Human Rights in Korea: Historical and Policy Perspectives (review)

148BOOK REVIEWS analysis of the Korean labor movement and of the historical and structural factors that have shaped its distinct pattern of development. Hagen Koo University of Hawaii at Manoa Human Rights in Korea: Historical andPolicy Perspectives, edited by William Shaw. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University and The East Asian Legal Studies Program of the Harvard School, 1991. The problem of human rights in South Korea has attracted an increasing amount of attention from scholars as well as diplomats, civil libertarians, and politicians over the past years because of the sad history of repression in South Korea since liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Like most of the previous publications on the subject, this book also is devoted mainly to publicizing the record of violations of fundamental principles of civil liberties and democratic procedure. Some of the articles also assess the responsibility of the United States in either failing to prevent violations of human rights or, more seriously, aiding and abetting the formation and continuation of conservative and repressive dictatorships in the name of higher policy, namely prevention of the spread of communism or preservation of South Korea against the threat from North Korea. Overall, the articles in the volume are of mixed quality. The best article is the one on U.S. policy coauthored by Jerome A. Cohen and Edward J. Baker that provides a valuable summary of the record on human rights from the 1960s. The article on the 1987 constitutional reforms coauthored by James M. West and Edward J. Baker reviews Chun Doo Hwan's decision in 1987 to allow the election of his successor, Roh Tae-woo, as president of the Republic, and provides a rather negative assessment of the effects of amendments to the constitution on human rights. Unfortunately, because the narrative comes to an end early in 1988, it was not possible to assess the record of the revived Constitution Court in action. The article concludes only with a set of wishes for the future. The valuable article by the late Gregory Henderson also provides information on the poor human rights record of the U.S. Military Gov- BOOK REVIEWS149 ernment in Korea, the Purakchi trial of 1949-50, and the legacy of Japanese law carried over from the colonial era, but Henderson failed to incorporate the results of Bruce Cuming's extensive research into the period prior to the outbreak of the Korean War. Lawrence Beer's article was also useful because it provides a comparative context for judging the use of constitutions in other nations in the twentieth century, but the other articles are of lesser utility than Henderson's because they go over familiar ground or concentrate on minor issues. The one area where the book might have risen to a higher level of analysis was the discussion of the propriety of a critique of both U.S. policy and South Korea politics on the grounds of human rights itself. In his article, Donald MacDonald rejects the criticism of U.S. policy for failing to protest the violation of human rights by the South Korean government , because he holds that since 1946 the U.S. consistently aimed at establishing a self-governing, independent, and economically prosperous South Korea, even though it was not able to achieve all these goals. He excuses the failure on the grounds that using force to achieve democracy and civil liberties would have been oxymoronic. He chastises humanrights critics for failing to appreciate the striking economic progress that has been achieved in South Korea, and asserts that the people of South Korea have put a higher priority on their climb out of poverty and insecurity than on democracy because group conformity was traditionally a higher value to them than Western individualism. Although South Korean workers did suffer from starvation wages, inhuman working conditions, and the denial of collective bargaining rights, these injustices were no worse than what Americans and Europeans had to endure. William Shaw, the editor of the volume, did attempt to address MacDonald's charges in his introduction by rejecting the argument that traditional Korean values make democracy and human rights impossible to achieve on the grounds that those traditions...