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The Developmental Sources of South Korean Neoliberalism

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Abstract

How do South Korea’s developmental legacies influence its contemporary political economy? The discourse surrounding this question has tended to diverge over the extent to which South Korea’s state-led developmental model has been supplanted by a market-led, neoliberal mode of political-economic organization. Though this debate has indeed fostered many important individual contributions, it has also yielded a muddled and ambiguous theoretical landscape. To clarify this cluttered terrain, this paper draws from recent advances in the study of neoliberalism to establish critical points of consonance between statist perspectives on Korean development and neoliberalism. To this end, it identifies key threads of continuity binding South Korea’s developmental past with its neoliberal present. The paper finds that critical aspects of the developmental state’s interaction with society, from coercion to ideological suasion, furnished elemental building blocks to those actively constructing a South Korean neoliberalism. Thus, exploring these historical contours produces a fresh means for apprehending the interactions of enduring statist developmental legacies with contemporary neoliberal reforms, both theoretically and empirically. As such, this study yields an improved set of conceptual tools for grasping the complex empirical phenomena shaping the interplay of neoliberalism, developmentalism, and democracy within contemporary South Korea.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in Jwa (2017, P.94).

  2. It bears mentioning here that given the extremely low initial baseline, the welfare system in Korea has certainly 'expanded' over the last several decades. For detailed explorations of these changes see, Kwon 2003; Peng 2011; Yang 2017. Nonetheless, the outlook adopted here joins those emphasizing the continued anemic nature of Korea’s welfare system that persists despite these reforms.

  3. Notably, supply side policy devices were not at all alien to the Korean development model as Jae-jin Yang (2017, pp. 43–44) describes tax cuts in the early 1970s as “Reaganomics before Reagan” which shored up a “low tax regime” and “significantly constrained the expansion of the public social security system.”.

  4. This insight can be traced back to Polanyi’s (1957) Great Transformation which offers a thoroughgoing account of the state’s role in effectuating the underlying conditions needed to create and maintain a ‘national market’.

  5. In Jackson’s (2012, p. 68) exploration of Hayek’s relationship with Walter Lippmann he quotes from a letter Lippmann wrote to Hayek noting that in the index of The Constitution of Liberty he was “puzzled to find that you have one reference to the corporation and nineteen references to labor unions. Does this mean that the index is at fault, or can it be that you think the corporation and its problems rate less than one page in a treatise of this kind?”.

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Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Northeastern Political Science Association conference in Philadelphia in November 2019. The author wishes to thank his fellow panelists at the conference, Nicolas Reynolds and Lowell Gustafson for their thoughtful comments and useful feedback. He also grateful to Joshua Leon for his valuable feedback and advice at various stages throughout the completion of the manuscript.

Funding

Research for this manuscript was supported by funding from the center for Research and Community Outreach Services (RCOS) at Akita International University. The author has no conflicts of interest to report.

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  1. Global Studies Program, Akita International University, Akita, Japan

    Kevin Hockmuth

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Hockmuth, K. The Developmental Sources of South Korean Neoliberalism. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 15, 41–61 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-021-00328-4

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