Hee-Yeon Cho
This chapter aims at analyzing new features of change in the social movements in the wake of democratization, based on the case of South Korea. The transition to democracy has been made possible by the driving force coming from social movement struggles against dictatorship. However, such a transition brings with it a new context. Therefore, the social movements themselves cannot but change in the process of democratization. This chapter tries to analyze this change, accepting this ironic fact as its starting point.
In the political and sociological analyses on democratization in the Third World and Southern Europe, the phases of the process of democratization are generally divided into two: the phase of democratic transition in the narrow sense, in which the so-called ‘liberalization’ policy is adopted and democratic institutions, including free election, are introduced, and, based on this free election, the ‘plural’ competition among diverse political parties happens. In this phase, the democracy becomes irreversible rule of competition and, within this rule, the chance of alteration of dominant position from one party to another is realized. The other phase is of the expansion of the democratic principle to political and social arenas. The so-called ‘democratic consolidation’1 comprises a main part of this phase, in which the democratic norm takes root as a dominant in most political and social areas.
The transition from the earlier to the later phase can happen in diverse ways. For example, in some countries there is a wide democratic insurgency making for democratic breakthrough, while, in other countries, there is not. In addition, in some countries, the dictatorial regime breaks down and loses power in a discontinuous way, while, in other countries, the transition continues under the hegemony of the former dictatorial forces. In South Korea, in June 1987, the Great Democratic Struggle caused the harsh dictatorial government to break down.
In this kind of phase change, we can see a new change in the social movements in terms of their main tasks. The main task of movement changes from the overthrow of the dictatorship to the democratic reform of the old dictatorial regime and furthermore the political and social establishments, greatly influences the directions of social movements and differentiation. During the dictatorship and at the early phase of democratization, the tendency of convergence within social movements predominates, despite the differences in issues, orientation, strategy and so on. A kind of centripetal force of diverse movements converges into one common issue that is anti-dictatorship in nature.2 The overthrow of dictatorship as the main task overshadows other issues of social movements and defeats dictatorial regime.
However, this kind of centripetal trend begins to change as the democratization process moves forward. After the dictatorial regime gives way to a democratic one, the social movements, which aimed at defeating it, are put in a kind of post- dictatorship situation, which in turn provides social movements with a different context resulting in change in the social movements themselves. As the monopoly of the state power by dictatorial forces gives way, the social movements begin to pay attention to new agendas in post-dictatorship. Considering this, I can say that this chapter aims to analyze the change in social movements in the later phase of democratization.
If so, what kind of change does social movement experience in the post-dictatorship context? How do the dynamics of social movements change? One argument is that because the main target of social movements disappears, they will lose their dynamics and will be reduced in their capacity of popular mobilization. P.L. Hipsher’s paper is one example of such an argument. He concludes in his study on urban social movements in Chile and Spain that ‘transitions from authoritarian rule not only provide opportunities for grass roots social movements to mobilize in protest but may also place constraints on their ability to remain insurgent’.3 The latter aspect especially is believed to come from that fact that the fear and threat of an authoritarian regression remain foremost in the thoughts of political leaders and the radical parties pursued a strategy of non-confrontation. J.J. Ryan analyzed the impact of democratization on the revolutionary movements with a focus on the guerilla movement. He differentiated it into three different types: ‘destruction of the movement’, ‘negotiated surrender’, ‘negotiated settlement’ and ‘overthrow of the regime’.4 Except for ‘overthrow of the regime’, the other three types show us a different picture during the dictatorship, in which social movements do not keep their mobilization capacity or ability to drive the government from below, although he focused only on the guerilla movement. Concerning this argument, I think that whether social movements can keep their former dynamics or not is not a proper question, because the democratization, which social movements have fought for, brings with it a new context in which they should be accustomed to and subsequently change their movement strategies. In my opinion, the social movements become more popularized. However, the way their dynamics are expressed changes. In a sense, the democratization process, ironically, should be thought of as re-contextualization and re-arrangement of social movements, resulting in the expression of the dynamics of social movements in different aspects. I think that change in social movements in democratization should be viewed as ‘multi-dimensional differentiation’, which means not that the main feature of social movements is a centripetal convergence over one main task and all the capacity of mobilization by social movements are expressed around such a task, but that because such a main task is achieved, the dynamics and capacity of mobilization of social movements are dispersedly expressed over various new agendas and therefore show a trend of multi-dimensional differentiation. Based on the consideration above, here in this chapter, I try to analyze the overall picture of such a dynamic differentiation of social movements, presupposing differentiation as the main characteristic.
This analysis of mine is based on South Korea, which shows us a very dynamic model of change in social movements in a post-dictator ship context. As is well known, social movements in South Korea have been a strong driving force for democratization not only under the dictatorship but also in the post-dictatorship context. The social movements in South Korea could keep their popularity and dynamics enough to diversify their activities in the process of democratization, in this sense, I think that the South Korean case will be a rich resource for analyzing the change in social movement in post-dictatorship context. For this, I will differentiate three horizons of social movement change first, and then analyze the characteristics of change.
In order to show the multi-facetedness of social movement change in the post-dictatorship context, here I will differentiate three dimensions of change in social movements and, thereafter, describe the concrete phenomena on these dimensions in the main part of this chapter. First, concerning the ideological aspect of social movements, we can differentiate diverse movements by a continuum of the ideological spectrum, which spans from conservative through liberal to progressive. The ideological content of three such ideological orientations can be different, depending on the historical period and countries. The meaning of the concept ‘liberal’ is different between the US and South Korea or Asia. In the US, liberal implies partly progressiveness. However, in South Korea or in Asia, liberal is a kind of middle position between conservative and more radical ideas. It is more so in the so-called neo-liberal globalization, which goes along with the democratization promoting liberalism. In addition, such ideological orientation can be differently expressed over different issues such as homosexuality, same sex marriage, patriarchic practices, conscientious rejection of military service, migrant labor, abortion, pornography, individualism, environmental issues and so on. In reality, the boundary between different ideological orientations is not fixed and one individual can have different orientations over different issues. For example, in the 1980s, some feminists criticized very progressive activists for being so patriarchal in family life. In the South Korean context, conservative movements have been characterized as ultra-right and anti-communist under the influence of ‘the anti-communist regimented society’.
Second, concerning objects of social movements, I want to divide system-centered movement and lifeworld-centered movement, which is based on the differentiation of system and lifeworld by J. Habermas. The former is focused around reform of the political and economic systems, while the latter is focused around diverse issues within the quotidian world.5
Third, there are different attitudes concerning the relation of social movements and institutional politics.6 As the democratization proceeds, there continues to be a change in the relation between the institutional politics and movements and in such an attitude.
The aforementioned dimensions of social movements can be illustrated by Table 6.1.
Comparatively speaking, some countries in Asia have been successful in industrialization and others have not. South Korea belongs to the former. Social movements in South Korea have developed themselves in opposition to the developmental dictatorship which has quite successfully driven industrialization. It is quite difficult for a dictatorship to be able to sustain its legitimacy in the case of failure of industrialization, because a poor economic performance gives an impetus for development of social movements. However, despite a successful economic performance of dictatorship, social movements can develop in confrontation with it. South Korea will be such a case. The successful economic
Table 6.1 Three dimensions of changes in social movements in democratization
| Dimensions | Categories | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Ideological character | Conservative, liberal, progressive orientation of movements | Diverse ideological differences show up among social movements in the democratization: diverse in terms of ideological content. And different orientations, depending on issues. |
| Objects of movements | System-centered and lifeworld-centered movements | There are movements aimed to change political-bureaucratic and economic systems, on the one hand, and the lifeworld, on the other hand. |
| Political character | Institutional politics-oriented and de-institutional politics-oriented movements | There is difference in movements in terms of attitude to institutional politics. There is institutional politics-oriented movement to enter it and change it, on the one hand, and anti-institutional politics movement, on the other hand, which has orientation to keep away from the institutional politics and de-link from it. |
performance driven by dictatorship might have put social movements in a marginalized and unpopular position. However, they have been able to organize a quite successful opposition, despite of a successful performance by the dictatorship.7 Under the developmental dictatorship, social movements are characterized as ‘anti-dictatorial’ movements that are main and dominant. What we could see during the dictatorship was oppositional mobilization of civil society.8 According to reduction of consent on dictatorship, South Korean civil society increasingly mobilized itself in an oppositional manner. In the early stage of dictatorship, the civil society remained quite passive. The developmental dictatorship mobilized people to be obedient followers of the modernization policy with the aid of existent nationalism and statism. People were ordered to be hard workers to achieve modernization of the nation as anti-communist warriors. However, they changed themselves more and more to be self-empowered subjects with oppositional consciousness. Ironically, the middle class, which has been the main beneficiary of modernization and gave strong political support in trade with their beneficiaries, began to defect from the dictatorship. With the help of changes in the political and social climates coming from this oppositional mobilization of the civil society, social movements as organizer of active part of it, could find a fertile land for anti-dictatorship to be popularized. Based on this oppositional mobilization of the civil society and anti-dictato rial movements’ leading role, the South Korean June Democratic Breakthrough became the climax of the anti-dictatorial movement in June 1987, also known as the Democratic Great Struggle (Yuweol Minju Daehangjaeng). It became a turning point for the breakdown of the military dictatorial government to and for military forces to retreat from the grip of state power. Impressively enough, social movements have been a driving role for democratization from below not only in the struggle for South Korea’s democratic transition, but also in the conflicts over democratic reform of the dictatorial regime in the post-dictatorship context.
The active roles in the early and later phases of democratization, including the democratic consolidation, could be different. In some cases, social movements which have kept their dynamism in the earlier stage of democratization could not keep it up in the later stage. However, in South Korea, social movements continued to remain as strong driving forces all the way through democratization, sustaining their own dynamism. In this sense, we can define South Korea’s case as one example of ‘democratization by social movements’.
For understanding the change in social movements, we have to understand those engendered by the Democratic Great Struggle of June 1987. It brings with it two changes: structural and behavioral. First, we could see expansion of autonomous free spaces of political and social activities. With the help of popular struggle against the dictatorship, the military regime had retreated, and the formal democracy, including free press and free election, recovered. As a result, the former repressiveness of the dictatorial state apparatuses was weakened. People were able to enjoy expanded freedom of diverse political and social activities. Second, the aforementioned oppositional mobilization of the civil society developed toward to a new ‘self-empowered revitalization of the civil society’, enjoying the expanded new freedom of activities. With this self-empowered revitalization of the civil society, I mean two phenomena. One is that people get self-empowered and become different from what they used to be. The other is that diverse group actors, including class, occupational groups, minority groups and so on, get self-empowered to become different from what they used to be during the dictatorship.
The former means that the people had changed from a kind of obedient ‘pre-modern people’ (baekseong) to modern individual citizens in the process of opposition against dictatorship, having a new awareness of civil and political rights and political consciousness. The civil and political rights, guaranteed formally by the first Constitution legislated in 1948, had been disregarded and not protected in real political life. Many students and the general populace had been tortured and arrested without due legal protection in the dictatorial period. Now legal protection of such rights had national consensus, which any post-dictatorship government could not but respect. We can say that, in a sense, the former obedient people had been ‘reborn’ as a modern public in the process of overcoming the dictatorship through a kind of individual self-empowered sub-jectification. The self-empowered revitalization of diverse group actors means that diverse social groups, including classes, minority groups, women and so on, organize diverse collective behavior and make organizational associations, demanding their interest openly and more aggressively. Before the democratic breakthrough, the civil society mobilized in opposition against a unified battlefront against dictatorship. However, it is diversely mobilized along the diverse lines of cleavage, interest diversification or majority–minority. Many minority groups made their own identities clear and demanded equal treatment against formerly unproblematized discriminations. These structural and behavioral changes in the civil society made a new base for social movements to organize their public action in diverse ways, and this contributed to dynamic differentiation of social movements.
Based on the remarks above, I want to analyze in detail the phenomena which happened on three dimensions of change in social movement in the post-dictatorship context. First, under the influence of expansion of autonomous space of political and social activities, a new emergence of so-called ‘civil movement’ (Simin undong) occurred.9 It meant that the moderate groups differentiated themselves from the progressively oriented grassroots people’s movement, which has led the anti-dictatorial movement, and established themselves as a kind of new movement with its own independent identity. This new movement is characterized as ‘liberal’ in its main ideological orientation. During the dictatorship, liberally and progressively oriented figures and groups united to fight against the common goal of breaking down the dictatorship. Especially because the anti-dictatorial movement had relied on the leading and militant struggles of the progressive movement against dictatorship, different groups with liberal or progressive orientations could not but unite themselves in a common battlefront. In addition, even liberally oriented figures and groups became more radicalized in their struggle against dictatorship. In the 1980s in South Korea, after the Kwangju massacre, the student movement and other social movement activists became more ideologically radicalized to arm themselves with Marxism, Juche-ism, Maoism, Leninism and other radical ideologies. In a sense, ideological radicalization and militancy in struggle was increasingly intensified in the harsh repression of dictatorship and the struggle against it. The anti-dictatorial movement called itself a ‘people’s movement’, which has a radical or progressive connotation in the South Korean context.
However, these two orientations which remained united in the anti-dictatorial movement began to divide. This was especially evident with the moderately oriented figures and groups, who differentiated themselves from the progressive grassroots people’s movement independently, stating different identities such as moderate, not radical orientation, institutionally permitted action program and so on to the public. Differentiating themselves seemed necessary in that the expansion of political and social spaces removed the former condition in which even a simple political opposition act had become illegal and subject to punishment, making opposition actions a huge sacrifice.
Against this situation, many civil movement organizations emerged and expanded their popular base.10 If the grassroots people’s movement, which has led the militant opposition against the dictatorship, could be defined as a progressively oriented one in the dictatorial context, the civil movement could be defined as a non- radical, mostly liberal one, aimed at driving the democratic reform and rationalization of the post-dictatorship regime. Although the ideological spectrum spanned from moderate conservative to moderate progressive, the dominant ideological orientation was liberal. The civil movement in its early stage in the late 1980s and early 1990s identified itself as using legal and institutionally guaranteed methodology, heading for liberal and plural democracy, and having support mainly from the middle class, while the progressive grassroots people’s movement had been using a militant illegal or semi-legal struggle strategy, heading for a socialist or anti-capitalist regime, and trying to mobilize the working class and lower classes such as peasants and the urban poor. The early identity of the civil movement was defined in this way. This might be the ideological content of the liberal movement, or civil movement, in the South Korean or Asian context.
The civil movement developed through two stages. The first was from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, and the second after the mid-1990s. The former was a period of ‘constitutive emergence’11 of the civil movement, while the latter was one of differentiation and diversification. The Foundation of Citizen’s Coalition of Economic Justice (CCEJ) in the name of extermination of land speculation, realization of economic justice and so on, signified the start of the first stage of the civil movement in July 1989, when the military candidate Roh Tae-Woo tried to perform a kind of ‘transformative’ reform of the post-dictatorship from above after winning the presidential election in 1987. After the retreat of the military dictatorship, diverse issues, which did not get proper attention from the movement community and the populace, have been brought to the front. For example, housing prices skyrocketed.
Thereafter, diverse movement organizations were founded in this period. In South Korea, the YMCA, YWCA, Young Korean Academy: Heungsadan, Consumers Union of Korea, and Korean Womenlink have been main organizations arising during the civil movement. Some women’s movement organizations changed in identity from the former grassroots people’s movement to the new civil movement. This meant that the political situation, whether dictatorship or post- dictatorship, influenced the identity of the movement. During the dictatorship, progressive or radical orientation had been strong, and moderate or liberal orientation became stronger under the post-dictatorship.
In the second period from the mid-1990s, the civil movement began to be diversified in terms of its orientation and its identity, accordingly, as the citizen’s movement expanded to various issue areas and the number of its organizations increased. In April 1993, the Korean Federation of Environmental Movement was founded when seven local environmental organizations and the Association for Anti- Pollution came together. In April 1994, Green Korea was founded based on a combination of some local organizations. In September 1994, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy emerged with a new identity as a progressive civil movement. Some human rights organizations refused to be identified as civil movements with a liberal orientation rather than a progressive one.
In addition, the diversification of the civil movement is evidenced by its issues. We see the foundation of diverse organizations such as the Citizen’s Coalition for Better Government in December 1997, Civic Solidarity for Open Society in April 1998, Global Civic Sharing in December 1998, Citizen’s Alliance for Consumer Protection of Korea in July 1997, Civil Network for Cultural Reform in September 1999, Citizen’s Network for Educational Reform in May 1998, Korea Waste Movement Network in October 1997, Networks for Green Transport in March 1993, Joint Committee for Migrant Workers in Korea in July 1995, and Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Federation in September 1997. This stream expanded to diverse local areas. Other examples include Citizen’s Solidarity for Participation and Self-Governance of Busan in May 1991, Jeju Solidarity for Participatory Self-Government and Environmental Preservation in September 1991 and People’s Solidarity for Kwanak in March 1995. In this process of the expansion of the civil movement, new movement organizations emerged for enhancing local autonomy and grassroots self-rule. In the local and grassroots level, diverse movement organizations emerged, which were based upon rank and file’s self-organization and problematizing their local and provincial issues. Typical cases are as follows: Movement for Keeping Ujang Mountain Alive in 1994, Movement for Regulating Cigarette Vending Machine around youth zones at Buchon in 1991, a movement for legislation of municipal ordinance of information freedom at Chongju in 1991, revision of municipal regulation for day nursery at Kwachon in 2001, impeachment of Sungnam mayor by grassroots people in 2001 and Movement against Approval of Love-Hotels at Il- san in 2000, among others.
Now, let’s see change in the formerly radically oriented people’s movement in the aftermath of democratization. The grassroots people’s movement could develop itself in terms of organization and its popular base, enjoying newly expanded political and social spaces of free activities. The grassroots people’s movement, which had comprised the main force of the anti-dictatorial movement, could not expand its popular organization because of the harsh repression of the dictatorship. However, in the post-dictatorship context, the grassroots people’s movement rapidly began to expand its local branches and new sub-organizations. This was most remarkable in the labor movement. Just after the Great Democratic Struggle of June 1987, thousands of new democratic trade unions began to organize nationwide, and former government-patronized unions began to democratize from inside. For example, there was a change of leaders to a democratic one during the so-called ‘Great Labor Struggle’ in July/August/September of 1987.12 This new surge also swept over white-collar workers across various areas. Based on this emergence of new democratic trade unions, the National Council of Trade Unions was organized in January 1990 and, there-after, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions came into being, covering such areas as Korean Big Conglomerates, white-collar workers, public service workers and blue collar workers.
In addition, the peasant movement, teacher’s movement, urban poor and other grassroots people’s movements could expand themselves organizationally. For example, national organizations such as the Korean Farmers League in April 1990, National Alliance of Street Vendors in October 1988, National Alliance of Urban Poor in November 1989 and National Alliance of the Displaced in 1994.
The grassroots people’s movement has covered diverse professional organizations with progressive orientation. In diverse areas, such professional movements expanded their organizational and popular bases. We could see also foundation and re-organization of diverse progressively oriented movement organizations in diverse sectoral areas such as professors, lawyers and in diverse issue areas such as anti-American military base and information rights: Association of Physicians for Humanism, Network for Healthy Society in November 1987, the Joint Committee for Migrant Workers in Korea in July 1995, Minbyun: Lawyers Association for a Democratic Society in May 1988, Minkahyu Human Right Group: Political Prisoners’ Family Association in December 1985, National Reconciliation Self-reliance and Reunification in May 1999, Korean National Congress for Reunification in July 1994, National Campaign for Eradication of Crime by US Troops in Korea in October 1993, Association of Korean University Students in 1993, Korean Teachers and Educational Workers’ Union in May 1989, National Professors Association for Democracy in June 1987, Korea Progressive Academy Council in November 1988, Jinbo Network in November 1998 and others.
These network organizations have driven the democratic reform of the former dictatorial regime and have done reform movement, including campaign for overcoming the dictatorial legacy and correcting economic and social structures distorted during the dictatorship.
Here I want to show the second characteristic, discerned in the wake of democratization.
The object of opposition of the anti-dictatorial movement was a totalitarian political and economic system, in which the military forces kept state power in its hands. Although the military forces retreated from the grip of state power after the democratic struggle, it did not mean automatic emergence of the democratic system itself. The creation of a democratic system demanded another long struggle for democratization, or democratic rationalization of the post-dictatorial. In this sense, reform movement for democratization or democratic rationalization of political and economic systems was brought to the fore in the post-dictatorship context. Such a movement implied the democratic reform of the political system on the one hand, and that of an economic system, including a reform of Korean Chaebol and so on, on the other hand. In this chapter, I define them together as the system-centered movement.
This system-centered movement was popularized differently from the vanguard-like movement during the dictatorship, which was never popularized except during the last stage of dictatorship because of harsh repression and the presumably expected large sacrifice made by the anti-dictatorial opposition. Such popularization of the democratic reform movement was helped by the fact that people achieved a higher political consciousness and the political arena of political and social activities had expanded. As a result, the democratic reform movement of political and economic systems was supported widely by the general populace. The system-centered democratic reform movement got public attention, especially because the democratic reform performed by the government had been very incomplete and short of people’s expectations, and also because the status-quo forces, which had a stake in the former system, seemed to resist the reform.
Concerning the reform movement of the political system, the important area of reform was political, including political party reform and parliament. This is because in every society, politicians are a social group having strength in their decision making abilities, which hugely impacts other social areas. Political reform received attention from the people. Social movements including the citizen’s and grassroots people’s movements continued to strongly campaign for political reform and to change the party constitution of the parliament, which was in favor of the former dictatorial forces.
Because the civil society has been mobilized oppositionarily and people had changed into a public with a modern consciousness of rights and critical political consciousness, there was a huge discrepancy between the political party area and the civil society after 1987. Although the civil society has already changed much during the democratization process, the political parties did not change as rapidly as the civil society had expected. As a result, the discrepancy remained huge and the politics and parties as a whole continued to be distrusted very much. This situation can be defined as the ‘political lag’. Because of this political lag, people demanded a driving force and momentum from social movements for a strong democratic reform of politics. This situation resulted in a special situation, in which the civil society movement organizations played the role of alternative or supplementary parties, which created political reform agenda and pressed political parties to undertake certain kinds of reform. The situation in which political reform oriented organizations undertook the role of not only watch-dog but also that of a kind of proxy-party can be called ‘proxy representation’.13
The climax of this kind of proxy representation as a political reform movement was the Blacklisting Campaign against Corrupt Politicians in the general election of April 2000, which was led by Civic Action for the General Election in 2000 (CAGE). This campaign comprised two phases. In the first, the political reform movement made a blacklist of corrupt politicians who had been involved in bribe taking, fraud and other corruption cases and demanded that the political parties not nominate them for candidates. In the second phase, its campaign appealed to voters not to vote for the blacklisted candidates in the election campaign period. The first was called the ‘Nakchon movement’ and the second the ‘Nakson movement’. These campaigns meant that civil society movement organizations intervened in the process of a party’s nomination. Those movement organizations are said to be doing a kind of proxy-party role.
Political reform movement has been expressed in diverse forms such as monitoring for free and fair elections, monitoring the parliamentary regular inspection of the administration, summoning of corrupt politicians, organizing public pressure for revision of former bad laws related to dictatorial repression or new legislation of a new law in favor of people’s interest, denunciation of improper persons or incumbent persons involved in fraud and corruption or misuse of their power and so on.
The economic reform issues have been very much diverse. CCEJ, which led the economic movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, raised quite successfully such issues as regulation of land speculation in the name of the public concept of land ownership. It brought to the front such reform issues as the independence of the Korea Central Bank from the political control of the government, more public provision of public housing, change of tax policy in favor of the lower class rather than business, the introduction of Real Name Financial Transaction System, reform of Korean Chaebol including disintegration of its over-diversification, increase of the inheritance tax, public regulation of big business and so on.14 Such agendas as the independence of the Korea Central Bank and Real Name Financial Transaction System and larger provision of public housing have been adopted as government policies, although not fully satisfactory.
As is well known, the developmental dictatorship went along with a corrupt or the so-called ‘crony’ coalition of the state and business. The dictatorial government gave various subsidies to big business, Korean Chaebol in South Korea, in trade-off for providing political support and political slush money. The economic reform movement tried to problematize this unjust coalition and raised various policy measures to publicly regulate the Big Conglomerates. As is well known, East Asian economies, including South Korea, fell into economic crisis in 1997. South Korea rushed to an IMF bailout.
The period of economic crisis was identical with that of the emergence of the first new opposition party government in nearly 50 years, the Kim Dae-jung government. The new government could not but adopt a broad range of economic reform policies. The civil society movement, including the citizen’s and grassroots people’s movements for economic reform, regarded this period as having a very high chance of success, because economic crisis implied the necessity of economic reform to renovate structural problems which had been accumulating and never had the chance for reform during the dictatorship. On the one hand, the Kim government adopted reform policies from above in such areas as industry, finance, public service and labor; and, on the other hand, the civil society movement tried to organize strong pressure for economic reform from below. During this period, the Economic Reform Committee of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) had exerted quite an influential role in the drive for economic reform. It tried to raise agendas of economic reform and directly pressed Korean Chaebol to restructure them reformatively. It adopted a minority shareholders’ movement as a methodology to push diverse reform agendas.15 From the standpoint of the minority shareholders, PSPD tried to prob-lematize un-transparent management, corruption, fraud, illegal behaviors and so on. Its members attended general meeting of shareholders, of for example Samsung, as minority shareholders and criticized distorted management at the meeting. Sometimes it organized class action against corruption or misuse of managerial power.
In addition, it tried to heighten legal responsibility for corrupt or misused managers of improper management, especially in public litigation. The best example of shareholders’ action against improper management was a lawsuit brought against former officers of the Korean First Bank (KFB) on 3 June in 1997. PSPD sued on behalf of 61 minority shareholders. The plaintiffs won 40 billion won in compensation against the former president and directors of KFB. It was alleged that the bank’s officers had received bribes in return for providing credit to the broken Hanbo conglomerate, causing huge losses to the bank and finally to the interest to the shareholders. On 24 July 1998, the Seoul District Court ruled in favor of the minority shareholders and gave them a decision of a historic 40 billion won penalty.16 In addition, PSPD also sought criminal or administrative investigations to raise management accountability. For example, PSPD filed a criminal complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office on 11 June 1998, charging Samsung Electronics, Samsung Display Devices, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Samsung Motors and the board members of each company for violating laws regulating the introduction of foreign capital, foreign currency management laws and securities transaction laws. PSPD also sought investigations by the Free Trade Commission into Samsung Electronics, which was suspected to have illegally transferred assets and business licenses to Seoul Commtech at a price below market value between 1998 and 1999 to the chairman’s son, who became the largest shareholder of Commtech by purchasing convertible bonds issued by the company. In addition, PSPD filed a complaint that the lawyers representing Hyundai Electronics aided the officers of Hyundai companies in concealing their criminal behavior, in connection with Hyundai Electronics’ illegal manipulation of stock prices.
In 1999, PSPD ran campaigns known as the ‘Minority shareholders’ movement against the five largest conglomerates’ and the ‘movement for betterment of corporate governance’. In 2000, it campaigned for new legislation for class suits in securities and bonds transactions. PSPD adopted a targeting strategy, which problematizes the most symbolic case in diverse ways such as lawsuit, request of investigations by the public agency concerned, raising criminal or administrative complaints, campaigns for legislation and so on. In addition, a taxpayers’ movement for budget watching was attempted as a form of economic system reform movement. This movement meant that economic reform agendas were being raised from the perspective of the taxpaying public. In this movement, diverse actions such as monitoring state budget spending, opening budget information to the public, tax system reform and so on, were undertaken as movement strategies. An agenda of the tax system is the demand that the government introduce the integrated comprehensive taxation of one’s whole transaction.
A main monitoring point was whether the citizens’ hard-earned tax money was well used or not. Even the expediency fund of the provincial mayor has been monitored by a local movement organization to be debunked, not to become private confidential money. As a symbolic campaign strategy, Citizen’s Action Network tracked representative examples of budgetary waste and awarded the most egregious offenders with ‘pork prizes’, starting from 1999. In addition, quite exemplarily and successfully, PSPD and the Democratic Labor Party have campaigned to legislate a new public regulation of lease contracts for commercial buildings in order to protect the rights of tenants.
Diverse campaign strategies have been adopted by the movement for pressing the economic reform forwards and raising public attention, institutional, outer-institutional, professional or popular methods. In the institutional method, we could see public lawsuits, sending a public letter to agencies or persons involved, and participation in general meetings of shareholders. We could see, for outer-institutional methods, sit-in demonstrations, picketing for professional methods, press releases, making declarations, providing professional reviews or comments to newspapers, holding seminars or organizing discussions, providing information, contributing essays to the media; for popular methods, demonstrations and rallies, campaigns and so on.
The grassroots people’s movement from below has struggled to speed up the democratic reform, get it more radicalized and to make the terrain of reform itself broader in order to cover people’s livelihood issues. As aforementioned, the democratic reform from above has been distorted and lagged behind due to the political consideration of the government and political forces and resistance from the status-quo forces. In this possible stagnation, the grassroots people’s movement has organized popular pressure on to the democratic reform toward more progressive direction, using mass-demonstration, diverse confrontations and so on. This kind of campaign of the grassroots people’s movement has given stronger leverage to the civil movement, which used to act within an existing institutional arrangement. For example, the peasant movement contributed to making a united system of health insurance covering rural areas, self-employed and employed, which has been one of the main agendas of it with other pro-democracy and human right movement organizations. In addition, the labor movement has performed the so-called ‘Struggle for Social Reform’ including reform of health insurance, basic livelihood, pension and so on, contributing to reform of the pension system. This kind of grassroots people’s movement gave larger momentum to the civil movement for driving the government to adopt social reform policies of their own.
Behind or along with the popularization of the system-centered movement, we have seen the expansion of the lifeworld-centered movement after 1987. Here, the lifeworld-centered movement is a new movement which focuses on diverse issues within everyday life, the resolution of which cannot be reduced to struggle against exterior power, including the state power or economic power. Speaking in sociological terms, this movement has the character of a value-oriented movement rather than a power-oriented one. The boundary between system-centered and the lifeworld-centered movements is variable, and one movement might imply both characters. For example, aims of the environmental movement are to change the anti-environmental government policies on the one hand, and to change people’s everyday consumptive life style on the other.
This movement differentiates itself from the system-centered movement in that it expands accordingly as the basic material and political issues such as absolute poverty and dictatorship are overcome, and the critical awareness of importance of lifeworld issues are increased enough to look at them as no less important than political or economic issues. We are able to see this kind of change in terms of people’s attitudes and perspectives. The importance and positiveness of the lifeworld-centered movement can be found in trying to expand the democratic principle to other social life areas, in which unequal power relations are taken for granted and are not problematized, such as patriarchal gendered relations in family life, repressed diversity of sexuality, reproduction of obedient culture and knowledge accustomed to the status-quo, and stigmatized minorities, among others. Given that the political and economic power relations of all society are reproduced on the basis of unproblematized culture, knowledge, attitude and consciousness, the expansion of this lifeworld-centered movement can be viewed as a kind of deepening of social movements. At the same time, the expansion of the lifeworld movement means an increase in the multi-dimensionality of the progressiveness. Before, I divided ideological orientations such as conservative, liberal and progressive, mainly along the lines of political ones. However, ideological differentiation over diversified issues arise, such as the family head system (hojoo-je), homosexuality, pornography, education, ecology, crime of adultery, right of information, conscientious refusal of military service and so on.
If we see a change in the lifeworld movement, it surely has existed before the retreat of the anti-dictatorial movement. For example, as an environmental movement, there has been a struggle by the victims of the ‘On-san disease’ in On-san region in the late 1970s. There have been the efforts of the women’s movement, refusal of the military service by Jehovah’s Witnesses for their religious conviction not to commit murder and the campaign of the disabled for the right to freedom of movement. These movements have been done mostly by victims. However, they were overshadowed by the urgent anti-dictatorship issue and largely dismissed as movement agendas. This marginalization of the life-world issues began to change in the wake of democratization. A kind of demarginalization came up and certain issues became hot and mainstream sometimes, depending on a conjuncture. Of course, this change has been helped by the expansion of the political and social spaces and self-empowered subjectification of the citizen. This change was precipitated after the emergence of the opposition party that is Kim Dae-jung’s government, because people under the Kim regime were of a higher level of critical political consciousness than those under the Roh Tae-woo and Kim Yong-Sam governments, which had kept the former repressive grip on civil society and people in a transformative state. After the opposition party government, the lifeworld issues began to receive more attention from the people and movement community: e.g. social and economic human rights, homosexuality, foreign workers’ rights, culture, education and environmental issues. As a case in point, pollution in Nakdong River in 1991 became a national and popular issue, in which most movement organizations came together despite their differences in agendas. In addition, conscientious refusal of military service has been regarded as a very exceptional and radical action or confined to specific religious fundamentalist group such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, it began to be accepted as a movement that fought against the existing militarist order by the mainstream student movement activists from around the early 2000s.
Pressed by and responding to this change, the opposition party government changed its attitude toward these kinds of issues by trying to accept them as policy issues. The setup of the National Commission of Human Rights in November 2001 signified a positive effort by the government to further the institutional guarantee of civil and political rights, driven from below by the social movement. The Institutionalization of the Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development, Republic of Korea in September 2000 serves as another example.
In the expansion of this lifeworld-centered movement, we can see alternative values and thoughts which go against current ones. New value orientation, including a kind of ‘de-materialist values’ as coined by R. Inglehart, which is different from existing values which focus on increasing levels of material life and acquisition of political power, began to spread. This change in values can be expressed in diverse phenomena such as endorsing a slower simpler life, return-migration/refarm movement to the rural community, life co-operative movements, organic farming, vegetarianism and more focus on spirituality movements. Such diverse ideas as eco-communitarianism, ecological fundamentalism, eco-feminism, radical communitarianism, idea of non-ownership (moosoyoo), life thought of poet Jee-ha Kim, among others, have spread among some communities and activists which had wanted to keep their eyes on untouched aspects of life by existing social movements which were aimed at changing current political and economic power relations. In the case of the communitarian stream, diverse efforts such a San-an communitarian farm, Gandhi School, Da-il Community, Hanmaeum Community, Mil-al Labour Family in San-seong province in Muju, Pool-moo Eco-Co-op, Kong-saeng Nong-Dure as a movement for Symbiosis of city and rural community, and Ho-jeo Eco-Co-op have been tried. Some radical groups in this kind of lifeworld-centered movement are determined to direct themselves toward an ‘exit’ from the existing establishment system. The lifeworld-centered movement shows us diverse features such as this in the post-dictatorship context.
The way in which the political orientation of the social movement is expressed varies as the political situation, including the relation between the political parties and social movements, changes. In the wake of democratization, we could see a ‘transformation of the movement into the institutional politics’, which means re-positioning of the political element of the movement to the institutional political arena.
During the dictatorship, the institutional political arena was contracted in such a way to exclude political figures who exhibited any hint of anti-governmental oppositional acts or consciousness. This resulted in a special situation, in which the institutional political arena is seen as an area open only for political coverts coopted by the dictatorship, not the oppostitional politicians or activists.
Under the late phase of the dictatorship, in particular the Yushin System from 1972 to 1979, the opposition parties have been repressed in various ways, and therefore only government-patronized politicians could survive with smiling faces and obedient attitudes toward the dictatorship. As a result, many politicians were expelled from the parliament and joined the anti-dictatorial movement. A kind of union of excluded politics (jaeya) and social movements occurred. Accordingly, as the dictatorship changed to a harsher repression regime in 1972 when the Yushin System started, and in 1975 when Emergency Act 9 was proclaimed, many politicians with critical attitudes toward the dictatorship were expelled from the parliament. Sometimes they were personally escorted to information agencies such as KCIA and tortured and coerced until they were accustomed to the dictatorship. Some aspects of the institutional political figures and activities became those of the movement. We can define this situation as a ‘transformation of the [institutional] politics into the movement or movement politics’. However, aided by the expansion of the institutional political arena after the democratization, a reverse trend emerged, that of a transformation of the movement or movement politics to institutional politics. This can be discerned in two phenomena. First is the return of formerly excluded politicians to the institutional political arena. With the new policy to unfreeze the regulation of oppositional political figures, they came back to the institutional political arena, running in the national election as candidates in 1985. This can be called ‘re-politicization of the expelled politics’,17 which became the first road of the transformation of the movement to politics.
Along with this, the oppositional movement activists with radical political orientation, who fought against dictatorship with the excluded politicians and made alliances with them against it, moved their area of activities from the street to the political party or parliament. Because these figures have moral and political symbolism, many of them won their elections to become national assembly persons with the political prestige coming from their anti- dictatorship movement career. By the help of this new recruit, the mistrusted politics could re-legitimize itself to a certain level, representing changed political opinions and demands of the people successfully. This is the second road of the ‘transformation of the movement into the politics’.
This kind of re-positioning of movement activists to politicians was defined as ‘co-optation’ from radical factions of the social movement.18 However, this recruitment of movement activists as politicians meant the narrowing of the distance between the movement and political party activities. Given that prior activities within the political arena have been interpreted as conversion from the movement to ‘dirty’ politics, this meant a big change.
Second is the emergence of new political parties or political groups to represent movement agendas into the institutional arena. These came from a ‘movement for establishment of themselves as an alternative political force’, a kind of a new political empowerment, in order to represent new political agendas and needs. This kind of new political movement was attended by several civil society movement forces such as progressive or labor movements, environmental movements for the green party, women’s movements or grassroots activists for local politics. This second is exemplified when movement activists form specific political groups and move their position in the form of the political group, whereas the first is exemplified when movement activists change their position on the basis of individuals.
This means that the political element which has been expressed in the anti-dictatorial street movement during the dictatorship separated itself from the movement in the narrow sense and moved to the institutional political arena. This is another road of the ‘transformation of the movement into the politics’ on a group basis. This can be defined as a ‘new politicization of the movement’. This also means that it became possible to ‘do politics’ as an extension of movement activities, not as a political conversion. In the view of the boundary between the institutional politics and the movement, this change means, on the one hand, that the social movement extended its arena of activities to institutional politics and, on the other hand, that institutional politics expanded its arena of activities to cover the former activists, which has given some relegitimizing effect to the institutional politics.
In relation to the second stream, we have seen first of all, the movement for progressive or labor party formation from the mid-1980s, just after the democratic breakthrough. This movement was an expression of the growth of progressive or labor forces. Within the progressive people’s movement camp, there have been two groups. One tried to make an alliance with the relatively progressive liberal party in the institutional political arena, such as the Democratic Party, New Democratic Party or National Council for a New Politics, to let it represent the progressive agendas on behalf of a progressive grassroots people’s movement. The other tried to make its own progressive or labor party independent of the other liberal political parties, albeit while being relatively progressive. The latter thought that a relatively progressive but basically liberal political party could not fully function as a political representative of the progressive ‘social’ forces. As time has passed, the first group lost its voice within the movement community and the second group became mainstream within the progressive social and labor movements. This stream for an independent progressive party was expressed as the People’s Candidate movement in the presidential election of 1987, the Party of the People in the general election of April 1988, the People’s Party in 1990, the Candidate of People in the presidential election in 1992, People’s Victory 21 for Democracy and Progress in 1997, and the Democratic Labour Party in January 2000. The Democratic Labour Party received 8.1 percent proportionate votes in local elections, and its candidate in the presidential election of 1997 garnered 957,148 votes, or 1.6 percent of the valid votes. In the national election in 2004, it became a third major party with ten seats among 299, including two local seats and eight proportionate representation seats, based on the support of 2,066,072 voters in the proportionate voting. This entry of the labor party to the National Assembly means a important step for the new ‘politicization of the movement’.19 However, it was split into two parties in February in 2008 into the DLP and Progressive New Party, and now there is a campaign for making a new united progressive unified party.
In addition, other social forces tried to enter the institutional political arena. First of all, there was the effort of the women’s movement, based upon the presupposition that the institutional political arena had been monopolized by men and structured in a gender-biased way to systematically exclude women. Interestingly, the effort of the women’s movement has been expressed not as the making of an alternative party, but as making a space for a women’s candidate for politics, notably in the quota of proportionate candidates or in nomination for local constituencies. Aided by this kind of effort, from the year 2002, the local election, a quota system was introduced that guaranteed a 50 percent proportionate for women candidacy in national and local elections.
In addition we see attempts by the environmental movement to create the green party. The Korean Federation of Environmental Movement (KFEM) and Green Korea have been at the forefront. Some activists from KFEM and other organizations created the Green Political Committee to promote the political entry as an independent party with ecological agendas. However, this group is now trying to make itself a stepping stone for an environmental political party, including environmental political education and propaganda among its agenda, based on the supposition that it will take a long time for the Green Party to take a root in the South Korean context. In the general election of 2004, it focused on supporting the environment-friendly candidates. It renamed itself ‘Chorok Political Group’ to cover more potential participants. In addition, a group of Green Koreans made a preparatory committee of the Korean Green Party in the early 1990s. This group made a Green Peace Party in 2003 with other groups and later re-made the Green Social Democratic Party in alliance with the former government-patronized Korean Federation of Trade Unions, but failed to get seats in the national election in April 2004. In November 2011, a Green Party was re-formed newly.
In the case of grassroots movements in local communities, many movement activists adopted a kind of participatory strategy with running candidates. After the recovery of the local self-government system, many activists ran for election as candidates for provincial or municipal councilors or mayors and some of them won the election. In the local elections of 1996 and 2002, 2006 and 2010 we could see many candidates with backgrounds of grassroots activists and many of them entered the provincial or municipal governments and parliaments and tried to realize their agendas as policies, which they wanted to push the local government to adopt. This kind of ‘the politicization of the movement’ does not mean that the movement can be reduced to institutional politics, because a new surge of movement having more radical agendas emerged to fill up the vacant spaces left after the activists’ move to the politics. However, this change brought with it a more flexible boundary line between the movement and institutional politics and more openness toward each other, on the one hand, and on the other, a new surge of new radical movement groups in diverse areas such as radical young feminists, more radical socialist party-oriented groups.
In the Seoul provincial by-election in June 2011, Park Won-Soon, who has had a representative symbolic status within the civil movement, ran for the mayor, and succeeded in being elected. Because he has been the founder of one of the most influential watch-dog organizations, this new phenomenon seemed to blur the clear dividing boundary between the institutional politics and social movements. The civil movement in Korea, which has kept a popular support for its watch-dog activities, is confronted with a new challenge to keep its influence and autonomous space for its activities.
1 The so-called ‘democratic consolidation’ can cover the second and third phases of democratization. ‘Democratic consolidation can thus only be fully understood as encompassing a shift in political culture.’ Here political culture means that ‘the norms, procedures, and expectations of democracy become so internalized that actors routinely, instinctively conform to the written (and unwritten) rules of the game, even when they conflict and compete intensely’ (Diamond, L., 1999, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 65).
2 I called this phenomenon ‘deepening of social movement’, by which ‘such phenomena as the development of the militant opposition movement, the union of lawful politics and movement politics, and the initiative of the latter in the struggle against the authoritarian regime’ are meant (Cho, Hee- Yeon, 2000, ‘Democratic Transition and Social Movement Change in South Korea’, Sungkonghoe Daehak Nonchong No. 15). For example, the women’s movement partook in anti-dictatorial struggles and became an important part and driving force behind the pro-democracy movement (Nam, Jeong- Lim, 2000, ‘Gender Politics in the Korean Transition to Democracy’, Korean Studies, Vol. 24, pp. 94–112).
3 Refer to Hipsher, P.L., 1996, ‘Democratization and the Decline of Urban Social Movements in Chile and Spain’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 273–297.
4 Ryan, Jeffrey J., 1994, ‘The Impact of Democratization on Revolutionary Movements’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 27–44.
5 For Habermas, the system means highly rationalized political-bureaucratic and economic ones and it results in a new opposition against the colonization of the lifeworld by such systems (Habermas, J., 1989, The Theory of Communicative Action. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Vol. 2, trans. T. McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity; Steven Seidman ed., 1989, Jurgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader, Boston: Beacon Press. Ch. 9, ‘The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld’). I am applying his concepts in this chapter. However, I put two limitations on it. First, the lifeworld cannot be defined as only a symbolic area but as a complex structure of symbolic and material relations, even though he defines the system as a material area and the lifeworld as a symbolic one (Ray, Larry, 1993, Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements, London: Sage, p. 73). Second, in South Korea, the system at issue is not a highly rationalized area but is one in the process of rationalization and democratization. The system for Habermas and that in the Korean context are qualitatively different. However, supposing such differences, I want to use these concepts to emphasize the differentiation of system and lifeworld and a new opposition against the problems arising within the latter.
6 In a broader sense, the social movement is the ‘movement “politics” ’. However, here in this chapter, politics is used to designate institutional politics in the narrow sense. In the democratic transition context, politics is alluded to as something corrupt and distrusted. However, here the concept ‘politics’ is used in the neutral sense to indicate activities in the institutionalized area of politics.
7 Concerning the modern history of industrialization and opposition together, see Cummings, Bruce, 1997, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: W.W. Norton and Company; Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2000.
8 Here I use the concept, the civil society. The civil society is the modern form of society in Western Europe, implying the situation in which civil and political rights are guaranteed to general citizens and that they have a certain level of human rights consciousness and are determined to defend them. However, these kinds of rights have been formally given after the legislation of the Constitution in the Constituent Assembly in 1948. In this sense, the formal sense of the civil society began to exist after 1948 in South Korea (see Professor Jang-Jip Choi’s paper about the surge of civil society in the political space after Liberation in 1945: ‘Political Cleavages in South Korea’, Hagen Koo ed., The State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 13–50). However, in my opinion, the substantive sense of the civil society began to exist after the Great Democratic Struggle in 1987, after which civil and political rights could be guaranteed to general citizens, who are born as modern individuals who are very determined to defend them. In addition, before 1987, it was possible that Korean society did not follow the trajectory of the Western modern civil society, turning instead to a socialist one via people’s revolution, and thus followed another trajectory.
9 The ‘Simin Undong’ can be called in South Korea, diversely: citizen’s movement, civil movement, civil society movement, NGOs and so on. It is identified as the South Korean type of ‘the new social movement’ in the Western context, while the people’s movement is defined as ‘the old movement’. ‘Simin Undong’ implies many characteristics of the new social movement, but cannot be defined as completely identical. Here I use the concept of civil movement for it. In the Asian context, the civil movement and NGOs are perceived as specialized movements on specific issues, sometimes funded by foreign donor countries. However, the civil movement in South Korea has quite a popular base and its budget comes from domestic sources. In addition, the grassroots people’s movement (Minjung Undong) is not a movement of the general public, but that of the lower classes, including the working class, peasants, urban poor and others. Therefore, it is identified as the ‘lower [Keecheung] grassroots people’s movement’. (For further understanding, see Koo, Hagen, 1993, ‘The State, Minjung, and the Working Class in South Korea’, Hagen Koo ed., The State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.) In addition, the concept of civil society is used here to cover the civil movement and the grassroots people’s movement as well, based on interpreting the civil society in a broader sense.
10 Concerning the development and diversifications of the civil movement, see Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2011, ‘Changes in Social Movements in the Process of Democratization in South Korean’, Hee-Yeon Cho, Andrew Aeria and Songwoo Hur eds, From Unity to Multiplicities: Social Movement and Transformation and Democratization in Asia, Selangor, Malaysia: Gerakbudaya/SIRD; Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2003, ‘Civil Society and Social Movements in the Political Change of South Korea’, Asia-Pacific Forum No. 21, September; Koo, Hagen, 2002, ‘Civil Society and Democracy in South Korea’, Good Society Vol. 11, No. 2.
11 Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2004, Change in Opposition Against from Abnormality to Normality, Seoul: Arche Publishing Co., pp. 114–118.
12 In June 1987, the number of trade unions was 2,700, and that of its members was 1,050,000. However, in the wake of Great Labour Struggle, the former increased to 7,900 in 1989 and the latter to 1,930,000.
13 Concerning the political lag and proxy representation, refer to Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2004, Ch. 2.
14 Concerning the economic reform campaigns, refer to Wi, Pyeong-rayang, 2004, ‘The Response of the Civil Society to Economic Issues in Democratization’, Korea Civil Society and NGOs, 1987–2002, Seoul: Korean NGO Times. Concerning the agendas of economic reform of CCEJ, refer to CCEJ Policy Committee, 2000, Let’s Change Our Society by These Policies, Seoul: Beebong Publishing Co.
15 Before the start of the small stockholders’ movement by PSPD, they had been guaranteed rights by the Commercial Code. However, after April 1997, with the revision of the Stock Transaction Law, their rights began to be guaranteed more widely, including the right to raise questions, to wield the right of decision making, to read the account book, to summon a general meeting of stock holders, to have an outside member as a board of director and so on. Here, PSPD began a small stockholders’ campaign to drive the reform of Chaebol and other economic reform, not only protecting their own interests, but also taking advantage of this change (concerning the details, see Hee- Yeon Cho, Ilpyo Hong and Jeonghun Kim, 2003, The Role of the NGO in the Decision Making of the Government and Business: Focused on the Economic Reform Campaign of PSPD, Seoul: Korea Institute of Public Administration).
16 Concerning the PSPD’s economic reform activities, see Cho, Hee-Yeon and Park Won- soon, 2002, ‘Democratic Reform and Civic Movements in South Korea’, Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies, Vol. 12, pp. 93–96.
17 Refer to Cho, Hee-Yeon, 2004, Ch. 2, concerning this process.
18 This co-optation process can be viewed as ‘transformational’ effort for existing parties to absorb new figures with moral respect in order to increase their legitimacy. This is what ‘transformation’ means here. In a certain conjuncture the dominant parties co- opt individuals or groups in an opposition camp to re-legitimize themselves. This occurs in diverse forms such as accepting agendas of opposition, and recruiting new figures from opposition (Gramsci, A., 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 58).
19 In the general election of April 2004, the liberal party (the pro-government Open Uri Party) with 152 out of 299 seats, dominated the parliament, getting rid of the first major party status from the conservative party (the Grand National Party), The labour party entered as the third major party. In the national election in 2008, the Democratic Labour Party got five seats, while another progressive party, New Progressive Party, couldn’t have a seat, having one in the by-election thereafter.