Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy

Conclusion

Conclusion The transformation that occurred in South Korea during the three and a half decades after the Korean War was stunning and unpredictable. Among the dozens of nations to emerge from formal colonialism following World War II, South Korea was one of the select few to achieve economic prosperity and political democracy. Once deemed an economic basket case, the country was well on its way to becoming one of the ten largest economies in the world. Once deemed incapable of self-government, South Koreans would soon have a democracy that was perhaps the most vibrant in Asia. Only through an honest and judicious evaluation of what enabled this transformation to occur can the experience of nation building in South Korea be understood and learned from. Autocracy, Development, and Democracy During the Cold War the Republic of Korea (rok) was governed by successive autocratic governments that were supported by the United States and, in some instances, would have perished without American assistance. The success of these regimes in achieving stability, promoting economic development, and even creating the social basis for democracy raises some vexing questions. Could South Korea have enjoyed the same measures of economic growth and democracy under governments that more directly reflected the popular will? Were South Korea’s leaders more autocratic than necessary in pursuing these worthy objectives? To what extent was the United States responsible for both the successes and excesses of their regimes ? Answering these questions requires an assessment of what the alternatives to these regimes were and how South Korea might have evolved under these alternatives. There were three critical junctures—1945–48, 1960–61, and 1979–80—when American actions proved vital to the assumption of power by autocrats at the expense of governments or political leaders who enjoyed stronger popular support. Revisiting each of these junctures offers the clearest perspective on the relative merits of the regimes that gained power and the alternatives that might have been. At the first crossroads, the years between 1945 and 1948, Americans intervened in a civil conflict between the left and the right that seemed destined to tear the country apart. In the absence of U.S. intervention, [252] Conclusion leftist revolutionaries would, in all likelihood, have defeated their opponents and assumed control of the entire Korean peninsula. Bruce Cumings has contended: ‘‘Had the Americans and the Russians quit Korea, a leftist regime would have taken over quickly, and it would have been a revolutionary nationalist government that, over time, would have moderated and joined the world community—as did China, as Vietnam is doing today.’’ In Cumings’s scenario, the unified Korean state would have presumably been able to move in a more moderate direction than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk) ultimately did because the social conflicts fostered by Japanese imperialism would have been resolved and the national division, one of the major causes of North Korean militarism, would not have existed. A civil war would still have occurred, but it would not have approximated the destructiveness of the Korean War in which millions lost their lives.∞ I generally agree with Cumings’s analysis and can understand some of the reasons why he believes the triumph of a leftist revolution was preferable to the actual course of events. Korea would not have been divided, and the civil conflict that Cumings describes would not have been as deadly as the Korean War. Thousands of Korean families would never have had to endure decades of separation imposed upon them by the stark realities of the Cold War. Korea would have likely aligned itself with international Communism but perhaps would have abandoned socialist models of economic development along with the rest of the world in the mid-nineties. At the same time, it is extremely unlikely that a Korea unified by the left would have enjoyed the same levels of prosperity and freedom that exist in South Korea today. Leftist nationalist governments of the kind that Cumings refers to do not have a good track record when it comes to stimulating economic growth or moving toward genuine democracy. The tragedies that befell some of the Asian countries in which leftist nationalist governments gained power often rivaled those that befell Koreans during the Korean War. Ironically, China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam have been able to improve their economies and moderate their policies in recent years only by emulating elements of the South Korean model of development. If the United...