Origins and Consequences of South Korea’s Social Development

Abstract

Origins and Consequences of South Korea’s Social Development Walter C. Clemens Jr. (bio) Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Daniel J. Schwekendiek, South Korea: A Socioeconomic Overview from the Past to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016). How to explain the transformation of South Korea, especially in the 1960s and 1970s? It was one of the most rapid and far reaching in world history. As Daniel J. Schwekendiek makes clear, the Republic of Korea (ROK) produced the world’s fastest growing economy in terms of GDP per capita after World War II. South Korea in the mid-2000s became the world’s tenth largest economy. While South Korea adapted practices from the United States, Germany, and Japan in the twentieth century, Schwekendiek argues that the ROK is now being “chased” by China and other rising economies. To understand a country such as South Korea is it more useful to utilize the tools of history or of social science? Given the two books discussed here, we need not choose. The reader can benefit from the work of two outstanding scholars, each of whom offers a different approach to knowledge. Students of Northeast Asia can forge their own synthesis, drawing from each approach. While Carter J. Eckert’s book is based on documents, interviews, and insights derived from other historians, Schwekendiek approaches his task as a social scientist. In this book and in previous studies he analyzes statistics from the Organization [End Page 341] for Economic Cooperation and Development, official ROK studies, and other sources. Free will or determinism? In the real world there is no absolute division. Both forces interact. Eckert quotes Karl Marx: individuals make their own history, but they do so “under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.” While engaged in creating something new, revolutionaries often utilize and sometimes mask names and slogans borrowed from world history. Eckert argues that the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged in the decades after the Korean War were laid during Japan’s occupation. Having trained at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria in the early 1940s, Park Chung-hee and other future ROK officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army’s ethos of victory at all costs and later applied it to the tasks of Korean modernization. They believed that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis and that a central authority should plan and monitor the country’s economic system. The book under review, the first of two volumes Eckert is writing on Park, traces these beliefs to Japanese teachings. To explain Korea’s modernization, however, Eckert takes the reader far and wide. He follows Korean intellectuals and activists as they encountered the ideas and policies that shaped China, Japan, the United States, and Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, having studied and traveled abroad, Yo Kilchun (1856–1914) wrote a nearly 600-page manifesto of the Korean enlightenment to provide Koreans with a detailed understanding of the unfamiliar world in which they found themselves and to offer models on which to base their reforms. Among them was Napoleon’s: making nations tremble. A half century later, Napoleon would capture the imagination of a young Park Chung-hee. To grasp what Korea’s enlightenment reformers learned, Eckert provides insightful sketches of social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and Prussian military thinkers such as Clausewitz. A paradox is that Kim Il-sung acquired a similar orientation after serving with communist Chinese and Soviet forces. Indeed, North Korea’s juche ideology of self-reliance includes the can-do spirit that Eckert attributes to the ROK. Both Park and Kim believed that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society [End Page 342] and exploit violence to maintain order. For communist leaders in China and the USSR, the military was to serve the Communist Party and its leaders, whereas Japanese generals expected the military to dominate and lead politics. Both viewpoints posited that war and politics should be total—mobilizing all resources to serve political ends. Park learned...