The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen et al., and; State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim (review)

A late industrializing nation-state, South Korea was characterized as "the miracle of the Han river" up until the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. And it was praised for rapidly overcoming the crisis, both by international financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and by nation-states that went through contemporaneous national economic crises. Scholars and experts attributed these achievements to the role of the South Korean state and the strong government initiatives and intervention in business and markets that had marked its administration and bureaucracy since the Korean War.

Scholarly work on the developmental state (Kim 1997; Woo-Cumings 1999) centered on whether the Korean government under the military regimes developed national wealth by largely controlling the big conglomerates (chaebŏl) or whether the regimes and the capitalists collaborated to produce economic growth. Despite the significant attention given to the economic growth of the South Korean developmental regimes, the role of the government in social development has been understudied. However, public awareness of social development, or "improving quality of living (sam ŭi chil hyangsang)," has been growing since the 1990s, when South Korea joined other nations in donating foreign aid and after the establishment of the National Basic Livelihood Security in 1999 under the Kim Dae Jung regime. In this context, The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen and colleagues and State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim are timely contributions to the field of South Korean state and social-development studies.

Reading these two books together is captivating because they seem to be having a dialogue with one another, even if they do not directly address each other. Both books consider the ways in which the South Korean government navigated its relationship with multiple stakeholders, especially participants in civic organizations, in working towards a democratic process. I would like to elaborate the imagined dialogue between the two books by identifying some key common narratives and differing perspectives or foci. The two books highlight the importance of detailing the institutional history of the South Korean state rather than simply lumping South Korea into the regional category of the (East Asian) developmental state (emphasized in Kim), or reducing the "mysteries" of rapid achievements to authoritarian state power (emphasized in Ringen et al.). The books share a narrative of "dynamics,""metamorphoses,""mutation,""shifting," and "change," whether it is from poverty and dictatorship to affluence and democracy (Ringen et al.) or from a (centripetal) state-centric mode of social governance to a (centrifugal) contested one (Kim).

In particular, Ringen and colleagues, coming from a political science background with a thematic focus on social policy and the East Asian welfare state, contend that social development was gradually expanded throughout the history of modernization, including during the Japanese colonial regime and before, and during and after the military regimes. In other words, they argue that social development did not suddenly begin with the appearance of the universalized welfare state during the conjunction of the Asian financial crisis and the Kim Dae Jung regime. With this argument, they want to show that what matters is not measurement of the capacity of state power but interrogation of the art of state power—how such strong state power was used and administered to achieve a goal of national prosperity, including social development. For instance, they provide data demonstrating that civil volunteerism, as a sign of democratic social governance, was...