The Politics of Reform in South Korea: The First Year of the Kim Dae Jung Government, 1998–1999

In dealing with the dual challenge of economic restructuring and democratic deepening, the principal strategy of the Kim Dae Jung government in South Korea has been that of parallelism—a simultaneous pursuit of economic and political reforms. This article critically evaluates the feasibility and practicality of this strategy. Despite the significant commonality between the two reforms in their ultimate goal—de-statization—the actual unfoldings of reform politics have been paradoxically self-defeating, augmenting the power and influence of the state they eventually seek to diminish. A remedy is to empower civil society to play an important role in checking and balancing the state.