described neo-liberal for whom the morally self-interested human being (todŏkchŏkigishim) is a fundamental historical category (de Ceuster 2010, 17). However, hesubordinates this liberal individualism to a statist understanding of history in whichthe historical state becomes seen in a teleological manner as the necessary instrumentfor the protection of self-interest (Lee 2006, 51). By this logic, Park Chung-hee’seconomic development strategies established the necessary preconditions for enligh-tened market rationality to take hold. Such a perspective leads Yi and other New Righthistorians to make distinct political choices that work against the democracy move-ment’s attempts at historical reconciliation. In a post-democratic fashion, they arefundamentally antagonistic to efforts that seek to contest the market rationality thatbenefits vested interests and promotes social justice. Instead, they posit a minimal rolefor democracy (protecting market rationality). Absent are demands for equality, histor-ical reconciliation and alternative forms of economic governance beyond the market,which itself is thinly theorised so as to avoid criticism of monopolistic groups such asthe chaebol.

As de Ceuster observes, the New Right deems efforts to come to terms with thelegacies of the past (kwagŏ ch’ŏngsan) a failure to let go. Revisiting the injustices of thisperiod can only sow dissention and undermine the integrity of the state. As a conse-quence, they ignore “the social need in a time of democratic transition to come to termswith the legacies of South Korea’s authoritarian past” (de Ceuster 2010, 18). Forinstance, the New Right Union, one of the two main New Right umbrella groups, hasvigorously attacked the work of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission(Kim 2010). And after his election, conservative President Lee appointed a New Right-affiliated scholar, Lee Young-jo, as the commission’s president, who then publiclydeclared that the commission’s work had been a waste of money (de Ceuster 2010,22; Roland and Hwang 2010). He also put a stop to circulation of materials critical ofpast military dictatorships produced under President Roh, Lee Myung-bak’s liberalpredecessor. Along similar lines, the New Right has waged a campaign to disseminatehistory books that characterise the Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship as strongly contribut-ing to South Korean democratisation, paint a rosier picture of Japanese colonialism, andomit important events for the democracy movement, such as the Kwangju Uprising,which some conservatives continue to regard as an anti-state riot supported by NorthKorea.10 Following the failure of the New Right to have their history textbooks adopted,Park and the Saenuri Party have taken steps to replace the current system of approvingprivately published textbooks for selection by individual schools with one that distri-butes a single version of a history textbook compiled under government supervision toall schools.11 Such efforts to revise history are predominantly aimed at influencing thecountry’s youth, a growing number of whom vent their anger at “lefties” and marginalcommunities through internet discussion forums – most notably Ilbe – and join thepolitics by public security as active agents on behalf of the status quo (Korea Exposé,October 6, 2014). Finally, the Saenuri Party’s attempt to revise the Democratization


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Movement Activists’ Honor-Restoration and Compensation Act following the arrest ofLee Seok-ki, and the narrative, promoted by the Ministry of Security and PublicAdministration and Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs during the 2012 election,that Park Chung-hee provided the structural foundation for South Korean democrati-sation that can be seen as further symptoms of the New Right’s revisionist logic.

Whether it is best conceived of as an elective affinity or explicit alliance, the networksbetween the New Right, the Saenuri Party (and its former incarnation as the GrandUnity Party), and state security apparatuses have helped produce the country’s currentpost-democratic trajectory, in as much as the public security policies of the Old Righthave been conjoined to a revisionist analysis of democratisation that obscures itspopular roots and credits past authoritarian regimes with the development of SouthKorean democracy. Several members of the New Right have held government posts orhave become lawmakers. New Right intellectuals who went on to become Saenuri Partylawmakers in the National Assembly include Shin Chi-ho, Kim Sŏng-hŭi and ChoChŏn-hyŏk, among others. The nexus between the old and new right thus seemsdetermined to continue influencing South Korean politics for the near future.

Conclusion: The challenges of post-democracy

The constriction of political expression by the logic of politics by public security, andthe weakening of historical consciousness of democratisation for the purpose of paint-ing dictatorship as a necessary precursor to democracy pose distinct challenges in SouthKorea. Such challenges afflict not only formal democratic institutions produced throughdemocratic struggles but also affect the various social movements that have advocatedfor more expansive democratic goals. The degrees to which the NIS continues toexercise influence over prosecution of the liberal-left in anti-communism cases, andto which prosecutors collaborate with the NIS to further the agenda of the ruling partyeven without evidence to warrant trials, speak to an enduring conservative regime-prosecutors-intelligence service nexus in South Korean politics dating back to the ParkChung-hee era, reinforced during Roh Tae-woo’s Sixth Republic, and resurgent underthe current president, Park Geun-hye. Dismantling this nexus will continue to be animportant goal if democratisation is to be restored to its intended form. Commentingon the NIS case, Choi Jang-jip states that “what has been highlighted by the fact of theNational Intelligence Service’s . . . expansive interference in the last presidential electionis that individual structures within the state apparatus responsible for national securityand ideology, as well as associated judicial organs, still have not been democratized”(Choi quoted in Pressian, November 4, 2014). Choi argued that the Democratic Party(now called the New Politics Alliance for Democracy) should use this case to developbetter vertical and horizontal power: that is, to develop better checks and balances onthe executive power of the presidency and a greater balance of power among thelegislative, judicial and executive branches.

This prescription is in keeping with Choi’s earlier arguments about the frailty ofliberalism. While we concur with Choi that these institutional reforms are desirable,we believe that the process of contesting post-democratisation requires not only thestrengthening of checks and balances, but also requires, as Choi himself has argued,greater attention to substantive, egalitarian concerns of social movements. After all,


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politics by public security has not only been aimed at the formal political opponentsof the conservative bloc, but more explicitly at those political forces that have tried toeffectively exercise their labour rights and contest neo-liberalisation. Thus, counteringpost-democratisation in the present must involve some reflection by liberal forces onhow such a trajectory was aided by the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun govern-ments’ economic and foreign policies (which included expansive labour marketderegulation, multiple free-trade agreements, and participation in the Iraq War)(Doucette 2010).

Finally, the pervasive use of politics by public security, which frames dissentingviews as a threat to public order, has the potential to stimulate democratic contesta-tion precisely because of the subversion of political institutions and egalitariandemands that have accompanied it, not to mention the insult it brings to popularmemory. A few vignettes from Park’s first year in office can help demonstrate thiscontradictory process. Park was forced to concede to the demands of the KRWU onthe rail strike, pledging not to pursue privatisation of the high-speed rail system,particularly because she risked legitimacy through her excessive reliance on politicsby public security to repress the strike, which in turn led to a dip in her approvalratings. Furthermore, moderate conservative Lee Sang-don argues that Park’s deci-sion to drop Kim Jong-in or other moderates who represented her “economicdemocratisation” pledge and replace them instead with figures with an old-regimebackground made it difficult for her to ignore the significance of the electoralintervention case (Kim 2013). Although the president avoided the issue of electoralinterference by state agencies at first, in December 2013 she reluctantly consented toa bipartisan special committee in the National Assembly for discussing possible NISreform. The Saenuri Party and the main opposition Democratic Party came to atentative agreement on December 31, 2013 that while the NIS’s psychological warfaredivision, at the centre of the electoral scandal, would be left intact, the agency as awhole would heretofore report to the National Assembly’s intelligence committee,bringing it for the first time under the control of a democratically elected body. Theagency’s power to surveil other state agencies, political parties, civilian institutionsand individuals was also partly curtailed and any political involvement explicitlycriminalised. Had she promoted the moderate conservatives that led her campaign,her regime may have been seen as more responsive to popular political demands andthus would have been less vulnerable to charges of authoritarianism, and betterequipped to ignore criticisms of the state security apparatus. But then again, Park’spromises to create economic democracy, if implemented, may have also challengedthe established interests that have traditionally supported the conservative party,thereby eroding Park’s mandate in a different way.

Despite these setbacks, there is no indication that Park will return to a moremoderate position. Her “Three-year Economic Innovation Plan” continues to mimicthe rhetoric of her predecessor Lee Myung-bak (as well as that of her father, whosegovernment managed the national economy through a series of five-year plans) andadvances a generic script of deregulation and market competitiveness. Park has adopteda Thatcherite rhetoric that likens government regulation to a “cancerous mass thatkeeps on killing our body” and “must be proactively excised with all our energy ifeconomic innovation is to be achieved” (Chosun Ilbo, October 3, 2013). Furthermore,


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the government continues to use politics by public security to contain social movementsas witnessed most recently in the suppression of protests by bereaved families afflictedby the Sewol ferry disaster. Challenging post-democratisation is thus likely to involvecontinued confrontation between civic movements and the Park administration.Against the New Right, this will necessarily involve a re-politicisation of past demo-cratic struggles in order to contest their minimalist conception of market democracyand depiction of the democracy movement as a threat to public order. Against the OldRight, it will involve greater attempts to democratise the coercive apparatus of the state,contest the oligarchical forces that the South Korean state has nourished, and amplifypopular calls for democracy, equality and social justice.

Notes

1. Notably, the Ministry of Employment and Labour used an enforcement decree to dereg-ister the KTU rather than a revision to the Trade Union Act itself, which would haverequired legislative approval. The Park administration’s public security politics have alsotargeted the Korean Government Employees’ Union (KGEU), for which the governmenthas denied official registration for more than a decade.

2. For instance, in 2013 a two day-workshop entitled “Post Democracies” at CambridgeUniversity used the concept to explore political dynamics in Latin American, SouthAsian, African and East Asian contexts.

3. There are some interesting comparisons here between the South Korean case of post-democratisation and the case of Thailand. In the latter, such politics pits conservative orroyalist city dwellers in Bangkok against the countryside, often relying on romanticisedand depoliticised and therefore disempowering representations of the peasant and thecountryside to do so, as in the case of the “sufficiency economy” (see Connors 2003;Glassman 2001; Hewison 2008). Unlike in Thailand, voters in the South Korean capitalcity of Seoul tend to vote liberal-left while rural areas, especially the south-easternprovince of Kyŏngsang-do, more often vote for the conservatives, with the exception ofthe southwest which tends to vote liberal-left, and thus gets its own chongbuk-style smearsuch as Cholla-do bbalgaengi, linking the term bbalgaengi (red or communist) to thename of the south-western province (Lee, Jan, and, Wainwright 2014). Furthermore,post-democratic politics in Thailand does not use anti-communist discourse in the nameof public security as much as it uses the royalist discourse of lèse-majesté to silencepopular, egalitarian forces.

4. Glassman’s account bears some resemblance to the emergent literature on authoritarianliberalism (Bruff 2014).

5. Choi’s analysis is close in spirit to that of Crouch (2004) in that Choi is concerned withthe level of representative democracy and the limiting effects of elite, conservative powerupon the achievement of a more substantive or maximal democratisation.

6. Lee Jung-hee does have a record of refusing to critique the North Korean regime, earningthe label Chusap’a – a “juch’e thought follower” – in both conservative and liberalcommentaries.

7. When the accusation of electoral interference against the NIS first surfaced just daysbefore the election in December 2013, the police carried out a quick investigation only toexonerate the agency. The emergence of additional evidence months after the electioncast doubt on police competency and raised the possibility of a cover-up.

8. Conservatives use this term to represent not only suspected sympathisers with NorthKorea but anyone that they see as deferential to the wishes of the North. This includeseven liberal politicians that favoured Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy.” The term chongmeans to obey or follow, with connotations of being slavish, while buk means North;chwap’a stands for left faction or leftist. The way in which chongbuk has been coupled


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with chwap’a as a compound term in contemporary conservative discourse erases thedistinction between what were originally two very different concepts, such that in thecurrent political climate the left becomes synonymous with chongbuk, and vice versa.

9. The idea of allowing a teachers’ union was consistently suppressed by the various militarydictatorships. The KTU was established in 1989 but even then did not become a legallyrecognised union until 1999 due to staunch conservative opposition that perenniallyportrayed the union as pro-North Korea.

10. This argument evokes earlier debates surrounding historical stagnation among SouthKorean historians, and in which Yi Yŏnghun – who has also co-ordinated the productionof the New Right’s history textbook – was involved (Miller 2010, 9). The KTU, thecountry’s teachers’ union, has been at the forefront of contesting the revision of SouthKorean textbooks to paint the Park Chung-hee dictatorship in a favourable light, makingit a prominent thorn in the side of conservative forces, who have sought to create analternative, new-right aligned teachers union.

11. Further controversies thus remain over efforts of the conservative administration and theNew Right Textbook Forum to produce educational materials on Korean history that castthe Park Chung-hee regime in a positive light. See, for example, the Asian Human RightsCommission’s recent criticism of Korea’s Ministry of Education (Asian Human RightsCommission, August 15, 2014; cf. SBS, September 2, 2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jamie Doucette http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4006-9841

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