Hyeong-ki Kwon - Changes by Competition: The Evolution of the South Korean Developmental State

As I remember, it was in 2009 when I visited the International Center for Business and Politics (ICBP) in Copenhagen, Denmark that I began to take a look at Korea as my research subject, although Korea is my home country. Until then I had explored advanced democracies, including Germany, the United States, Ireland, and Nordic countries, doing field research for my dissertation and subsequent studies. I never forget the ICBPs sincere hospitality during my two visits. But most impressive was Professor Peer Hull Kristensens gentle smile and his thought-provoking question: Why are you wandering around these European countries, far away from your home country Korea? At that time, I could not reply immediately and avoided giving him an answer. However, what I avoided was not just an answer to Professor Kristensen, but more importantly, to myself. I wanted to avoid studying deeply the politics of my home country because Korea was divided into different political and ideological opinions. People I felt deeply attached to fought each other, forcing me to take one side or the other. I refused to take a side in such conflicts after studying abroad. However, I changed my mind about studying Korea, not only because my foreign acquaintances had continuously asked me about my home countryfor academics and policy-makers, Korea is an important test case for theoretical debates on economic development and democratization; but also, I knew that avoidance is not the best way to deal with the conflicts.

Conflicts in Korea are not tapering. On the contrary, they continue to amplify to the current day. People who lean toward democracy tend to disregard Koreas successful economic development which almost all emerging nations try to emulate, whereas people who emphasize Koreas successful economic growth tend to underestimate democracy, sometimes admitting authoritarianism for economic growth at the expense of democracy. While studying the prevalent theories on political economy, I discovered that the exclusive ideas of democracy versus economic development are not ordinary Koreans responsibility, but are based on academic theories. In particular, developmental state (DS) theories, which gained significant ascendancy in accounting for East Asian economic developments, hold that for successful economic development, the state should be unitary, cohesive, and unaffected by social forcesauthoritarianism strong enough to direct private actors with their unitary rationality.

However, through exploring the stories of successful economic development, I observed that in contrast to the DS theories, successful developmental states, including Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China, are neither unitary nor cohesive, but fragmented and full of rivalry and conflicts, particularly among policy-making elites. Even the Park Chung Hee regime, regarded as an archetype of the DS cohesive state, was full of rivalry and conflicts among economic ministries, including the Economic Planning Board (EPB), the Ministry of Finance (MoF), and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI). Furthermore, I found that competition and conflicts among elites are not always bad for economic development, as shall be examined in this book. On the contrary, collective deliberation and pragmatic experiments through rivalry and competition among elites can significantly contribute to economic development through flexible institutional adaptability in response to new challenges resulting from ever-changing contexts of domestic and international political economy.