South Korean civil movement organisations: Hope, crisis, and pragmatism in democratic transition

By Amy Levine

This is a unique ethnographic study of the practical, theoretical, methodological, ethical and social dimensions of some key non-governmental organisations (NGOs), non-profit organisations (NPOs), and think tanks in Seoul during Roh Moo Hyun’s tumultuous presidency (2003-8).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784996215

Amy Levine

Amy Levine is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Pusan National University

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Introduction

Key fields, sites of historical importance, and praxes (hyeonjang)

An activist who worked for a major civil movement organisation based in Seoul was bitingly critical of nearly every US policy in South Korea. Upon first learning that I am American, she remarked: ‘at least that means you’re practical (siryongjeok)’. She went on to say that unless Korean civil movement organisations got more practical and engaged in ‘the field, site of historical importance, and praxis (hyeonjang)’ then they would become obsolete. Meanwhile her boss similarly worried about the anticipated obsolescence of Korean civil movement organisations. For him, however, the source of this impending obsolescence was the increasing migration of civil leaders to elected political office at the same time all leaders lacked the necessary scale of theory to challenge capitalism, neo-liberalism and sustainable development. He focused on changing the ‘discourse (damnon)’ of environmentalism, which he knew was ‘less than theory’ and ‘smaller than ideology’. This was the in-between practical space he could approach in the rough scale he articulated among discourse, theory, and ideology. The aforementioned activist, in contrast, saw this work as an unhelpful ‘obsession’ that only exacerbated the lack of field-driven praxis (hyeonjang) crippling civil movement organisations. So she focused on a variety of specific ‘projects (peurojekteu)’ that were smaller in scale, such as starting a small dues-paying club to support local energy initiatives around South Korea and South-East Asia. Department Leader Lee (Lee Gungjangnim) and Secretary-General Choi (Choi Samucheojangnim), as I came to know them respectively, differed in many ways. They belonged to different generations and often had contrasting, even diametrically opposite, views about organisational administration, activist priorities, and tactics. Yet they both identified themselves as activists (hwaldongga/undongga), anticipated the obsolescence of the organisations they devoted much of their lives to, and sought practical approaches. I will take each of these in turn.

Naming or identifying the subject of a study, particularly an ethnographic one, is often difficult. Subjects typically change, and they did for me. I started with a focus on how transparency would be enacted inside a handful of Seoul-based civil movement organisations during the Roh Moo Hyun presidency (2003–8). Once immersed in my fieldwork, however, I came to see transparency as a symptom rather than a cause. One colleague called it ‘means (sudan)’ without any ‘goal or end (mokjeok)’. Put another way, it played out as part to wholes (e.g. Mol 2002; Strathern 1991). I will spend most of the book describing these wholes: hope, crisis, pragmatism, and democratic transition.

Another major finding I had during my fieldwork period in Seoul from 2005 to 2007 was that my informants – or colleagues as I came to know them – shared the difficulty in identifying themselves. The ‘identity crisis’ (Lewis 2002) that defined post-1980s South Korean civil society was intensifying. Many questioned their individual and organisational job titles and enlisted me to help them investigate, as I later detail. On a broader level, there was an active debate about how to name organisations. I follow my colleagues in grouping non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and non-profit organisations (NPOs) into a broader category – civil movement organisations. This category is meant to reflect movement history, which I will describe later in the Introduction, along with the aspiration for more organisation rather than fragmentation. In Chapter 1, I describe the fragmenting disposition and precariousness of ‘civil society (simin sahoe)’. Civil movement organisation also captures the ongoing generational, social, and pragmatic transitions that define South Korea’s democracy. The distinction between NGOs and NPOs at the time of my fieldwork was one between advocacy and social welfare respectively. This was also a distinction used inside NGO studies and a key leader’s, Lawyer Park’s, ‘conglomerate family (jaebeol)’ of organisations, which I will describe throughout the book. People’s Solidarity for a Participatory Democracy (Chamyeo Yeondae, PSPD) is exemplary of NGOs, the Beautiful Foundation (Areumdaun Jaedan) of NPOs, and the Hope Institute (Huimang Jejakso) of think-tanks. However, there is a large and fast-growing segment of religious organisations in South Korea that obviates the advocacy and social welfare distinction. None of the handful of civil movement organisations I focus on in this book had any official religious affiliation or mission; however, many staffers at various levels cited Buddhist, Protestant, and/or Catholic influences, which are noted.

While religious, regional, economic, gender, generational, and other social affiliations varied greatly among my colleagues, most shared some sense of being in crisis (wigi). For some, crisis was limited, but most extrapolated it to limitless moral, political, logistical, economic, legal, and social realms. The anticipated obsolescence (Choy 2011; Smith 2011) that Department Leader Lee and Secretary-General Choi described for civil movement organisations were repeatedly corroborated and amplified by others. The more closely I listened, the more I heard literal as well as metaphorical references to military battles, hospitals, and emergency rooms; all of these historical sites of importance (hyeonjang) point up the modern history of South Korea, which will be detailed in the Introduction and later in the book.

Finally, nearly every person I encountered prized pragmatism (siryongjuui) in some form. The frequent references to hyeonjang (field, site of historical importance, praxis) that peppered hundreds of conversations and interviews, the founding of new think-tanks that promised to connect ‘field and theory’ and that drew upon the historical ‘mass people movements (minjung undong)’ as well as the ‘practical study movements (sirhak undong)’, and the media and government discourses that explicitly called for pragmatism were all considered. In the remainder of this Introduction, I will describe all of these in much greater detail. Before getting there, however, allow me to better explain the context of my research and South Korea more generally.

The ground: 2002, 386 generation, and Roh Moo Hyun

In the summer of 2002, many civil movement organisation staffers in Seoul traded their earthy-toned clothes for bright-red Team Korea fare. When South Korea and Japan co-hosted the World Cup that year, 386 generation (sam-pal-lyuk sedae) activists came to the fore as organisers of the ‘Red Devils (Bulgeun Angma)’ phenomenon. The Red Devils were not ostensibly political, but the colour red is highly politicised inside South Korea as a symbol of Communism. One 386 generation activist humorously pointed out this fortuitous elision between a national sports colour and a historically derisive term for Communists. She joyfully reflected on the 2002 World Cup experience as a rare, widely shared hopeful moment in Korea’s history.

Among my colleagues in Seoul, twentieth-century Korean history is mostly seen as a war both literally and figuratively. There were many literal wars, as I will briefly describe; at the same time, there were many figurative ones between ideas. To give an account of Korea’s past is to recognise the significance of movements, a theme in Korean studies which I will discuss in more detail later in this Introduction.

Briefly, the twentieth century began with Russia and Japan escalating to a war that Japan dramatically won in 1904. In a peace treaty brokered by the US in 1905, Russia as well as the US and Britain recognised Japan’s claim to Korea in exchange for Japan recognising the US’s claim to the Philippines and not questioning nearby British colonies. Japan quickly became a brutal colonising force in Korea. Debate still rages on among Koreans about who resisted the Japanese compared to who collaborated with them.

During colonisation, nationalist and Communist movements grew alongside agrarian and industrial development projects. Kim Il Sung, for example, began to make his name during this period as a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese. Kim is the first leader and much revered ‘grand-father’ in North Korea. Colonisation shaped and continues to shape so much about North and South Korea and it did not end until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945. Following colonisation, there was an explosion of political and ideological activity as well as an all-out land grab with dashed hopes for independence and indigenous land reforms. External powers, mainly the US, took over and proceeded to divide North and South Korea in a move that preceded and continues to outlast the Cold War. The peninsula was officially partitioned by US military officials in 1948; Kim Il Sung, a young revolutionary opportunistically allying with the Soviet Union, emerged to lead the North, while Syngman Rhee, a 70–something committed anti-Communist and long-time expat in the US, opportunistically allied with the US to lead the South. Just two years later, the North invaded the South and the Korean War began, which made the Cold War very hot. After three years of land changing hands with millions of casualties, the war ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. Kim Il Sung led the North until his death in 1994; Syngman Rhee, on the other hand, was toppled by a popular uprising in 1960.

There was a small window of democratic rule in South Korea until Park Chung Hee’s military coup in 1961. Park created unprecedented economic growth through his populist ‘New Village movements’ (saemaeul undong) while he violently quashed many forms of resistance under the banner of ‘national security’ and ‘Anti-Communism’ until he was assassinated in 1979. Again, mass protests for democracy, human rights, and unification broke out and culminated in a violent showdown in the city of Gwangju. Another military president, Chun Doo Hwan, brutally suppressed the protests until they could not be contained in 1987. That ‘Democratic Spring’ which swept across regional and economic divisions was not unlike the ‘Arab Spring’ that erupted in more recent times in the Middle East. Both ‘springs’ produced glimpses of wider reforms, but infighting among the opposition combined with military-backed corruption and authoritarianism led to backslides in both cases. In South Korea’s case, the first democratic election in almost thirty years led to Roh Tae Woo’s pluralist victory in 1988 and a return to status quo autocratic rule.

The two main opposition leaders – Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung – persevered, however, and took their turn as president in 1992 and 1997 respectively. The economy rapidly globalised, then tanked and rebounded from the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. The term ‘386 generation’ was coined in the early 1990s when two-thirds of South Korea’s 43 million people were under the age of 40, the GNP was rising steadily, and democratic reforms accelerated (Dong 1993: 1; Lee N.H. 2007). Conventionally, the 3 of 386 refers to people in their thirties, the 8 to the decade they attended university (1980s), and the 6 to the decade in which they were born (1960s). When South Korea hosted the Olympics in 1988, the nation was said to have ‘what must be the world’s fastest-growing college population’ with around 1.3 million students (Dong 1987: B1).

In the 1980s, South Korea’s percentage of students attending a four-year university course was second only to the US. Cho Haejoang (1992) describes the nation’s first ‘socially stable’ generation who came of age in the 1980s as carrying ‘the weight of the country on their backs’ (1994: 146). Namhee Lee describes it as ‘a collective pressure to succeed for one’s own future, for family, and for the nation’ (2007: 149). As witnesses and beneficiaries of the rapid changes and economic growth during Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s, the 386 generation was expected to transform the nation not unlike the computer had done to the world economy. The analogy is not coincidental, since the other explanation I have encountered of 386 is that it referred to the common computer processor at the time, which preceded 486 and Pentium (Park 2007). There is, in other words, an entanglement of persons and things, especially persons and technology, in South Korean generational names (Levine 2014). 386 also captures the progress that is evident in development discourses (e.g. Escobar 1995) as well as the ‘national utopian imagination’ (Nelson 2000) that animated many Korean movements.

Japan and South Korea co-hosting a major event such as the 2002 World Cup was a historic event. Although colonisation officially ended in 1945, South Korea did not normalise diplomatic relations with Japan until 1965. That event helped to define another generation in South Korea while remaining hotly contested into the present. The lines between past and present blur and divide Japan and South Korea in daily news and everyday talk about ongoing Second World War sex slave issues and various maritime disputes. What united and still unites Japan and South Korea is their commitment to anti-Communism and concomitantly, the US. I could fill several books with the intricacies of North-East Asia cultural, political, economic, and militaristic relations. However, that is not my focus; rather it is part of the (back)ground which is necessary in understanding my focus or figure. My focus in this book is the working and reworking of figure–ground relations through obviation (e.g. Strathern 1991; Wagner 1978, 1987), which principally includes hope, crisis, pragmatism, and democratic transition. Before elucidating these key figures, however, allow me to continue laying the ground.

The election of Roh Moo Hyun, whose success was widely linked to 386 generation mobilisation, was the culmination of a sequence of dramatic events in 2002 (Levine 2004a). Roh was a former democracy activist and self-taught human rights lawyer who married a woman whose father had died in prison because of his blacklisted political activities. He was not only the first South Korean president born after the colonial period, but also the first not to have graduated from university. Roh solidified the ‘political transition away from the elites who had dominated [South Korea] since 1948’ (Cumings 2005: 401). He gained widespread support not only from the 386 generation, but also from people who had never engaged in political campaigns before (e.g. Kang 2008). Roh made headlines shortly after taking office by telling the chair of Japan’s Communist Party that South Korea would only become a ‘true democracy’ if a Communist party were allowed to visit the country (Yonhap 2003). The boldness and hope of these statements for many of my informants was later compared to Barack Obama’s statements on the Iraq War and race in the US during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Both Roh’s and Obama’s statements were praised at the times they were spoken for their honest confrontation with painful histories, courage to openly share convictions despite negative consequences, and the hopeful move away from previous generational obsessions that both seemed to signal. Korea’s colonial and anti-Communist inheritances from Japan and the United States are taken up further in Chapter 2.

Not unlike Barack Obama’s supporters, the distance between hope and crisis proved to be short for Roh’s supporters. Before Roh even took office, some of his fiercest supporters began to worry about the closing distance between civil organisations and Roh’s administration, which was a feature of neo-liberal governance that had intensified during and after the Kim Dae Jung administration (Song 2009). The government liaison for an environmental NGO, for example, worried about how civil movement organisations could go about their work when the President-elect had successfully used methods (bangbeop) that were conventionally their own – demonstrations in public squares and online networks (Levine 2004a). These methods were foundational to civil organisations and their ongoing transition from student, labour, and democratisation movements to increasingly expert (jeonmun) advocacy and governance organisations. The ongoing transition from minjung (mass people) to simin (citizen) which Nancy Abelmann (1996, 1997a) and Robert Oppenheim (2008) have described marked a turn away from violent activism to non-violent organisation and administration. Similarly, the ongoing transition from liberal to neo-liberal which Jesook Song (2009) has taken up, marks a turn from an oppositional and confrontational government–civil society relationship to a collaborative and co-opting one familiar to many neo-liberal contexts (e.g. Greenhouse 2009; Muehlebach 2012; Paley 2001).

The Citizens’ Alliance for the 2000 General Elections (CAGE, Nakcheon Undong), which I address in Chapters 1 and 5, is an example of how an alliance of civil movement organisations combined authoritarian and liberal methods to great political effect. In the wake of this campaign, several prominent civil movement organisation leaders expressed the need to be ahead of the government, ‘on the cutting edge’, and ‘setting the agenda’. Lawyer Park, a civil leader who warrants the complete fifth chapter of this book, emerged as the very edge of this cutting edge. At the end of Roh’s ‘participatory government (chamyeo jeongbu)’ in 2008, when conservative Lee Myung-bak launched his ‘practical government (silyong jeongbu)’, practical solutions rather than criticisms garnered funding and media attention. The Hope Institute (Huimang Jejakso), a ‘think-and-do-tank’ which Lawyer Park founded in 2006, was conceived in many ways to provide citizen-engaged practical policies. In Chapter 5, I explore how the Hope Institute started as a civil-led pragmatic project to carry on what Roh Moo Hyun’s administration had started in 2003. By 2009, however, Park was a defendant in a civil defamation lawsuit brought by President Lee’s administration. Two short years later, Park was elected mayor of Seoul, the position President Lee held before he became president.

Rapid reversals and changes are not uncommon in South Korean politics; rather, they are a key part of the constant crisis mode that forms the ground upon which pragmatism thrives. As I make final revisions on this book at the end of 2014, for example, South Korea’s constitutional court officially disbanded the nation’s third largest political party. The legal basis for this dramatic decision lay in the National Security Laws, which effectively freezes South Korea in a constant state of terror vis-à-vis North Korea and so gives the South Korean state broad powers to protect its national security. These laws are a remnant of South Korea’s foundational commitment to anti-Communism. Roh Moo Hyun, following a long-movement tradition, openly challenged the National Security Laws and rolled out an ambitious agenda for sweeping government reforms.

However, the hope that Roh and many of his civil movement supporters had for reforms quickly turned to disappointment. Policies that promoted more accounting and decision-making transparency, for example, came to be seen as little more than instruments for political advantage. As Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle, Roh and his supporters found it difficult to escape their familiar instruments of criticism, protest, and broad-yet-vague slogans of anti-dictatorship, pro-democracy and pro-unification, which are all taken to be legacies of the 386 generation and the larger anti-Communist discourses they defined themselves through and against.

To give a sense of how quickly hope became crisis, the aforementioned government liaison that shared concerns about Roh borrowing civil organisation methods (Levine 2004a) had quit working for his organisation, studied for a short time in an NGO studies programme,¹ and was working for a presidential advisory commission just a couple of years later. However, he left civil service disillusioned not long after. Another mid-level civil organisation manager shared repeated concerns that such organisations could no longer attract the best college graduates because both the government and media organisations were producing better versions of what they did in terms of investigative journalism.² To highlight her concern, she became a part-time civil organisation worker as she pursued graduate degrees in public policy and environmental studies while advising political parties and government commissions. Another veteran staffer who worked for the same civil organisation in the same position for almost ten years finally decided to pursue a graduate degree in the US that had long been on hold soon after her secretary-general stepped down to work as a consultant to city government commissions.

These stories of mid-level and veteran staff attrition became the subject of research studies and newspaper headlines of crisis during the mid 2000s. As I explore in Chapter 3, civil organisations were in a crisis (wigi) which variably referenced their changing role and relationship to government and business sectors, increasing staff turnover, decreasing dues-paying members, and waning media attention. The crisis that civil movements and organisations faced during the Roh Moo-hyun era (2003–8) was one defined by a profound sense of obsolescence and irrelevance. This moment warranted a turn to activist knowledge practices (Smith 2011) and revealed a collaborative space of ‘co-theorising’ (Rappaport 2008) and conceptual ‘retooling’ (Riles, Miyazaki, and Genda 2014). My informants, or colleagues as I think of them, were thoughtful, creative, and reflexive interlocutors (Holmes 2009; Lynch 2000; Miyazaki 2012).³

Secretary-General Choi, with whom I opened this Introduction, told me that the old activist methods of writing press releases, having press conferences, and organising street demonstrations were not working as he and his colleagues prepared for the last push against the largest government-led land reclamation in Asia at the time. His civil movement organisation joined several others around the country in closing down office operations to coordinate large protests ahead of the final court ruling on the lawsuit to stop the reclamation. Not long after the court ordered the reclamation to continue, he wondered if doing nothing would have been better than all the work done over the past few years. He told me several months before that the real problem for civil organisations was that they did not have the scale of theory (iron) necessary to challenge not only the increasing scale of reclamation projects, but also the more pervasive scale of capitalism and neo-liberalism. Secretary-General Choi, whom I also discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, was constantly diverted from his larger theoretical and ideological aspirations by one crisis or another – the Saemangeum reclamation, protests in Pyeongtaek over the expansion of US military operations there, the negotiation of a South Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, or the latest eruption of North–South Korea tensions – and his Green Life Theory project relegated to one of many items on the agenda that often got pushed aside temporarily or indefinitely. As an ethnographer, I have empathised with this frustration, particularly when I have to carve out time and space for writing while living in South Korea.

My colleagues and I shared a constantly interrupted search for the time and space to playfully theorise and experiment with alternatives. The interruptions were often crises that demanded quick and pragmatic responses. This book is an effort to suspend our shared pragmatic impulses, particularly in response to various crises, long enough to enable an ethnography of pragmatism. Put another way, we sought to render pragmatism itself into a figure of study rather than defaulting to it as the ground upon which to act. I take a cue from colleagues such as Secretary-General Choi in re-approaching units of analysis such as ideology, field, discourse, project, and agenda in terms of scale and Lawyer Park in rescaling individual actions to larger social movements and designs. Here I am positing scale following Gregory Bateson (1958) and Marilyn Strathern (1991) as a means or method to apprehend, organise, and analyse complexity. Scale was not only my analytical device, but an analytical device I shared with my colleagues in the field. My approach to agency follows that of Debbora Battaglia (1995, 1997) and Hiro Miyazaki (2000, 2004) insofar as I explore its subtle ambiguities, amplifications, and abeyances.

This work replicates past and present movements, both activist and analytical, in order to reorient in terms of scale, crisis, and pragmatism. In the next section I make evident the