|
South Korea INTRODUCTION
Unavailable
Figure 1. Administrative Divisions of South Korea, 1990
FOR NEARLY A HALF-CENTURY, the Republic of Korea (South Korea)
and the United States have maintained a close relationship. Since
the mid-1980s, South Korea has been the seventh or eighth largest
trading partner of the United States, and the United States has
ranked as South Korea's first or second trading partner. In 1991,
nearly four decades after the end of the Korean War (1950-53),
Washington retained more than 45,000 troops on the Korean
Peninsula committed to the defense of South Korea. During the
1991 conflict in the Persian Gulf, Seoul joined other coalition
partners of the United States and provided a military medical
team and several hundred million dollars in support of the
campaign to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.
Ties between the two countries extend to language, education,
and culture. In 1991 English was the primary foreign language
studied in South Korea, and for some time it has been popularly
said that more Ph.Ds from American universities work for the
South Korean government than for the United States government.
Hundred of thousands of United States servicemen, businessmen,
Peace Corps volunteers, and missionaries have lived and worked in
South Korea, and as many as 1.5 million South Koreans--one fourth
of all overseas Koreans--have emigrated to the United States.
The Korean Peninsula has been inhabited since paleolithic
times, and Korean historians trace the ethnic roots of the Korean
people at least as far back as the pottery-using cultures of the
fourth and third centuries B.C.. Early tribal groups formed
numerous federations, and over the centuries these combined into
larger state-like entities. Sometime before the fourth century
B.C., at least one of these entities had begun to refer to its
leaders by the Chinese title for king, wang. Three of
these states, boasting an aristocratic social structure and
centralized institutions of government, had come to dominate
Korea by the early centuries of the present era, conducting trade
and intermittent warfare with each other and with China.
Stretching down from Manchuria in the north was the kingdom of
Koguryo; in the southwest and southeast, respectively, the
kingdoms of Paekche and Silla held away. Korean political,
cultural, and linguistic unity dates back to the unification of
these three kingdoms under Silla in the seventh century A.D.,
making Korea, despite its present temporary division into two
states, one of the oldest unified nations in the world.
Geographically poised between China and Japan, Korea
developed its own social and cultural patterns. More deeply
influenced than Japan by Chinese culture, Korea adopted the
Chinese model of monarchy and successive dynasties, rather than
developing a single imperial line from its early tribal
federations. Yet Korea retained its native preference for a
strongly aristocratic social order based on hereditary lineages.
Korea also served as one of several cultural bridges between its
two regional neighbors, taking pride in passing along advanced
Chinese political, philosophical, religious, and literary ideas
and models to what Koreans consistently perceived as a less well-
developed Japan.
Korea's geographic position often made it a focal point for
regional conflict. Recovering from two Japanese invasions in the
late sixteenth century and Manchu incursions several decades
later, Korea's last traditional dynasty--the kingdom of Choson
(1392-1910)--withdrew into self-protective isolation, strictly
regulating travel and commerce with Japan while maintaining its
tributary status with China. This policy was increasingly
challenged, however, during the nineteenth century, when Western
diplomats, traders, and adventurers sought to open all of East
Asia, including what they termed the Korean "Hermit Kingdom," to
European-style trade and diplomatic relations. In the end, Japan
forced open the Korean door, imposing a Western-style "unequal
treaty" on Korea in 1876.
At the turn of the century, Korea was the object of two wars
as China and Japan in turn fought to maintain footholds on the
peninsula and to exclude a Russia keenly interested in Korea's
warm-water ports. In the first half of the twentieth century,
Korea was victimized by several decades of colonization by Japan
(1910-45), becoming by the 1930s a stepping stone and industrial
base for Japanese military expansion into Manchuria and northern
China. Although many Koreans fought for independence from
Japanese rule, Korea's liberation in 1945 was brought about not
by Korean efforts but by the Allied victory over Japan and by the
division of Korea into two zones of occupation by the United
States and the Soviet Union. In the southern zone, the United
States Army Military Government in Korea lasted for three years
before the establishment of the Republic of Korea. South Korea's
immediate postwar fate was dominated not only by the Cold War
antagonism of the two great powers but also by seemingly
irreconcilable political differences among Koreans themselves.
Separate and antagonistic states controlled the two halves of the
peninsula by 1948, setting the stage for the considerable civil
conflict that led to the Korean War (1950-53).
Given the tragic and bitter legacy of the loss of national
independence under Japanese colonial rule, the experience of
national partition in 1945, and the ensuing civil war,
educational authorities in South Korea have emphasized areas of
national identity in schoolbook treatments of Korean history and
language. Despite many differences among South Koreans, this
carefully nourished national consciousness centered perceptions
on national independence and the place of Korea on the stage of
world history. Such thinking underlies much of the vigorously
pursued economic development of the past three decades and also
carries on a long tradition of modern Korean thought. For
example, after Japan seized control of Korean foreign relations
and military affairs in 1905, Korean historian Ch'oe Nam-son
compared the nation's parlous condition with the glories of
ancient Korean dynasties and asked, "How long will it take us to
accomplish the goal of flying our sacred national flag above the
world?" As energetic national preparations for the 1988 Seoul
Olympics--under the slogan "Korea to the world, the world to
Korea"--demonstrated, toward the end of the century South Koreans
still were striving for national success and an international
reputation in response to that same impulse.
South Korean urbanization--which increased by a rate of more
than 4 percent annually during the 1960s and 1970s--continued at
a slightly slower rate of 3 percent per year in the 1980s.
According to the 1990 census, Seoul was one of the world's
largest cities. Its more than 10.6 million people accounted for
almost one quarter of the country's 43.5 million people. The
concentration of the population in Seoul prompted efforts by city
planners to decentralize government and other functions by moving
some ministries and agencies to Taejon. The growth of Seoul and
other cities, although partly caused by interurban migration,
also was accompanied by a reduction of the rural farming
population, especially in the poorer areas of the southwest. This
migration was reflected in Seoul by the numerous restaurants that
offered regional specialties and by the electoral districts that
produced bloc votes for presidential candidates from one or
another province in the December 1987 presidential election.
Another social change with political implications was the
increased emphasis on higher education during the 1980s. When
army General Chun Doo Hwan took power in 1980, he approved a plan
to double college and university enrollments within four years.
Perhaps, as some observers said, the change was intended to
submerge traditional student protest in a sea of aspiring
professionals and white-collar workers. Yet planners also knew
that broader education was vital to continued economic growth,
inasmuch as the country's exports faced increasing competition
from labor-rich Third World countries and Seoul sought to shift
to knowledge-intensive and high-technology industries. By 1990,
according to a Ministry of Education study, one South Korean in
four was a student. The number of South Koreans in college by the
late 1980s comprised some 35 percent of the relevant age-group, a
higher percentage than Japan or any country in the world except
the United States and the Philippines.
The changes in higher education corroded old political
patterns and in several ways may have set the stage for the
political and constitutional reforms of the late 1980s. With the
spread of scientific and technical education and the continued
growth of a new managerial elite, the military's claim--heard
especially in the high-growth years of the 1960s and early 1970s-
-to managerial and technical leadership became increasingly
irrelevant. The more educated populace also seemed less tolerant
of press censorship and other authoritarian practices. Meanwhile,
increasing student enrollments and the consequent rise in the
number of college graduates in the job pool created even greater
discontent among many employed and underemployed graduates and
provided a setting in which a small but increasingly radical
student dissident movement--often financed with sizable student
association fees--could find its voice.
The steady modernization and urbanization of society was
accompanied by a continued growth in nostalgia for Korea's past.
Even in the countryside, the 1980s saw a continuation of the late
1970s revival of folk arts, often supported by generous
government subsidies for regional festivals and "living cultural
treasures"--experts in traditional technologies, crafts, and
arts, such as architecture, temple painting, or traditional
p'ansori folk opera. Shamanism, ignored by modernizing
elites in the 1950s and 1960s, was much more openly practiced in
the 1970s and 1980s, when it was not unusual to see a new office
building or major tourist hotel formally opened with shamanistic
rites. Many urban professionals enjoyed taking their children to
visit the Folk Village near Seoul where they could examine a
well-scrubbed reconstruction of nineteenth-century country life
and try to imagine a quieter, less hurried time. The revival of
traditional culture in the 1970s and 1980s cut across class and
political lines. It had a political dimension as well, seen both
in dissident student adaptations of traditional anti-aristocratic
mask dramas that lampooned the social and political establishment
and in government promotion of school trips to the shrine of
sixteenth-century naval hero Yi Sun-sin.
Religious commitment was strong for many South Koreans,
nearly half of whom were affiliated with an organized religious
community in the 1980s. About 20 percent of the population was
Buddhist, whereas a somewhat larger and more rapidly growing
Christian community gave South Korea the second largest
proportion of Christians in Asia, following the Philippines.
Although conservative on the whole, the country's Christian
population also included some of the most active elements of the
political dissident movement.
Confucianism was dominant during the last dynasty (1392-1910)
but declined in force as a political philosophy following the
loss of independence to Japan in 1910. Nevertheless, it retained
a lingering impact on social relations even in the early 1990s.
Attempts to revive Confucian ethical values, whether through the
Park Chung Hee government's campaign for filial piety and loyalty
in the 1970s or in occasional public seminars or newspaper
editorials through the early 1990s, reflected both a decline in
the practice of Confucianism as a living creed and the feeling of
many South Koreans that rapid modernization and the growth of
materialism had created an ethical vacuum.
Population policies began in the 1960s continued their
momentum through the 1980s. Tax and medical insurance benefits
for smaller families, for example, provided additional incentives
for family planning in the early 1980s. The government also
distributed posters, such as one featuring an attractive young
couple and the slogan, "Have one child and raise it well." The
effect of such efforts continued to be felt in a decline in the
number of primary and middle school students; the number of
middle school students alone dropped by half a million during the
1980s. The success of the family planning program was suggested
by the desire of other Asian countries to send officials to Seoul
for training.
As the number of births per couple reached 1.9 in 1990, the
population growth rate dropped to just over 0.9 percent from
almost 1.6 a decade earlier, causing the Economic Planning Board
to predict serious labor shortages and to authorize importing
increased numbers of foreign workers. Many factories already had
been compensating for such shortfalls by hiring illegal
immigrants (1,000 such workers were deported in 1990), or by
breaking prevailing patterns to hire married women in substantial
numbers. By 1991 South Koreans also were beginning to reflect on
the social and policy implications of two emerging problems: a
possible male-female imbalance by the end of the 1990s, resulting
from a continuing preference for sons and use of family planning
techniques; and projections of a steadily increasing proportion
of elderly in the population over the coming two decades.
South Korea's economic growth continued to be driven by the
import of raw materials and semi-finished components (the latter
proportionally declining in the late 1980s) and the export of
finished industrial products. Manufacturing accounted for more
than 30 percent of the gross domestic product, aided by the rapid
modernization of technology and the continuous reinvestment of
trade proceeds. By the end of the 1980s, the Republic of Korea
was the world's tenth largest steel producer and had made major
strides in mastering the production technologies required for the
home electronics and semiconductor industries. South Korean-made
televisions, personal computers, videocassette recorders, and
microwave ovens increasingly became known under their own brand
names, although dependence on Japan for key components and some
assembly production for Japanese companies also continued.
The automotive industry gained a firmer footing under close
government direction following overexpansion in the late 1970s.
Most of the growth in the early 1980s was fueled by overseas
sales, which began to boom in 1985, but also was stabilized by a
rapidly growing domestic market by the end of the decade.
Textiles and construction, both staples among the export
industries in the 1970s, continued to play an important role
through the 1980s. As South Korea's comparative advantage in
labor became increasingly subject to challenge from developing
economies in Asia and elsewhere, however, planners looked to even
greater social investment in high technology fields, such as
materials science, biotechnology, electronics, and aerospace, and
to an economy that would become technology-intensive sometime
during the 1990s.
Growth in the service sector, comprising real estate, supply
services, entertainment, the hotel industry, and other services,
continued in the late 1980s, outpacing increases in
manufacturing. The number of workers in service industries
increased by 8 percent between 1988 and 1989, amounting to more
than twice the rate of increase in manufacturing-sector employees
during the same period. In the first half of 1990, the total
number of workers in manufacturing declined for the first time
since the early 1960s. In 1990 the Economic Planning Board,
concerned over this trend and a projected shortfall of 69,000 new
manufacturing workers for the year, announced its Industrial
Manpower Supply Program. The program was designed to stem the
exodus of skilled manpower from manufacturing industries by
offering long-term workers preferred admission to college and
university night-school programs. The government also prepared to
use tax penalties and higher utility rates to slow the growth in
what it viewed as unproductive "consumption industries."
As South Korea continued to industrialize and urbanize during
the 1980s, the agricultural sector drifted into stepchild status.
Official support for rice prices dropped behind the rate of
inflation in the mid-1980s as Seoul attempted to reduce
government costs. Urban growth contributed to a series of
problems. Young people were sent to the cities for education or
left the farms to seek employment and left behind a smaller and
increasingly older farm population. Young bachelor farmers had
greater difficultly in finding wives willing to undergo the
rigors of rural life. Productivity gains failed to keep up with
changes in population, leading to greater imports of wheat and
soybeans. Rising land prices caused by the housing squeeze and
commercial and industrial construction gave an impression of
increased farmers' assets, even as modern machinery costs and
increased use of consumer credit contributed to higher farm
indebtedness. Tenancy increased from 21 percent to more than 30
percent during the decade, as urban investors and the larger
scale farming encouraged by the government absorbed increasingly
scarce and costly farm lands. Average farm incomes had fallen
well below urban incomes by the end of the decade. By 1990 many
farmers could agree with the statement of the founder of a
matchmaking center for bachelor farmers that it was "time to turn
the government's attention to farmers' life and welfare."
Part of increasing farm indebtedness during the second half
of the 1980s was used to finance consumer durables that brought
farm families closer to national standards, even as the gap
between rural and urban incomes was increasing. A 1990 report of
the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries indicated
that more than 90 percent of rural households had refrigerators,
electric rice cookers, and propane gas ranges. Even more
significant were major increases in rural ownership of consumer
goods, such as telephones and color television sets, which served
to link rural families with national and international
developments and issues. Such linkage, in turn, may have
contributed both to an increasing awareness of the growing rural-
urban gap and to the politicization of farmers' movements in
response to foreign pressures to liberalize agricultural markets.
In political life, South Korea began the 1980s with an old
pattern. For the third time in two decades, a military leader or
former military leader declared a state of political crisis,
rewrote the constitution, and drove prominent civilian
politicians from government through farfetched legal charges or
under the guise of "political purification." Re-elected president
in electoral college voting in February 1981, former General Chun
Doo Hwan consolidated his control through dominance over the
court system, use of the state security apparatus, and tight
restriction of the media. By the second half of the decade,
however, Chun's government had lost considerable political
capital. In the National Assembly elections of 1985, Chun's
Democratic Justice Party was able to retain control of the
legislature only through a system of proportionality that
converted its scant 35 percent of the popular vote into 54
percent of the seats. Polls taken in 1986 showed that only 41
percent of people queried expressed confidence in political
leaders and that less than 50 percent of respondents were
satisfied with the kind of society in which they lived.
Dissatisfaction with government control of the media was
especially strong and was evident in newspaper editorials and a
popular campaign to withhold payment of compulsory viewers' fees
to the state-run television network.
The gradual reemergence of banned political figures, such as
Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, began in 1985 and culminated in
the full restoration of political rights to all former
politicians in a political compromise between the ruling and
opposition political parties that followed severe civil
disturbances in June 1987. Subsequent events marked a watershed
in South Korean politics. First, the government removed virtually
all restrictions on the media. Next, in late 1987, the
Constitution was revised--the first constitutional revision since
1960 that was drafted through a process of multiparty
discussions. The 1987 revision promised substantial changes in
the unequal power relationships among the three branches of
government that had prevailed at least since the inception of the
yusin constitution in 1972. Under the new fundamental law,
the president lost the power to rule through emergency decrees
and to dissolve the legislature. The National Assembly gained new
rights to investigate state affairs, to hold longer annual
sessions, and to approve Supreme Court appointments. These and
other constitutional provisions pointed to more potential
autonomy for the legislature, the court system, and for the
constitutional review of legislation.
The presidential election of December 1987 placed a former
army general, Roh Tae Woo, of the ruling Democratic Justice Party
in the Blue House, or presidential mansion. A minority president,
he won only 36 percent of the votes cast. Kim Young Sam and Kim
Dae Jung, who together accounted for 54 percent of the votes,
accused Roh's party of election fraud, while apologizing to the
public for their failure to agree between themselves on a unified
opposition candidacy. The charge of fraud on a scale great enough
to have swung the election was undermined at the time by the
fragmentary and anecdotal evidence presented and by the
insistence of each of the two Kims that he was the one who would
have prevailed in the absence of government misconduct. In 1990,
however, the government admitted to one serious legal breach--the
diversion of more than more than US$14 million dollars from the
1987 national budget to support Roh's election campaign. For some
observers, it remained an open question whether other large-scale
irregularities may have occurred, or what further steps the
government might have taken to ensure victory had the two major
opposition candidates been unified.
In the National Assembly elections held in April 1988, the
ruling party lost a working majority for the first time in South
Korea's history. The new balance of forces in the legislature
made a reality of the separation of powers provided for in the
new Constitution when opposition assembly members joined forces
to reject President Roh's first appointment for chief justice of
the Supreme Court in the summer of 1988. Through the rest of 1988
and 1989, additional signs of the new order were seen in the
distribution of committee chairmanships among the ruling and
opposition parties and in the process of compromise, as floor
leaders of the four principle parties periodically met to
negotiate working agendas for the legislature and its committees.
As 1989 ended, Roh's party was engaged in secret negotiations
with two of the three opposition parties to bring this process of
compromise under firmer control.
As a result of these talks, Roh's party merged with Kim Young
Sam's Reunification Democratic Party and Kim Cong-p'il's New
Democratic Republican Party to create a new Democratic Liberal
Party (DLP) in January 1990. Some observers likened the resulting
coalition to Japan's Liberal Democratic Party. Each of the former
opposition party leaders clearly hoped to become an important
power broker within the ruling party and perhaps also to become
the party's candidate for the 1992 presidential election.
In the short term, the formation of the DLP provided the
president with a substantial majority in the National Assembly,
while politically isolating his most uncompromising political
opponent, Kim Dae Jung. Seen in longer-term perspective, the
merger curtailed the broader processes of compromise and
cooperation in the National Assembly that had included even Kim's
Party for Peace and Democracy (PPD) in 1988 and 1989. It further
put the new ruling party in the awkward position of having to
pass important legislation in the absence of opposition
politicians, who boycotted the legislature on several occasions
during 1990. The merger also complicated factional politics
within the ruling party and raised the question of whether the
president could make good on his promise to revise the
Constitution.
Although politicians were permitted to change parties under
the 1987 Constitution and related laws, Kim Dae Jung immediately
labelled the move a "coup d'état against representative politics"
and called, unsuccessfully, for new elections. A small number of
legislators from Kim Young Sam's party also objected to the new
super-party and eventually formed the small Democratic Party. Kim
Dae Jung's isolated Party for Peace and Democracy spent much of
1990 and early 1991 fulminating against the DLP and attempting to
embarrass the government politically by boycotting National
Assembly sessions or attempting to resign. The disengagement of
the PPD often seemed to leave it marginalized and unable to
contribute to major legislation or even to influence issues in
which it had an immediate political interest, such as the
scheduling of small district local elections in March 1991.
Awareness of the costs of intransigence may have prompted a
more moderate approach in the second half of 1991. In private
talks with President Roh in September, Kim Dae Jung successfully
lobbied for several regional development projects in the Cholla
region.
By mid-1991 the DLP coalition was beginning to show signs of
strain, brought about by differences over questions such as the
timing of the upcoming 1992 presidential and National Assembly
election and disagreement over how the party's presidential
candidate would be chosen. On most such issues, Kim Chong-p'il
and President Roh formed a mini-coalition within the party,
opposed by Kim Young Sam and his followers. Competition for the
party's presidential nomination reintensified after National
Assembly elections in March 1992, in which the DLP won slightly
less than fifty percent of the seats. The DLP was able to recover
a bare majority by absorbing several members who had run as
independents.
Kim Dae Jung's party encountered major defeats in local
elections in March and June 1991. It subsequently absorbed small
numbers of opposition lawmakers, becoming in turn the New
Democratic Party and finally, under Kim's joint leadership with
Yi Ki-t'aek, the Democratic Party (DP) in September. The DP,
which included some members from outside the Cholla region,
continued to fight the ruling DLP across a variety of issues,
including tax and budget policy, hyperinflation in urban land
prices, and corruption. Like the Kim Young Sam faction within the
DLP, the DP also opposed possible revision of the Constitution to
create a parliamentary system of government. In National Assembly
elections in March 1992, the DP won a respec;
table 31.1 percent of
the seats.
Outside the world of the parties, other features of political
life changed during the 1980s. Professional associations and
interest groups, long under the domination of the state, began to
strive for more autonomy. Farmers' associations--traditionally
little more than mechanisms for communicating government
policies--began to proliferate and to protest trade
liberalization measures. Professional associations of university
teachers, journalists, and lawyers also became increasingly
outspoken on political issues. The major business conglomerates--
chaebol--sought a greater role in economic policy
formation. The voices of industrial associations were heard more
clearly as the respective economic ministries began to gain
influence within a less centralized state planning structure. At
the fringes of politics, an extremist wing of the leftist student
movement conducted sporadic violence through the 1980s. The
violence peaked in dozens of arson or Molotov cocktail assaults
against government offices, commercial establishments, police
boxes, and United States diplomatic and cultural facilities in
late 1988 and 1989.
South Korea's diplomacy during the 1980s, while remaining
oriented toward the West, also aggressively pursued closer ties
with China, the Soviet Union, and East European countries. Trade
with these countries, obscured by Seoul's nonpublication of the
relevant import-export statistics, continued to grow throughout
the decade, and was matched by a variety of other contacts,
culminating in the participation of the Soviet Union, China, and
all the major East European countries in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
These efforts, which South Korea termed pukpang
chogch'aek, meaning "Nordpolitik" or northern policy, were
intended to diversify the country's global trade relations and to
give Seoul greater leverage in its difficult relationship with
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
Seoul's northern policy alone would probably have
accomplished little without the dramatic liberalizing reforms in
East European countries, which made it possible for South Korea
to establish diplomatic relations with all nations of Eastern
Europe by the end of the 1980s. The opening of diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union in September 1990 followed a
series of high-level bilateral meetings in 1989 and early 1990.
South Korea's two-way trade with communist countries
increased by one-third in 1990 to reach an estimated US$5.6
billion. Increased trade relations with the Soviet Union followed
closely on the heels of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, driven by
Moscow's perception that South Korea could play an important role
in the development of the Soviet Far East. As with other East
European countries, South Korea's exports to the Soviet Union
were heavily concentrated in electrical and electronic
appliances. During 1990 and early 1991, news of bilateral
exchanges, civil aviation agreements, and pending commercial
deals between the chaebol and the Soviet Union filled the
South Korean press. By the end of 1991, South Korea had paid or
approved slightly more than half of a promised US$3 billion
package of loans, commodity credits, and project assistance to
the Soviet Union, and it was expected that Seoul's aid program
would continue with the new Commonwealth of Independent States.
Trade with China, which began with quiet transactions in the
late 1970s, was estimated to have reached US$1 billion in 1985
and more than US$5 billion in 1991. The importance of the Seoul-
Beijing economic relationship was demonstrated in the
establishment of trade offices with limited consular functions in
the two capitals in October 1991 and a trade agreement two months
later, in which South Korea and China exchanged most-favored
nation status. The political component in such trade remained
prominent, as evidenced in Seoul's tolerance for sustained
balance of payments deficits. In the case of trade with China,
such deficits grew from US$1.2 billion in 1989 to a projected
US$2 billion for 1991.
Probably because China remained more sensitive than the
Soviet Union to North Korea's reactions, progress in moving
toward diplomatic relations between Seoul and Beijing was slower
than the moves establishing formal trade ties. In the mid-1980s,
the two countries had increased quasi-diplomatic contacts to
include a number of negotiations to resolve a series of sea and
air incidents, and China also permitted South Korea's attendance
at international conferences and meetings of United Nations
organizations in China. The two countries also participated
jointly in a variety of athletic competitions and sports
exchanges. In September 1990, China extended courtesy diplomatic
status to South Korean athletic officials attending the Asian
Games in Beijing; and by mutual agreement senior diplomats in the
trade representative offices held formal diplomatic immunities
and privileges under the Vienna Convention, reportedly performing
consular as well as commercial duties. Beijing sent a vice
foreign minister to the Seoul meeting of the United Nations
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific in April
1991; South Korean-Chinese discussions during the meeting
provided the highest level official contact to that date between
the two countries. In May 1991, when it became clear that China
would no longer support its North Korean ally by vetoing South
Korea's membership in the United Nations, some observers believed
that the two countries had moved even closer to establishing
formal diplomatic ties.
Over the past two decades, South Korea's relations with North
Korea have been characterized by alternating periods of tension
and dialogue. A joint communiqué issued by the two countries on
July 4, 1972, agreed to continue discussions concerning political
and military questions and confidence-building measures to be
implemented through a North-South Coordinating Committee and Red
Cross channels. Through the 1970s, however, further discussions
stalled as each side reaffirmed its position in an effort to
claim and retain the initiative and to deny legitimacy to the
other side.
In early 1980, the two countries for the first time referred
to each other by their official names and agreed to work toward
prime ministers' talks. By the following year, negotiations
stalled again after P'yongyang made a number of political demands
on the Chun Doo Hwan government--including withdrawal of United
States troops from South Korea--as a precondition for further
talks and also sponsored an abortive attempt to have Chun
assassinated by two Canadian gangsters. A second attempt--a
bombing in October 1983--failed to kill the South Korean
president but killed four cabinet ministers and thirteen other
officials during a state visit to Rangoon, Burma. In 1984 Seoul
rejected P'yongyang's proposals for three-way talks that would
have included Washington but excluded South Korea from key
discussions on military topics. Bilateral discussions during the
same year concerning a joint Olympics team failed to achieve
results in time for the Los Angeles Olympics in July.
After South Korean acceptance of North Korean rice, cement,
and medicine for southern flood victims in September 1984, the
two sides conducted talks and some exchanges on a range of issues
for a sixteen-month period through early 1986. These discussions
in the mid-1980s were sometimes acrimonious and frequently
interrupted, each side presenting proposals, as one observer
noted, that almost seemed intended to provoke rejection by the
other or to play to the galleries of world opinion. In
retrospect, however, it can be seen that the mid-1980s
discussions were successful in establishing institutions for
dialogue on both sides and in laying down multiple channels of
contact and communication that continued to function through the
early 1990s.
A series of talks to reunite families separated by national
division and the war took dozens of Red Cross representatives and
even more journalists from each side across the Demarcation Line
during three visits in 1984. In September 1985, several dozen
North Koreans and South Koreans met with separated family
members, and a similar number of folk art performers from each
side gave concerts in the two capitals.
In the area of economic cooperation, vice-ministerial level
conferences met at P'anmunjom on a number of occasions during
1984 and 1985, exploring for the first time specific trade,
transportation, and other joint projects. South Korean and North
Korean legislators met twice in July 1985 to explore political
issues. Bilateral discussions began in 1984 concerning a North
Korean proposal to cohost the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. After an
interlude following the North Korean bombing of a South Korean
airliner over the Andaman Sea in November 1987, Olympic talks
continued through mid-1988, when they broke down in disagreement
over the number of games to be hosted in P'yongyang.
The two Koreas continued to talk past each other concerning
broader political issues during much of 1988 and 1989. President
Roh's July 1988 proposal for freer contacts and expanded
exchanges between the two Koreas and the eventual establishment
of a Korean commonwealth was met with North Korean reiteration of
Kim Il Song's 1972 proposal for a transitional Democratic
Confederal Republic of Korea. Meanwhile, Seoul began to disclose
the existence of a quiet trade relationship between the two
countries and in early 1989 allowed a major industrialist to
travel to P'yongyang to discuss additional forms of economic
cooperation. North Korea generally welcomed these steps but also
continued to demand abrogation of South Korea's National Security
Act, under which Seoul prosecuted several unauthorized South
Korean travellers to North Korea.
An important breakthrough in relations between the two Koreas
began in 1990, which saw the beginning of a series of prime
ministerial talks. Held alternately in Seoul and P'yongyang,
these garnered substantial publicity but little progress until
mid-1991, when it became clear that Seoul had won China's support
for its plan to have both Koreas simultaneously admitted to the
United Nations. The event took place in September. During the
fourth round of prime ministers' talks in P'yongyang in October,
the two Koreas agreed to work on a nonaggression accord. This
document, the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression,
Exchange and Cooperation, was signed in Seoul on December 13,
1991. It took effect in mid-February, 1992, at the time of the
sixth round of prime ministerial talks in P'yongyang. In late
December 1991, the two Koreas signed a separate agreement barring
either side from having or using nuclear weapons.
Although the new agreement was in itself a landmark,
observers noted that it was essentially a promissory note, in
which the two Koreas pledged to cease negative actions toward
each other and to continue to work toward resolution of several
important issues. These issues included a declaration of
nonaggression, a separate peace treaty, and measures to promote
free travel and correspondence. The question of mutual inspection
of nuclear facilities, which South Korea held to be of overriding
importance, still was being discussed by working-level
negotiators in late March 1992.
South Korea's relationship with the United States
increasingly was focused on bilateral economic issues, spurred by
a current account surplus that began in the mid-1980s and
increasing United States pressures to open South Korean markets
for agricultural and industrial products as well as
telecommunications and finance services. These issues posed a
problem not only for South Korean diplomacy, but also contributed
to often tumultuous domestic criticism of Seoul whenever it
appeared to show signs of weakness in negotiations with
Washington.
An important issue in South Korean-United States relations
during the 1980s was the joint security relationship. This
relationship not only encompassed technical issues such as the
size, composition, financial support, and legal status of United
States forces stationed in South Korea, but also included a
psychological dimension because of the popularly perceived role
of the joint United States-Republic of Korea Combined Forces
Command in the brutal killings of civilians in Kwangju in May
1980 during the coup d'état of Chun Doo Hwan. Facts surrounding
the Kwangju incident--deliberately distorted under Chun Doo
Hwan's martial law authorities--remained unclarified until the
United States government issued a detailed statement on the
subject in 1989. The statement, prepared in response to a South
Korean National Assembly query, showed that the United States had
not approved the coup and that the troops used in Kwangju in 1980
were not under operational control of the Combined Forces Command
but had taken their orders from South Korean army authorities
under General Chun.
The Korean War permanently enhanced the role of the military
in South Korean society and politics as well as in the defense of
the nation. Although South Korean military officers did not seek
to intervene actively in politics under the rule of President
Syngman Rhee (1948-60), the coups d'état of generals Park Chung
Hee in 1961 and Chun Doo Hwan in 1980 demonstrated that some
elements in the army believed that the nation's security demanded
periodic corrections in the course of politics as well as
preparedness against North Korea. The army's influence on society
and politics during the 1980s continued to be seen in the laws
that prevented the news media from freely covering political-
military issues, the mandatory student participation in the
college-level Student Defense Corps, the custom of preferential
placement of retired senior officers in the civil service and in
state-run corporations, and in the frequent practice of
punitively drafting students expelled for demonstrating against
the government. At an even broader level, harsh discipline within
the military probably provided the most significant political
socialization for the more than 75 percent of South Korean males
who served in the regular army, the reserves, or the Homeland
Reserve Force.
Many of these practices were the subject of reforms outlined
in the Ministry of National Defense White Paper in 1988, when the
Roh administration abolished the Student Defense Corps and made
efforts to standardize conscription practices and to provide some
protection to the rights of recruits. As opinion surveys
conducted in 1990 indicated, however, the public continued to
support reforms that would improve conditions of service,
eliminate preferential placement of retired military officers in
the civil service, and move military installations away from
populated areas. In the same year, the government promulgated
additional regulations intended to reduce the more severe aspects
of military life and protect the basic rights of recruits.
As the 1990s began, however, some observers believed that
change in many military practices would come slowly. One of the
most outspoken criticisms voiced in a South Korean army
publication in 1990 was by an army major general who charged that
"a trend characterized by assaults, abusive language and torture
prevails in the barracks." He called upon the army to reform
itself to regain the trust of the public. The charges were given
additional credence two months later when a former marine corps
officer was convicted on charges of torturing a subordinate. In
October 1990, the minister of national defense was relieved of
his position after a former undercover agent of the Defense
Security Command disclosed that the military counterintelligence
organization had continued to maintain dossiers and conduct
surveillance on some 1,300 prominent civilians, including
politicians, clergymen, and journalists. The government pledged
its efforts to return the Defense Security Command to its
original function. The following year, however, the government
admitted as true new media charges that the DSC was investigating
several student activists.
Under President Chun Doo Hwan's force modernization program,
military spending increased dramatically during the 1980s,
exceeding estimated North Korean military spending during most of
the decade and nearly doubling to US$10 billion a year by 1990.
As a result of improvements in the defense industrial base that
began in the mid-1970s, 70 percent of the equipment and weaponry
used by the armed forces was being produced by domestic defense
industries by the late 1980s.
At the end of the 1980s, the armed forces numbered about
650,000. The army continued to divide responsibilities among
three commands. The First Army and the Third Army defended the
country from the threat of North Korean attack in their positions
along the Demilitarized Zone. The Second Army, positioned well
south of Seoul, was charged with logistical and training
responsibilities and managing the military reserve system. Some
of the country's forward defense was also provided by the marine
corps, which was charged with defense of the Han River estuary
and five islands located close to North Korea. Specialized army
units, such as the Capital Defense Command, defended the seat of
government, while the Defense Security Command in Seoul was
responsible for military counterintelligence and monitoring
politics within and outside of the military.
The air force expanded its fighter squadrons during the
1980s, operating almost 700 combat, transport, and training
aircraft under its three commands. In wartime, it assumed control
of civilian airports and sections of major highways adapted for
use as runways. During the 1980s, the air force added the F-16
and the Republic of Korea-United States coproduced F-5 to its
fighter inventory. The smaller navy also modernized during the
decade, focusing on antisubmarine warfare and the deployment of
new, domestically produced submarines, frigates, fast-attack
craft, and patrol boats.
In 1990 Roh moved the headquarters of the army and air force
(with navy to follow) to Taejon in an effort to promote more
effective interservice cooperation and more efficient command and
control of the armed forces during wartime. In 1990 the armed
forces began a three- to five-year plan to reorganize the command
structure. Under the Armed Forces Organization Act passed in July
and promulgated in October, the joint chiefs of staff system in
use since the Korean War would be replaced with a more
centralized Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in which
operational control of the military forces would be centralized
in the hands of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
new Joint Chiefs of Staff structure was designed to give Seoul a
wartime command structure separate from the United States-
Republic of Korea Combined Forces Command.
Fundamental to the restructing was the separation of the
operational and administrative functions immediately below the
minister of national defense. Under the reorganization, which
took effect on Armed Forces Day, October 1, 1990, the minister of
national defense defined military policy, consolidated planning,
and allocated resources. The newly invigorated Joint Chiefs of
Staff had the authority to employ military units of all the
military services, including task forces organization for joint
operations. Unified operations, strategic planning, intelligence,
and logistic directorates consolidated functions previously
controlled by the separate services, and the service headquarters
were reduced to maintenance, support, logistics, personnel, and
administrative functions. The services were to have reduced
intelligence organizations, but most of their intelligence assets
were to be transferred to the newly created Joint Chiefs of Staff
Defense Intelligence Command.
The 45,000 United States troops in Korea included a small
contingent at P'anmunjom with the United Nations Command, some
32,000 United States Army members under the Eighth Army, and
12,000 United States Air Force personnel under the Seventh Air
Force. Military issues relating to the Combined Forces Command
and other topics were discussed in annual bilateral Security
Consultative Meetings and in other joint talks. In April 1990,
the United States Department of Defense announced a program to
shift gradually the United States military presence in South
Korea to a smaller and more supportive role as international
political conditions and strengthened South Korean defense
capabilities permitted. As part of this program, the United
States and South Korea also agreed to disband the United States-
Republic of Korea Combined Field Army and to separate the Ground
Component Command from the Combined Forces Command during the
1991-1993 period. The two countries further agreed to appoint a
South Korean senior officer as commander of the Ground Component
Command and to replace the senior member of the United Nations
Command to the Military Armistice Commission (MAC)--who had been
a United States officer since the signing of the armistice in
1953--with a South Korean general. The appointment of a South
Korean army major general to the senior MAC position was made in
March 1991.
At the twenty-second Security Consultative Meeting in
November 1990, Seoul agreed to increase its financial support for
United States forces stationed in South Korea from US$2.7 billion
in 1990 to US$2.8 billion the following year. This figure
includes valuations for contributions in real estate, logistics
support, discounted costs, and tax. Other issues discussed
included Seoul's requests for eased United States restrictions on
its exports of coproduced military hardware and improved terms
for United States Foreign Military Sales to South Korea.
Discussions also occurred concerning possible reductions in the
Team Spirit exercise in 1991, in part because of United States
military commitments in the Persian Gulf.
In January 1991, South Korea and the United States signed a
new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing the legal
position of United States forces in South Korea. This agreement,
the first major revision of the 1966 SOFA, expanded Seoul's
jurisdiction to cover all kinds of crimes involving United States
personnel--not just felonies--and required the United States to
guarantee the presence of United States criminal suspects before
South Korean courts. Other provisions of the agreement concerned
customs procedures and the disposition of property no longer used
by United States forces in South Korea.
In 1991 President Bush announced that the United States would
withdraw its nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula, and later
in the year, in a statement accepted by United States
authorities, President Roh Taw Woo declared that the country was
free of such weapons. In 1989 the United States had stated that
North Korea had a plutonium reprocessing facility theoretically
capable of supporting nuclear weapons development. By mid-1991
United States, Japanese, and South Korean estimates held that
North Korea was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than
previously realized. By the end of the year, North Korea, which
had signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons
in 1985, still had not set a date for on-site inspections of
nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In
the joint statement issued after the close of the twenty-third
United States Republic of Korea Security Consultative Meeting in
November 1991, both countries declared that they had "agreed to
postpone the second stage reduction of United States forces in
Korea until such time as the North Korean threat and
uncertainties of developing nuclear weapons have disappeared and
the security in this region is fully guaranteed." This fact meant
that withdrawals would stop once United States forces were drawn
down to the 36,000 target for stage one. It was also confirmed at
the meeting that the United States Republic of Korea Combined
Field Army would be dissolved and that a Korean general would be
made Combined Forces Command ground component commander in 1992,
further decreasing the United States Profile.
March 31, 1992
William R. Shaw
Data as of June 1990
|
