People Power in an Era of Global Crisis: Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation by Barry K. Gills & Kevin Gray

Author:Barry K. Gills & Kevin Gray [Gills, Barry K. & Gray, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415500098
Google: eQTMXwAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13710929
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding remarks

Twenty-five years have passed since the military regime surrendered to the people power revolution and the democratic transition in Korea began. The Korean experience can be characterised as a negotiated transition in which the ruling party negotiated with opposition leaders while maintaining its political power. The pact between the ruling party and opposition leaders set limits to the development of democracy since it imposed the interests of political elites on the scope and nature of political reforms. While the fiercest challenge to the military regime was carried out by university students and radical political activists, they were excluded from negotiations surrounding the abolishment of authoritarian political institutions. Thus, the political negotiations between the ruling and opposition parties significantly restricted the outcome of regime change in South Korea. Popular movements such as the labour and peasant movements were also excluded from the sphere of institutionalised politics. Progressive parties were unable to participate in the new institutionalised politics, since existing parties based on strong regional antagonism among voters occupied the political space. Although workers and peasants had strong organisations, they were unable to fully mobilise the masses on behalf of the progressive parties in the elections.

Furthermore, the people power movement that successfully toppled the military regime in summer 1987 was not powerful enough to bring about regime change immediately because of the split between the opposition candidates in the presidential elections of 1987 and the failure of the democratic candidates. The conservative party was able to maintain its power for more than a decade after people power had opened up the path of democratisation. The persistence of the GNP contributed to the survival of the civic organisations that had been organised and sponsored by the former military regime. Genuine regime change did not occur until 1997, when the opposition candidate Kim Dae-jung finally defeated the GNP. However, the rule of the liberal democratic parties was short-lived and lasted for only a decade. The GNP returned to power in 2008.

In the post-crisis period, the newly elected Kim Dae-jung government implemented a set of neoliberal economic reforms under the guidance of the IMF. These reforms generated massive layoffs and increased the number of working. Despite the introduction of some welfare policies to prevent the emergence of a widespread social crisis, the welfare programmes introduced by the Kim Dae-jung government fell short of providing a social safety net for the unemployed and irregular workers. As a result, mass disaffection with rising inequality and poverty undermined the social support of the liberal democratic governments. The conservative political party and civic organisations were consequently able to capitalise on the deteriorating social and economic condition of the people.

The extraordinary political dynamics of democratic transition in Korea challenges theories of democratic transition and consolidation in newly democratised societies. It shows that the dynamics of civil society is as important as that of the state. The conservative civic organisations established and sponsored by the military regime were able to survive and become the social basis of the conservative political mobilisation from the mid-2000s onwards.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.