The new patron state in South Korea: cultural policy,democracy and the market economy

ABSTRACT

This article explores conceptual frameworks for understanding Korea’s contemporary cultural policy by looking into the historical transformation of the culture-state-market relations in the country. It argues that Korea has become ‘a new kind of patron state’, which emulates the existing patron states in the West firmly within the statist framework and ambitiously renders government-led growth of cultural industries (and the Korean Wave) as a new responsibility of the state. The formation of Korea’s new patron state has been driven by a ‘parallel movement’ consisting of democracy and the market economy, which has defined the political and socio-economic trajectory of Korean society itself since the 1990s. Democracy has been articulated in cultural policy as cultural freedom, cultural enjoyment and the arm’s length principle; meanwhile, the market economy of culture has been facilitated by a ‘dynamic push’ of the state. After discussing the parallel movement, the article points out the tension, ambiguity and contradiction entailed in cultural policy of the new patron state.     

Managing Policy Dilemmas in South Korea: The Case of the Emissions Trading Scheme

This paper analyses the policy dilemma of South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak government regarding the greenhouse gas Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the cornerstone of the government’s Low Carbon Green Growth (GG) policy. The paper analyses policy governance, with a focus on the deliberative nature of the policy process. The ETS was promoted as a way to overcome certain international, political and socioeconomic challenges facing the government, yet the process of its establishment featured severe confrontations between the stakeholders (industrialists and environmentalists), and a lack of effort on the part of the government to pursue deliberation with them, resulting in a significant policy dilemma. The government reacted passively at first, and later responded with a symbolic decision that failed to pursue deliberative processes and exacerbated the situation. This paper addresses the theoretical and policy implications of this policy process by identifying the mechanism that created the policy dilemma. The reliability and validity of the study are substantiated through a multi-strategy approach, including a review of the literature and an in-depth interview with a government economic official.     

Contemporary cultural diplomacy in South Korea: explicit and implicit approaches

This paper argues that in the case of Korea, cultural diplomacy (CD) has been explicitly implemented in a top-down and unilateral approach by government to enhance national prestige abroad, underpinned by the institutional legacy of a ‘developmental state’ model of governance. Yet, an implicit approach has also emerged, associated with capacity building of the domestic cultural industries through promoting ‘international cultural exchange’. Whilst the top-down unilateral approach has persisted, a disarray of policy rhetoric and institutional fragmentation surrounding CD, as well as the blurring of cultural industries development policy with the CD agenda has led to gradual convergence of both explicit and implicit approaches.     

Cultural diversity and free trade: the case of the EU-Canada agreement

This article examines the role assigned to culture in general and to cultural industries and diversity in particular by the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA). Although it pursues further economic liberalization, the arrangement is about much more than trade: its preamble, for instance, contains a reference to the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Nevertheless, the text lacks a general exception clause protecting culture. This paper examines the consolidated CETA text from the perspective of political economy to clarify to what extent this is an opportunity to reconcile rules of free trade with cultural policies aiming to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions, especially when the latter derive from cultural industries in both analogue and digital scenarios.     

Middle power,status-seeking and role conceptions: the cases of Indonesia and South Korea

This article examines how role theory can enhance the middle-power literature in understanding the role preferences of middle powers. Rather than treating it as merely a function of material capability or good international citizenship, this article resituates middle power as a concept of international status that states aim to pursue through the enactment of role conceptions. Thus, it reinstates a conceptual distinction between ‘middle-power status’ and ‘middle-power roles’. The article suggests that the notion of role conceptions can analytically connect the status-seeking behaviour of middle powers with their foreign policy agenda. In so doing, it provides a more nuanced explanation of middle-power behaviour, which might differ between one middle power and another. Using Indonesia and South Korea as case studies of middle power, this article contends that foreign policymakers have strategically conceptualised and enacted several main roles that aim to capture historical experience, as well as ego and alter expectations, in order to pursue middle-power status. These role conceptions determine the foreign policy agenda of states in articulating their middle-power status.     

明万历援朝将士与韩国姓氏

万历年间 ,明廷援朝抗倭将士立下赫赫战功。战后许多将士落籍朝鲜 ,亦有许多将士的子孙东渡定居。明朝将士落籍及援朝将士子孙东渡使朝鲜的姓氏结构发生了变化 ,增加了韩国历史上从未有过的姓氏 4个 ,本贯 14个。这些华裔在朝鲜朝廷和地方都受到重用 ,在军事、经济、文化等各个领域都做出了贡献。     

Branding South Korea in a Competitive World Order: Discourses and Dispositives in Neoliberal Governmentality

Since 2008, the South Korean administration has invested significant budgetary and political resources in its nation branding strategy, involving the private sector and Korean citizens in this endeavour. This article takes Korea as an exemplary case study of the way many states have enrolled their citizens, through nation branding, in the construction of a collective competitive identity. This study is based on an empirically deductive methodology, looking at the industry literature on nation branding, official sources, iconography and videos from the Korean nation branding campaign, and drawing on interviews with actors and observers of this campaign. I suggest that Korean nation branding should be seen as a continuation of the capitalist developmental project initiated by Park Chung-Hee in 1960s. Lee Myung-Bak’s nation branding campaign belongs to a series of strategies aiming at transforming South Korean into a successful global site of capitalist accumulation. This path dependency involves citizen mobilisation, and this is analysed through a Foucauldian prism: this article shows that although modalities of social control have evolved with the democratisation in 1987, they still play a role, combining coercion and non-coercive technologies of the self, in seeking to transform Korean citizens into competitive capitalist subjects.     

Seeking a Sense of Belonging: The Exclusion of Female Doctorate Holders in South Korea and the US

Despite the vast literature on East Asian international students in higher education during the current era of globalization, few studies examine how the international migration of doctorate holders is gendered. The migration and career choices of Korean women who hold doctorates from American universities, we argue, are shaped by geographical imaginations based on the political connections between South Korea and the US and their personal experiences from their home and host countries. The notion of the US as an ally of South Korea and the hegemony of US higher education in Korean academia have led Korean women to pursue doctorates in the United States. Yet, the Korean women who participated in this study revealed that earning a doctorate from a world-class university did not necessarily bring them greater mobility. Whether the interviewees returned to Korea or not, they found themselves situated within the hierarchy of gendered power relations and excluded from everyday practices such as decision-making both at home and at work. Consequently, they attempted to build a sense of belonging at various geographic scales. This study found that Korean women scholars’ migration and career choices were the multi-layered outcome of gendered power relations within the family, political connections between the two countries, and cultural values of their home and host countries.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Cultural diversity as a multilevel and multifaceted legal notion operating in the law on cultural policies

The objective of the present article is to highlight the obscured links between the multilevel and multifaceted legal concept of cultural diversity and its political uses. It intends to provide a clear appraisal of the concepts of cultural diversity within the legal framework in which cultural policies are immersed. It seeks to focus on the uses of cultural diversity as a legal concept that reflect intense disagreements on cultural policies, that helps legitimatize very different and variable political ideas and that emerges from very different backgrounds. After identifying the exact legal scope of the notion, the article analyses the narratives and discourses that lead to the consolidation and use of cultural diversity as a multilevel legal notion.     

Teaching English in South Korea: mobility norms and higher education outcomes in youth migration

In many Western contexts, travel has a long historical association with youth, young adults and coming of age, an association that often connects temporary mobility with the lives of the educated middle classes and elite. Indeed, from the colonial adventure and the ‘grand tour’, to contemporary ideas of the ‘gap year’ or ‘overseas experience’, the mobility of Western youth and young adults is often considered voluntary and based on a desire to explore places and develop positive personal attributes, marking a stark contrast to depictions of migration from the developing world as directly or indirectly forced and driven primarily by economic considerations. This paper questions this depiction of developed world mobility in the context of the changing economic conditions that face young graduates in many Western countries. Drawing on survey and interview data I focus on the profiles and biographies of young adults from English-speaking countries working as foreign language instructors in South Korea. Although the personal narrative of travel and exploration amongst these individuals remains significant, findings from this research also suggest that many of these young graduates are also driven by economic circumstances: unemployment or underemployment and high levels of debt usually associated with tertiary studies. This tension between the opportunities available to young people and the constraints imposed by their own circumstances raises important questions about the multiple layers of social and economic differentiation operating through higher education and international mobility in the lives of young people.     

Kim Dae-jung and the Persistence of Anti-Communist Hegemony in South Korea

Existing writings that explore the relationship between inter-Korean relations and the political economy of South Korea stress the role of the ruling ideology of anti-communism in the domestic struggle for power or hegemony. They also consider Kim Dae-jung a member of the hegemonic group because he represented the interests of the bourgeoisie and, thus, they contend that the level of inter-Korean reconciliation during his presidency was a product of the hegemonic group’s accommodation of the people’s nationalist demands. Their arguments are, however, contradictory because, among other things, Kim was one of those most severely damaged by the hegemonic group’s ruling ideology. Drawing on Gramsci’s concepts, such as historical bloc and hegemonic project, I attempt to resolve the contradiction by arguing that Kim was not a member of the hegemonic group, but a leader of the counter-hegemonic liberal nationalists. Accordingly, this article demonstrates Kim’s stance on the chaebol-centred economic structure and his abortive attempt to change it. By the same token, it argues that the inter-Korean reconciliation was a hegemonic project to realise the liberal nationalists’ vision of peaceful unification through a liberal approach and to undermine the anti-communism with which the hegemonic group had exercised ideological leadership for decades.     

Agamben,Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.     

韩中建交后韩国华侨社会地位变化考察

采用定量分析的方法,对在韩华侨人数变化的趋势、有关在韩华侨研究的概况进行了分析;从政府对华侨的关注及政策的改进、韩中民间经济贸易关系加速、韩国华侨扩大对外交流的努力、华侨学校的再兴等方面阐述了韩中建交后韩国华侨社会的变化;并从政治、经济、社会、文化等层面对韩国华侨地位加以评估。结论是,由于韩国政府对外国人政策的变化,中国人在韩国的影响力日趋显著;受教育、人才等因素的影响,在韩华侨在韩国的地位并无明显改善;随着新华侨影响幅度的加强,在韩华侨社会有很大的发展前景;韩国政府对于外国人的政策已有相应程度的改善,包容多种文化的政治态度应予以肯定。     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

Audiovisual laws and legal intervention in South American cinematic culture

In South America, various state organizations have an investment in producing some kind of ‘national’ cinema. Although different countries around the world have varied levels of government involvement, the four countries I would like to examine – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru – can be drawn upon for their similarities and the shared regional context in which their policies operate. Particularly important is the fact that an increase in government involvement and support has been taking place in the twenty‐first century against predictions that enhanced global capital would weaken the function of the state. Furthermore, it is frequently the case that policy, in the form of government regulation and funding, provides the only means for cinema’s continued existence, visibility and access to the public and thus cannot be underestimated. Complicating these factors is the fact that while legislation is in place, government bodies often struggle to implement the policies in a practical manner. This article examines these issues and suggests the effect they are having on the cinematic culture of the region.     

对峙中的缓和：70年代的美国对朝政策

对朝鲜政策是美国亚太政策中非常重要的一环.伴随着70年代国际局势的相对缓和,美国对朝政策也出现松动.尽管两国间危机不断,但在安全、政治、文化交流等领域美国仍采取了一些主动缓和的措施.然而,作为二战后美国第一场热战的主要对手之一和意识形态上的敌人,美国对改善对朝关系又心存疑虑,同时也受到多方牵制,最终没能有所突破.     

韩国公州宋山里6号坟几个问题的探讨

韩国公州宋山里6号坟的形制结构与武宁王陵一样属于典型的"建康模式",其时代比武宁王陵略晚,墓主推测是武宁王之子百济圣王,墓壁发现的"四神"壁画明显受到南朝绘画艺术风格的影响。"建康模式"的砖室墓在百济葬制中的植入,应与百济东城王六年遣使中国南齐要求内属有关,可能是百济内属时期的制度规定与要求之一。     

Cultural censorship in defective democracy: the South Korean blacklist case

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand the cultural censorship practiced in contemporary South Korea, a liberal democracy, where cultural quangos were established after political democratization, following the arm’s length model. I will focus on the analysis of cases from the film industry which has been central to the censorship debate historically in Korea because of its popular appeal. The establishment of arm’s length cultural organizations laid the foundation for freedom of cultural expression which had been seriously curtailed under military rule. However, recent revelations of cultural blacklist cases under the two previous administrations are baffling to understand since rampant political censorship was practiced through ostensibly autonomous cultural organizations. The paper examines the ways in which the state constructed a ‘system of ideological censorship’ by using not only cultural quangos but non-cultural state apparatuses. In so doing, the paper emphasizes the role of non-cultural policy state institutions in the operation of cultural policy and the effect of state systems on cultural organizations. I draw upon the concept of defective democracy to understand the socio-political condition where these cultural organizations exist.