Wow, I know almost nothing about South Korea.

[Simfan34]

It's dawned upon I know very little about South Korea. I thought Lee Myung-bak was in his 40s, not 70. I didn't know he was CEO of Hyundai, too. I didn't know that Park Geun-hye was Park Chung-hee's daughter. Or that they use a cross between AP exams and the SAT, the CSAT, as their entrance exam. Or that they produce the most ships of any country. Or that the largest department store is there (I thought it was Macy's...). Or that so many Koreans were Christians.... It's scary, but it's safe to say I know more about North Korea than I do South Korea. I had no idea the Grand National Party changed names... why they'd do that?

[Silent Hunter]

I don't know a lot about the ROK either, except that they really like Starcraft there.

[minionofmidas]

Or that they produce the most ships of any country. Or that so many Koreans were Christians..

I knew those things! And even something - not nearly enough - about how they came about!

But the rest... nah. I probably read but forgot about the party renamer, and otherwise... is it really relevant? South Korea is an odd cross of democracy and American military possession, colored (just like North Korea, of course of course) by a quite unique experience of imperialism - at the hand of an Asian neighbor, and not the one they'd always looked up to and felt to be almost part of, but the semibarbaric other one. That's the important thing to know (and the Christian thing is tied with the bit about Asian imperialism. And later to the US influence.)

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Or that they produce the most ships of any country. Or that so many Koreans were Christians..

I knew those things! And even something - not nearly enough - about how they came about!

But the rest... nah. I probably read but forgot about the party renamer, and otherwise... is it really relevant? South Korea is an odd cross of democracy and American military possession, colored (just like North Korea, of course of course) by a quite unique experience of imperialism - at the hand of an Asian neighbor, and not the one they'd always looked up to and felt to be almost part of, but the semibarbaric other one. That's the important thing to know (and the Christian thing is tied with the bit about Asian imperialism. And later to the US influence.)

I've read that South Korea's strong Christian heritage is a big part of the reason why Korean politics are more turbulent and prone to polarization than Japanese politics.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I always love grand sweeping theories that ignore actual existing room based pachyderms.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What is your opinion on this topic, Al? It'd be cool to see your insight instead of your disdain.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is that what counts as disdain these days?

[© tweed]

What is your opinion on this topic, Al? It'd be cool to see your insight instead of your disdain.

don't try, he is what he is; and if that much disdain gets reflected on everything else, be sure that in his own mind, it gets plenty reflected on himself.

[Simfan34]

I do know how Korean Christians came to be, but I didn't realize they were such a high percentage.

[minionofmidas]

What is your opinion on this topic, Al? It'd be cool to see your insight instead of your disdain.

Korea and Japan don't share a present or recent (ie slightly longer than the oldest roots of the Japanese party system) past, you'd have to be a determinist racist to think they ought to have a similar party system.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What is your opinion on this topic, Al? It'd be cool to see your insight instead of your disdain.

Korea and Japan don't share a present or recent (ie slightly longer than the oldest roots of the Japanese party system) past, you'd have to be a determinist racist to think they ought to have a similar party system.

Korean culture is or at least fancies itself considerably closer to Chinese than to Japanese culture, too.

[seanobr]

It's dawned upon I know very little about South Korea. I thought Lee Myung-bak was in his 40s, not 70. I didn't know he was CEO of Hyundai, too. I didn't know that Park Geun-hye was Park Chung-hee's daughter. Or that they use a cross between AP exams and the SAT, the CSAT, as their entrance exam. Or that they produce the most ships of any country. Or that the largest department store is there (I thought it was Macy's...). Or that so many Koreans were Christians.... It's scary, but it's safe to say I know more about North Korea than I do South Korea.

And did you know that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the OECD?  Or that by 2050, nearly forty percent of its population will be 65 or older?  It wouldn't be right if your list ended without a note of pessimism, but the actual reason I thought this discussion demanded such a late reply from me is because of something you inadvertently identified, which is the difficulty South Korea has encountered in garnering the attention its political and economic stature deserve.  From a historical perspective, Korea's contentment with its place in the Sinic order and its interpretation of orthodox Confucianism might render its past less distinctive than either that of China or Japan, reducing its modern appeal.  I've also often felt that the enduring tragedy of the Korean War is not so much the division of the peninsula, which was inevitable as early as 1946 -- when Kim Il-sung forced out Cho Man-sik, formed the Provisional People's Commitee and turned to the Soviet MGB for assistance in establishing his state -- but that South Korea's phenomenal achievements continue to be overshadowed by the profile of its neighbor.  Part of that marginalization is geographic, because the South is only one half of a peninsula situated between the aforementioned duo and Russia, and despite the enthusiasm for 'global Korea' and sustaining hallyu more generally, it will never compare in power or influence to any of the three.  

As the division of the peninsula is an anomaly, it is modern Korea's defining characteristic.  Since North and South can almost never be conceived completely separate from one another, the extreme belligerence and inanity of the North will naturally diminish the South -- and Pyongyang has exploited that to full effect in the past.  While no one would deny that the North has a legitimate rationale for its nuclear program, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il surely appreciated that nuclear development would allow the North to command a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its actual significance.  Despite their ideological posturing, both Kim's had an insatiable desire for external validation; Kim Il-sung hoped his revolution would acquire international resonance, and in the formal explication of songun, North Korea is leading a remnant socialist bloc in confronting American hegemony.  If, as an experiment, we removed the North's nuclear arsenal from consideration, what would remain?  Its xenophobia and isolation would probably allow it to disappear from international notice, like Eriteria, but also reduce it to nothing, a captive of its own malnutrition and deprivation.  When I'm not lamenting the lack of depth in our treatment of the North, I'm struck by the fact that America's insistence on inflating it from an infirm middle power to an antagonistic caricature satisfies certain needs in alliance and domestic politics, but it also appeals to the North's most primal instincts and is harmful to the South in many respects.

I think America's approach to the peninsula has facilitated the dynamic described above, although that brings to the fore questions about our relationship with the South which are not relevant here.  In the first instance, every time we insist on portraying the confrontation between the North and South as a final manifestation of the Cold War, we perpetuate an allegory that is no longer useful.  That characterization has led to the sense that the South is incomplete, and only once the North fulfills its pre-determined role and collapses can we lavish a unified Republic of Korea with praise for having prevailed over its neighbor; paradoxically, however, America's military presence and the Cold War imagery both make the conflict feel as if it may persist indefinitely.  When we concentrate on the North's nuclear development to the exclusion of any other issue, America not only impairs its ability to interact with Pyongyang, but we also promote the idea that its nuclear arsenal is the only matter of real importance on the peninsula, thus nullifying the South entirely.  That failing is not confined to the peninsula; my most persistent criticism of current American foreign policy is its inability to accept that nuclear proliferation is a manifestation of underlying political conflict and cannot be dealt with in isolation.  Exhorting North Korea or Iran to halt nuclear enrichment as a pre-condition for discussion, or refusing to engage beyond the nuclear issue, is entirely counterproductive, because it attempts to remove proliferation from its context, whereas Iran and North Korea see the nuclear question as comprising one element of a broader settlement.  

More fundamentally, while Seoul's prominence has been enhanced by the close relationship Obama enjoys with Lee, I have wondered if America has difficulty relating to its Asian allies, a reality compounded by the South's own refusal to be as submissive as we would have preferred over the last decade.  As Leslie Gelb's petulant commentary on the Obama administration's Asian re-balancing illustrated, the majority of our foreign policy community is still steeped in a distinctly European experience, and that sentimental attachment might prevent us from recognizing that other areas are becoming more relevant and they demand as much, if not more attention.  If you know comparatively little about the South, then, it's because reaching the '20-50 Club', developing a democracy that, despite its tendency toward the superficial, is extraordinarily successful, or becoming the first aid recipient to qualify for the OECD Development Assistance Committee have done nothing to mitigate its neglect, and these may not be accomplishments that necessarily inspire.

[seanobr]

I had no idea the Grand National Party changed names.

The Grand National Party changed its name to Saenuri, or New Frontier Party, as part of the reform program launched by Park Geun-hye when she was brought in to lead its emergency committee in December of last year.  Hong Jun-pyo had proven himself completely inept in only eighteen months as chair, and after Park Won-soon's defeat of Na Kyung-won in the Seoul mayoral election it began to dawn on everyone that the GNP was headed for disaster in April's parliamentary elections and the Presidential poll if it didn't make significant adjustments.  In fact, when I made a comment here last November about the trajectory of our relationship with South Korea, I did so certain that the GNP was going to lose its majority in parliament, just to illustrate how sour the atmosphere surrounding the party was at the time.  Since I don't know how familiar you are with South Korea, the sub-plot to the decision is that Park Geun-hye lost the GNP Presidential primary to Lee Myung-bak in 2007 by a negligible amount, winning amongst the party membership but losing because of the inclusion of non-partisan polling data in the final result.  It was never in doubt that the GNP candidate was going to win the overall election -- the UND's Chung lost by over twenty percent, so that decided the outcome, and Lee naturally took advantage of the opportunity to solidify his control over the party, marginalizing those perceived as supportive of Park.  Elevating her to the party leadership a year before the Presidential election it was accepted she wanted to contest, then, was as much a repudiation of Lee as a recognition of her electoral sagacity.  

Park took the party toward the center of the Korean political spectrum, removed a number of Lee loyalists from the electoral rolls or uprooted them to other districts, started employing the term 'economic democratization', a phrase which has recurred in her Presidential campaign, and even abandoned the party's blue livery in an attempt to decouple it from Lee's presence.  In the run up to the parliamentary election, Saenuri nearly equalled its opponent, the DUP, in issuing pledges about reducing the cost of health care and education and promoting welfare, even though few if any of them could have been implemented; the 'economic democratization' chant remains completely meaningless, though it has successfully captured a prevailing hostility in South Korean society to the chaebol and the stultifying version of capitalism they tend to practice.  Ultimately, the GNP's revision was about symbolism, right down to including Jasmine Lee, a Filipino-Korean, on their proportional list, and in that it was extremely successful.  There was even some speculation that Lee might be cajoled into resigning from the party to further amplify the separation between them, which has occurred before on the eve of an election in South Korea, but fortunately nothing so drastic was attempted.  Lee's mind has probably already shifted to retirement and evading the scandals that have haunted him for the past five years in any event, like the one enveloping his brother and Kim Hee-jung last week.

However exceptional Park's efforts were, the opposition should have never lost the parliamentary election -- so, of course, that's exactly what they managed to do.  Han Myeong-sook's Democratic United Party decided to form an alliance with the United Progressive Party (which itself was the product of Rhyu Si-min's PPP, the DLP, whose remnants have been at the epicenter of controversy since April, and the NPP) to ensure that they did not compete with each other in any electoral district, an eminently logical decision, except that the DUP was forced to adopt several policies championed by the UPP to ensure their cooperation. To comprehend the ramifications of this agreement, we first have to recognize the influence of Lee's predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, a figure who left office deeply unpopular and had a difficult relationship with Washington, but remains an indirect force in South Korean politics even after his suicide.  Roh was responsible for the original negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement that was only ratified in October of last year, as well as the decision to construct a naval base on Jeju Island; his legacy is still incubated in the DUP, and if the GNP was riven by the division between Park and Lee, the DUP has a schism between Roh supporters, those who remained with the Millenium Democratic Party after Roh's group left to form the Uri Party in 2003 -- a tale in itself, and other elements, like Sohn Hak-kyu's Hannara grouping, that were incorporated into it through the DUP's various incarnations.  

Han had served as Prime Minister of the government under Roh for a single year, and her selection as DUP Chairwoman affirmed the dominance of the Roh faction and elicited protest from those in Jeolla, Kim Dae-jung's territory, which is typically associated with the progressive movement.  The DUP embraced its identity as the party of Roh, so it was completely incongruous when it proceeded to advocate for the repeal of the FTA and the abolition of the base project on Jeju, the most prominent items on the UPP's ledger.  Saenuri took advantage of every opportunity to remind the DUP of that fact, devastating the DUP's credibility and having the most dramatic impact on the result, since the GNP's transformation into Saenuri eliminated much of the difference between them.  The UPP itself, led by Lee Jung-hee, created a scandal over its selection of proportional representation candidates that has seen the party self-immolate over the last three months, an issue deserving of its own post.  Substantive allegations about a program of government surveillance carried out under the Lee administration amounted to very little; Park Geun-hye claimed she had been targeted as well, and it was later advanced that eighty percent of the records in question originated from the Roh administration, although I don't know if that has ever been proven.  

On the eve of the election, some very crude comments that Kim Yong-min, a media personality formerly on the podcast 'Naggomsu' and candidate for the DUP, had made in his capacity as host of that program were brought to light, and that helped to divert attention away from the convenient shifting of Saenuri's image and some of the more problematic aspects of Park's presence.  The performance of the Roh loyalists in the election was disappointing; Moon Sung-keun, the actor voted onto the six-member policy setting Supreme Council in January, lost his race in Busan, where it was hoped he and others could benefit from the presence of Moon Jae-in, who was unable to galvanize that type of following.  More damaging, the DUP was unable to win a single seat in Gangwon, an area with some Roh support.  As it happened, Saenuri emerged with a majority of 152 seats, not the result I expected to encounter, sufficient for them to expel Kim Hyeong-tae for his alleged sexual assault and Moon Dae-seong, who was proven to have committed plagiarism in his doctoral thesis.  It's been certain ever since that Park would be the Saenuri party's candidate in the Presidential election, although she does have perfunctory opposition, the most important of which -- Lee Jae-oh and Chung Mong-joon -- already withdrew after they were unable to impose an open primary on the party.