Whither the Developmental State in South Korea? Balancing Welfare and Neoliberalism

Abstract

Scholars of political economy have been debating the role of the Korean state in the economic development of the country, as the characteristics of a developmental state, a neoliberal state and/or a welfare state have appeared simultaneously in the various governments’ policies since the 1990s. This paper argues that although the nature, degree and extent of government intervention has varied from administration to administration, the basic stance of a developmental state has been retained while neoliberal and welfare policies have been used concurrently to further economic and social development. This coexistence of contradictory approaches reflecting alternative market economic systems was the product of a combination of government policies that has for the past 20 years provided the Korean government with the ability to deploy flexible policy mixes in response to changes in the political and economic environment and to maximise the outcomes of developmental policies.     

Liberal nationalism and Central American refugees: What is America's national responsibility?

In an era of unprecedented numbers of migrants from the global south to the global north, nationalism has become synonymous with liberal states' ethnocentric, xenophobic, and racist immigration policies. The Trump administration's treatment of Central American refugees has been taken as a prime example. By focusing on liberal cultural nationalism, this paper demonstrates that these prevailing perceptions about nationalism are unfounded. Although liberal cultural nationalism has been accused of endorsing restrictive immigration policies, the degree to which liberal cultural nationalism's immigration policies are restrictive is context dependent; under certain circumstances, liberal nationalism may call for relaxing immigration policies to admit certain types of immigrants by invoking the idea of national responsibility. Consequently, liberal cultural nationalism offers one of the strongest liberal arguments for admitting certain kinds of migrants from the global south. The Central American refugee crisis at the U.S. southern border is analysed as a case study to illustrate this.     

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.     

Ethnicity and political violence in Africa: The challenge to the Burundi state

This paper contributes to debates on the crisis of the African state, particularly the challenge posed by the rent-seeking elite, ethnicity and political violence. In most accounts, Burundi's persistent civil war fits contemporary discourse of the failed neo-patrimonial state in which opportunistic elites mobilize ethnicity for economic gain. Drawing on recent theorising on the politicization of identities and their intersection with state formation, the paper examines historically the development of ethnic consciousness and its links to the Burundi state. Ethnicity, it contends, has been the central organizing principle of the modern Burundi state with its successive policies of differentiation and exclusion. Throughout its post-colonial history, the Burundi state has not been a fully functioning sovereign state along the lines of its western counterparts. Yet, its citizens, irrespective of their ethnic affiliation, have not contested its territorial integrity. Instead the conflict reflects contested claims for enrichment, representation and security as expected from a model state. The on-going violence is attributed to an increasingly factionalised political elite, based on the multiple cleavages in Burundi society, who mobilize ethnicity in their struggle for control of the state. Recent peace negotiations, aimed at correcting ethnic imbalance through power sharing and reform of the institutions of governance are unlikely to resolve the political crisis as they fail to move beyond a methodological pre-occupation with ethnic identities and address the complex social reality of Burundi society and to include the people of Burundi as part of a broader non-ethnicized political community, a prerequisite for a stable pluralistic democracy.     

Revisiting the South Korean developmental state after the 1997 financial crisis

This study reassesses the conventional wisdom surrounding the developmental state of South Korea (hereafter Korea) since the 1997 Korean financial crisis. The conventional wisdom is that, as a result of the continued structural reforms prompted by the crisis, the Korean developmental state, inherently characterised by active or direct state intervention, strong economic and industrial policies, the chaebol-oriented economic policy, and labour exclusion, has finally begun to dissolve in earnest. In this study, we have considered whether that is really the case and also which theoretical implications can be drawn from this consideration. Analysis of the Korean developmental state following the 1997 crisis has indicated that, quite contrary to conventional wisdom, the developmental state has continued to prevail as a core policy framework of the Korean administrations even after the crisis. There is no doubt that the continued structural and market reform after the crisis certainly undermined the Korean developmental state to a certain degree, but that does not mean the beginning of the end of the Korean developmental state at all. For much evidence strongly indicates that the Korean developmental state still remains intact and strong despite the structural reforms, on account of the successive Korean governments’ assiduous and deliberate efforts to maintain and reinforce it. Even after the crisis, the Kim Dae-Jung and post-Kim regimes have hardly abandoned many of their market interventionist policies. Such market interventionist policies, which were routinely practised under the military regime in the 1960s and 1970s, diametrically contravene the argument that the Korean developmental state has begun to dissolve as a result of structural reform after the 1997 crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Korean developmental state persists as usual. All this information, then, suggests that path dependence is in action in the case of the Korean developmental state, and this suggests a further hypothesis that the Korean developmental state is very likely to persist in the future as well, despite increasing globalisation pressure, given the strong path dependence.     

The Village in Contemporary Persian Poetry

This paper explores the ever-shifting symbiosis between the village motif, social justice and populist politics in Iran over the past three decades. The village has remained a recurring motif in Persian literature, employed by a variety of writers and state institutions for a range of means. As a symbol, it has been a conduit into which any ideology can be poured; the village allegory can be manipulated to both condemn and support the official policies of the state. A comparison of Iran’s pre- and post-revolutionary literature sheds light on the ways the state literati perpetuated an idealized picture of the village as an authentic, sacred space, increasingly associated with religious nationalism during the 1980s. The paper examines the key socio-political influences on the evolution of the pastoral motif, the work of state-sponsored official poets, and the impact of the village on the cultural doctrine of the Islamic Republic.     

In Search of an Innovative State: The Development of the Biopharmaceutical Industry in Taiwan,South Korea and China

Recent developments in the biopharmaceutical industry in Taiwan, South Korea and China bear witness to the transformation of these states in nurturing an innovation‐based industry. This article argues that the segmentation of the value chain of the biopharmaceutical industry has provided industrializing countries with a window of opportunity. These East Asian states have modified their former catching‐up approaches by establishing a more effective institutional platform that can attract knowledge‐creation players to the industry. Through case studies, the authors show that the Taiwan state's promotion of the biopharmaceutical industry has been based on an incremental approach; existing state policies have been modified to cope with the demands of the industry, which has resulted in the continuation of its SME‐based industrial structure. The methods of the Korean state have been more radical, in that the policies that previously favoured the chaebols have gradually been reoriented toward the promotion of smaller, science‐based firms that now co‐exist alongside the chaebols. Finally, the Chinese state and local governments have sought to promote this innovation‐based industry by building biotech parks. This approach has resulted in a boom in new science firms, which have become increasingly isolated from the flourishing domestic SOE‐led market.     

From Fighting Underpopulation to Curbing Population Growth: Tracing Colonial Power in German Development Interventions in Tanzania

This paper investigates how colonial power is rearticulated in policy and practice of German development cooperation in Tanzania. Drawing on archives and interviews, it analyses the emergence of interventions with regard to population control and reproductive health during Germany's colonisation of ‘German East Africa’ and compares these interventions to present-day German development assistance in Tanzania. While German policies during colonial rule addressed ‘underpopulation’ and contemporary German development aid stresses population growth to be the problem, this paper finds that racialised, gendered discourses are interconnected with the political economy of population control in both periods. It highlights that colonial power in development cooperation can only be fully comprehended by tracing the continuity of colonial discourses to material practices as well as economic interests of the Global North, and argues that critique of population politics should address population control in general – whether anti- or pro-natalist – as imbued with racism and serving the interests of capital. Such a perspective might allow us to be sensitive to possible future developments in population and reproductive health policy towards the Global South, in which antinatalist (regarding marginalised people) and pronatalist (regarding privileged people) policies run concurrently, as is the case in countries of the Global North today.     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

Unstable stability: Turkish politics at the crossroads?

The Justice and Development Party has been in power in Turkey since 2002 after a sweeping victory. The party has since implemented a successful economic stabilization programme and led the country into membership negotiations with the European Union. The educated modern‐urban segments of the population, however, continue to harbour suspicion that the government party has a secret agenda of turning Turkey into an Islamic state. Although the evidence for such a fear is not fully convincing, it can be understood within the broader framework of Turkish modernization which was carried out by a highly centralized state in the cultural‐educational domain in an uncompromising fashion, generating a social bifurcation between the moderns and the traditionalists. After the transition to competitive politics, elected politicians worked to curb the power of the state elites that have been the exponents of modernization policies. Supported also by economic development that has expanded society's power against the state, the political elites have worked to expand their scope for decision‐making. Such redistribution of power in society has been problematical and has twice resulted in military interventions. The shift in the balance of power in favour of the political (elected) elite is nearing completion. The struggle is currently centered on the election of a new president by the parliament in May 2007 because historically the presidency has been seen as a position that counterbalances the preferences of the political elite by those of the state elite. Although likely to cause perturbations, the president will be elected by the Justice and Development Party. Consolidation of Turkey's democracy is continuing.     

Reflections on the Transformation in Mexico

This article offers panoramic portrait of Mexican politics since the election victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena movement in July 2018. Along its path to overwhelming success, Morena presented a vision of a historic transformation of a thoroughly corrupted Mexican state. Morena’s opponents viewed its emergence with anxiety, as a radical, populist, leftist force. But the new regime has been extremely cautious, affirming existing geopolitical and security commitments and pursuing conservative macroeconomic policies. Working within these constraints, the López Obrador government has largely focused on a moral transformation of the state. The context of Morena’s victory was the ongoing collapse in the Mexican state’s monopoly of force and its historic complicity with criminal and paramilitary violence. The government’s post-election approach has included a public reckoning with state crimes, from 1968 to Ayotzinapa. But its primary strategy has been one of ostentatious political asceticism. Rhetorically, this encompasses ideas of ‘political love’ and ‘republican austerity’; in practical terms, it includes campaigns of public frugality and the performative vulnerability of the president himself. In closing, we analyse the proposed National Guard, arguably the centrepiece of Morena’s putative state transformation, a policy condemned by some as renewed militarisation in the name of utopian republicanism.     

Real-estate Boom,Commodification and Crises of Social Reproductive Institutions in Rural China

Based on 12 months of ethnographic, interview and archival research in a poor rural county in China, this article argues that three state policies, namely the concentration of rural educational resources in the county seat, the decision to make access to county-seat public schools conditional upon homeownership in school districts, and the (former) one-child policy, have compelled rural households to participate in the real-estate market to meet the reproductive needs of basic education and marriage. The increasing commodification of education and marriage has fuelled a local real-estate boom during the past decade. At the same time, it has put peasant-migrant households under severe economic pressure, forcing them to relocate unpaid female care labour away from the village and to become heavily indebted. These outcomes have had serious repercussions for two other reproductive institutions, leading to a breakdown in intergenerational care and financial support for the elderly, and a sharp decline in the rural birth rate. The Chinese countryside as a social space in which peasant-migrant households were able to reproduce themselves in a relatively non-commodified manner has disappeared.     

Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy

Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm’s revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state’s drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.     

新国家空间理论的内涵与评价

新国家空间理论是对国家空间重构的系统性描述,它将国家空间看作动态的"过程",而非预定的、固定的"容器"。其核心观点为：①以社会建构的国家空间为研究对象,并关注其多维重构,尤其是尺度重组过程;②关注资本积累方式的转变、国家管制模式转型和行动者的社会政治斗争等多重动因;③关注国家空间选择性及其演变趋势,以及国家空间重构的分层特征。不过,该理论也存在若干不足,如缺乏对行动者的详细探讨、缺乏对尺度和领域以外的空间维度的分析、重构趋势仍有待验证等。尽管如此,新国家空间理论有效整合了人文地理学关于国家治理与空间关系的相关理论,对于全球化研究、城市和区域治理研究以及行政结构重组研究等仍具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Chiefs,hunters and adventurers: the foundation of the Okavango/Moremi National Park,Botswana

This article is about the politics of wildlife management in Botswana. The existing literature on the origins of wildlife conservation in Africa has portrayed the formation of protected areas as an imposition of colonial state authorities. Preservationist policies are usually cast as the product of European conservationist ideas, and related notions of the ‘wilderness’ value of African landscapes. Many recent studies have emphasized the negative effects of such ideas and policies in a colonial context: they have drawn attention to the way in which they devalued local African ideas, undermined local management strategies, and criminalized access to important economic and cultural resources. The case discussed here, however, suggests that this interpretation needs closer scrutiny: the meaning and impact of global ideas and policies of wildlife conservation depends on how they are localized in particular places. The key actors in the foundation of Botswana's Okavango/Moremi National Park in the 1960s were not state officials but local BaTawana chiefs and a network of hunters and adventurers turned conservationists. The initiative was conceived as a means of protecting wildlife from the depredations of illegal South African hunting parties and ensuring future local use, and was initially opposed by the colonial state. The article discusses why Okavango/Moremi was an exception, and why the initial coalition of African and local settler interests came to see preservationist policies as being in their interest.     

Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

From Necropolis to Blackpolis: Necropolitical Governance and Black Spatial Praxis in São Paulo,Brazil

Based on ethnographic work on police‐linked death squads and with black women's organizations, this article analyzes current urban governance policies and the spatial politics of resistance embraced by communities under siege in Brazil. Space matters not only in terms of defining one's access to the polis, but also as a deadly tool through which police killings, economic marginalization, and mass incarceration produce the very geographies (here referred to as “the black necropolis”) that the state aims to counteract in its war against the black urban poor. Yet, within the context of necropolitical governance, blackness appears as a spatially grounded praxis that enables victims of state terror to reclaim their placeless location as a political resource for redefining themselves and the polis.     

Mind the gap: Town planning and Manchester's local railway network: 1947–1996

This article uses Manchester as a case study to explore post‐war relationships in Britain between local rail networks and urban form. During this period, Manchester's rail network has been severely rationalized with only limited investment in new infrastructure, although local services have been underpinned by public subsidy. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was little formal land use planning policy with regard to the rail network, but in the late 1970s strategic policies crystallized which sought to steer major activity generators to nodalities generally well‐served by public transport. However, these policies were undermined in the 1980s by Thatcherite deregulation. The early 1990s has seen more positive trends with the opening of Manchester's light rail line and the development nationally of policies aimed at creating more sustainable urban form through synergy between local rail networks and urban development. But there is evidence of counter‐trends and the whole future of the rail system has been thrown into doubt because of rail privatization. Conclusions are drawn that focus on the need for changes in the institutional arrangements for transport planning and strategic town planning through the creation of a strong regional tier of government, as found in other EU countries.     

Rural Development Patterns in Post-Reform China: The Pearl River Delta Region in the 1990s

Since the reforms that began in 1979, economic development in China has been marked by four major policy initiatives: the re-integration of the Chinese economy with the global economy, the decentralization of economic decision making away from the central state to lower levels, and, especially in the coastal regions, the shift away from subsistence agriculture towards rural industrialization and increasing commercialization. In this article, the effects of the reform policies are discussed in the context of the Pearl River delta region, the economic core of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Closely proximate to Hong Kong, with many Overseas Chinese connections, the province was given opportunities to innovate within the new policy option and has been marked by rapid economic growth. The article focuses on the impact of industrialization, commercialization, and globalization in four contrasting areas of the Pearl River delta in the 1980s and 1990s. At a general level, what McGee has called desakota zones have emerged and follow a development process which is similar to that observed in parts of East and Southeast Asia in the 1970s. When examined from the perspective of villages and localities, the blending of government policies, geographical location, and market forces with an array of local social values has resulted in separate and distinctive patterns of development.     

The Attitudes of State Legislators and State Medicaid Policies Related to AIDS

As the Medicaid programs become increasingly important payers of AIDS-related care, state governments will face difficult policy choices in allocating limited Medicaid resources among many competing health needs. The state legislatures will play a critical role in these allocation decisions. This research presents the results of an analysis of attitudes concerning Medicaid coverage of AIDS-related care among state legislators serving on health-related committees in all 50 states. The model employed includes characteristics of the state legislators, their districts, and their states to explain the legislators' allocation choices and attitudes relating to Medicaid coverage of AIDS-related care. The relationship of these factors to the actualization of AIDS-related state policy also is examined. The model identified political ideology, party affiliation, and sex of the state legislator as the most important predictors of attitudes about AIDS-related Medicaid policies. AIDS prevalence, constituency characteristics, and legislator attitudes are the most important predictors of actual state policies.