On 3 December, the thirteenth President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law. Looking tired and frustrated in his televised address to the nation (it is rumoured that he may have been drinking), he justified this decision by accusing the parliamentary opposition of establishing a ‘legislative dictatorship’, ‘conspiring to incite rebellion by trampling on the constitutional order of the free Republic of Korea’ and colluding with ‘North Korean communist forces’. The state of emergency didn’t last long – all of six hours, in which opposition leader Lee Jae-myung and his fellow lawmakers wrestled through a police cordon at the National Assembly and barricaded themselves inside, where they unanimously voted down the presidential decree. They were supported by a large crowd of Seoul residents who had rushed to parliament, forming a human shield to ward off paratroopers wielding assault rifles.
Yoon appeared on television again and agreed to revoke the measures, of which he evidently had not informed South Korea’s closest ally, the US. On 14 December he was impeached by the National Assembly; the constitutional court is deciding whether to remove him from office. The public has breathed a sigh of relief, and the liberal opposition, headed by the Democratic Party, has proclaimed that democracy has been saved. But the episode reveals a striking feature of South Korean political culture: the centrality of anti-communism to the constitutional order. It is in this context that Yoon’s apparent act of madness should be understood.
First, some background. Yoon was born in 1960 in Seongbuk, a wealthy northern neighbourhood of Seoul. Both his parents were university professors. Much has been made in recent days of the fact that Yoon attended Chungam High School along with his defence minister Kim Yong-hyun, with speculation about a ‘Chungam faction’ in Yoon’s inner circle and its role in the planning of the martial law decree. After studying law at Seoul National University, Yoon passed the bar exam in 1991, and following several high-profile cases as a public prosecutor, including the corruption investigation that led to the arrest of former President Park Geun-hye, he joined the Central Seoul District Prosecutor’s Office. He was appointed as Prosecutor General in 2019 by then-president Moon Jae-in, but their relationship soured after Yoon pursued investigations against Moon’s justice minister, among other allies. Following his resignation in March 2021, Yoon secured the presidential nomination of the right-wing People Power party (PPP).
The contrast between Yoon and his predecessor has been stark. Moon held a historic meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in April 2018 which resulted in the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and the Reunification of the Korean Peninsula: formally committing the two countries to ‘denuclearization’ and broaching the prospect of a peace treaty. Donald Trump had been a vocal supporter of this entente cordiale during his time in the White House. But by the time of the South Korean presidential elections in 2022, it had foundered. The campaign was dominated by domestic issues, primarily the lack of affordable housing (81% of Koreans in their 20s live with their parents, the highest rate in the OECD) and the economic fallout from Covid-19, which the PPP sought to blame on the Moon administration. Yoon triumphed over his Democratic Party rival Lee Jae-myung by a slender margin, winning broad support among younger male voters.
Yoon had sparked controversy during the election cycle by suggesting that South Korea would benefit from a 120-hour work week. In office, he attempted to increase the maximum weekly working time from 52 to 69 hours, eliciting a major backlash from the youth and trade unions, who pointed out that it was not idle workers but low birth rates that explained the country’s economic woes. Although South Korea ranks second in the world in R&D, productivity growth has been flatlining thanks to demographic decline – down from 6.1% in 2001-10 to 0.5% in 2011-20. Yoon also managed to provoke a strike over medical school admission quotas which saw 90% of junior doctors resign in protest. In foreign policy, the president was hawkish, seeking to upgrade relations with Japan to the level of a strategic military alliance. In addition to vocal hostility toward North Korea, Yoon stoked anti-China sentiment. The ROK’s trade surplus with the country turned into a deficit of around a billion dollars in the first half of his presidency.
The second half of Yoon’s presidency has been defined by scandal. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate allegations against his wife, ranging from stock price manipulation to bribery to questionable dealings in nominations for PPP positions. Yoon intervened in the prosecution, ignored the allegations, aggressively wielded his veto powers in the National Assembly, and promptly refused any negotiations with the majority opposition party.
How, then, to make sense of what appears to have been a genuine attempt to return South Korea to a form of military rule? Yoon’s career as a prosecutor, which taught him stubborn belligerence at the expense of diplomatic negotiation, may help to explain his recent act of hubris. To study law in the ROK certainly offers plenty of opportunities for poring over the extra-legal playbooks of the authoritarian regimes of past dictators like Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. On 10 December, Hankyoreh reported that ex-Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun – an alleged member of the so-called ‘Chungam faction’ – had been trying to provoke a limited border conflict with North Korea as a pretext for imposing martial law. Since the latter can only be declared in times of war or national emergency, a strategy may have been devised to provide Yoon with legitimate grounds for his decree, and thus revive his lame duck presidency (following defeat in May’s legislative elections, Yoon’s PPP policy agenda has been blocked). How this relates to Yoon’s declaration on 3 December, and whether the president intended to feign a conflict with the North once martial law had been implemented, remains to be seen.
Yet this also must be considered historically. Bruce Cumings characterized South Korea and Japan in the late 1940s as ‘the subjects of a dual containment policy . . . both to contain the communist enemy and to constrain the capitalist ally’. South Korea’s integration into the global economy was premised on the supposed need to combat communism – a threat invoked by successive governments to suppress political freedoms, via the National Security Act. Ostensibly designed to shield South Korea from the North, the NSA functions as a ‘constitution within the constitution’, proscribing the recognition of North Korea as a political entity, the printing and distribution of ‘anti-government’ propaganda and the promotion of ‘rebellion against the state’. To this day, the act is still used to smother opposition to the status quo. In 2014, it was invoked to ban a newly formed left-wing party, the Unified Progressives, after it performed surprisingly well in the Assembly elections. And last August, it was cited by police to justify raiding the offices of the People’s Democratic Party, seizing its documents and arresting its leader, Lee Sang-hoon.
South Korea’s political and ideological landscape was shaped by a combination of economic success and fragile democratic institutions, with ‘anti-communism’ the primary weapon of the elites – today dominated by the Chaebol conglomerates of Samsung, Hyundai, LG and others – to clamp down on progressive politics. Yet there has been a gradual shift in how it is deployed. Gone are the days when the statement ‘I am a communist’ could land a Korean in a mass grave. And we are now at a point where the ROK’s liberal anti-communism – which is to say emergency laws that function smoothly within the framework of a liberal constitution – has mutated into a form of anti-liberalism. A telling incident was the cancellation of a talk by Judith Butler at Kyung Hee University on ‘Democracy and the Future of Humanities’ early this month, after threats from right-wing nationalists. This spoke to a wider cultural climate: during his presidential campaign Yoon had run on an explicitly anti-feminist platform, promising to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family on the grounds that structural gender inequality no longer exists. The reality is that workplace sexual harassment and misogyny is widespread in the ROK. In 2017 Human Rights Watch found that 80% of male survey respondents admitted to violence against an intimate partner.
How is the situation likely to evolve in the short term? In the rarefied atmosphere of South Korean television studios, such scandals often take on a life of their own. Yet the audacity of Yoon’s decree coupled with his refusal to resign has inadvertently brought the subject of anti-communism to the forefront. Although a survey in 2021 showed a majority of people still support the NSA and its controversial Article 7, which prohibits a ‘rebellion against the state’ (a phrase Yoon cited in his television address) the voices calling for its abolition are likely to grow louder, joining those of the Korean Journalists Association and Amnesty International, which describes the NSA as ‘a tool to silence dissent and to arbitrarily prosecute individuals who are peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association’.
Are their voices likely to be heard? This is difficult to predict. However, we see some grounds for optimism. First of all, anti-communism is increasingly viewed as part of an outdated political settlement, one which claimed the lives of 1.5 million people in the Korean War. While some conservatives initially supported Yoon’s actions, in the wake of the impeachment vote in which twelve PPP members supported the opposition’s motion, the governing party is reported to be falling apart. The more revelations emerge in the coming weeks of fake military threats from ‘North Korean communist forces’, the more difficult it will be to divorce opposition to Yoon and the PPP from opposition to anti-communist discourse more generally; historically, anti-communism is intimately bound up with martial law declarations – there have been 16 since 1948. Yet the political alternatives arising from opposition to anti-communism have evolved, signalling a growing desire for a new political settlement. Today Koreans who participated in the pro-democracy movements of the 1980s, and the younger generation in their 20s and 30s, broadly consider the era of inter-Korean rivalry to be over, and that instead of posing a communist threat, North Korea serves as the neurotic fantasy of the security state.
Second, South Korea’s democracy has a habit of springing up in times of crisis. The Candlelight Protests, the last of which took place in 2016-18 against former president Park Geun-hye, saw millions of Koreans gather in the streets. On the night of 3 December citizens rallying to the National Assembly were predominantly from the 1987 pro-democracy generation. However, by 7 December, when protestors gathered at the National Assembly, younger participants, particularly women, formed the majority. Protest sites resounded with both traditional democratic anthems and contemporary K-pop songs. Organisers of Saturday’s anti-Yoon protest in front of the National Assembly claim that two million people were in attendance. It is difficult to believe that such strength of feeling is likely to be appeased by Yoon’s suspension from office. Rather it suggests that any attempt by the government or the opposition to treat this as an isolated aberration, the better to resume business as usual, is likely to backfire, and transform the street protests into a more sustainable democratic movement.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Absolutely. Just a spin, is it not? Yoon is firmly joined at the hip with hegemon. It was always thus. It was something as moronic as purchase of 152 mm shells and such that broke that umbilical hold (eyes roll). Oops.
on December 20, 2024, 8:59 pm