창작과 비평

 

Bruce Cumings and Paik Nak-chung

 

*The Korean translation of this article was published in The Quarterly Changbi (Spring 2009).

Bruce Cumings is a Professor in History at the University of Chicago. Paik Nak-chung is a professor emeritus at Seoul National University. ⓒ Changbi 2009

 

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Dialogue/ Seoul, 17 December 2008

 

Paik: I understand the main purpose of your visit to Seoul this time is to participate in the Yonsei University Conference commemorating the 60th anniversary of its Korean Studies Institute. Since your conference paper, “Korean Democracy and American Power,” is mostly devoted to a historical review of what has gone on since 1945, we may begin by your adding a sort of postscript to that paper regarding what’s happening in Korea today.

 

Cumings: Well, I argue in the paper that Korean democracy came up from the bottom, that the motive force or real power behind the democratization of Korea was the masses of protesters in the streets, and events like the Kwangju rebellion and the June mobilization against Chun Du-hwan in 1987. Those watershed events, I think, created a very strong civil society based in young people and in labor groups. And as I’ve said, I think in many ways Korean civil society is stronger than American civil society, with more participation, more interest in politics.  And these days young people are especially wired to the web. In the United States, to the extent that people ever talk about Korean democratization, they just assume, especially people in Washington, that it was a matter of nurturing the middle class and when the middle class became stronger, Korea democratized and the United States always stood behind that.  But in fact, in my paper I argue that the middle class, when it gets its rights, usually wants to stop there and not extend them, and that much of Korean democratization came against American power in Korea, especially American support for one dictator after another. But I think the Korean democracy that we see today strikes me as like democracy everywhere; it’s very unsatisfying but it’s better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said it in a different way, that democracy may be a terrible system, but it’s better than all the others.  Democracy in a highly complicated society like Korea or the United States can often be very disappointing. From my point of view, I was quite disappointed with the election of President Lee Myung-bak in South Korea, although I don’t vote here, so I don’t take it so personally; whereas in the United States I certainly did take Bush’s ‘election’ personally. But here in Korea I think one can’t be too disappointed because you had ten years of a liberal government under Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun. Much was accomplished in consolidating democracy, in opening relations with North Korea on the basis of reconciliation, and so I think that those ten years in Korea generally were very positive ones. But I do think that it’s only proper to say that actually existing democracy in a capitalistic society is bound to be disappointing, day in and day out, but there are victories that are won and one was 1998 and another was 2002 in Korea, and the third was the Obama election in the United States.  I’ve regained my optimism about American politics because of Obama’s election which was very decisive, not on the margins like Bush, but very decisive, so in spite of the economic crisis that we’re all facing I’m very optimistic about the Obama administration, optimistic about American democracy because essentially the kind of stranglehold that the right wing and especially fundamentalist Christians had on American politics has been broken. So those are just some reflections on the current situation, but on balance I think one can say that the democratic development in Korea has been wonderful on the whole, much, much better than what existed 20 years ago.

 

P: We’ll talk more about American politics later. On balanc, development of South Korean democracy may have been more encouraging than what happened in the US – until this past year. While in America Obama won decisively as you say, in Korea it was Lee Myung-bak who won, also quite decisively, in last year’s election, and launched a new administration earlier this year. Now, at first, even many of those who had opposed Lee were ready to concede that his victory had certain good points. I mean after all another transfer of power through the electoral process points to the progress of Korean democracy; and also this offers a good chance to shake up democratic or progressive forces in South Korea. But after less than a year, more and more people are worried that we have really elected another George W. Bush, as this President has embarked on a series of disastrous policies. I don’t know if you think these worries are exaggerated.

 

C: No, I don’t think they are exaggerated. I think that the election here was rather like the 2000 election in the United States, in other words you had at that point 10 years of Kim Dae-jung and Rho Moo-hyun and in America we had 8 years of Bill Clinton. And even though in both cases there was a great deal of accomplishment, voters get tired of seeing the same party in power or the same faces. I don’t know that I would say that Lee Myung-bak is like George W. Bush, for several reasons. One, he was genuinely elected, whereas Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court in his first term. Bush is closer to Kim Jong Il in the sense that he would never have been President without his father. And in that sense there is a commonality of aristocratic or monarchical aspect to Bush’s appointment in 2000.  Anyway, in Lee Myung-bak I think you have a person who came of age and made his career in the Park Chung Hee era and hasn’t really adapted to the post-dictatorial era. He wants to turn the clock back on any number of issues: on North Korea, to try and get tough with North Korea. I think the record of trying to get tough with North Korea shows that it generally doesn’t work. North Korea knows best that environment when their back is to the wall, and they always respond very negatively.

Also, I think the textbook issue of trying to revise all the important history that we’ve learned in the era of democracy is very unwise.  It’s like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube after the toothpaste is squeezed out.  It’s impossible. There are many scholars here and also victims and civil society groups that have thrown light on unfortunate aspects of post-Liberation Korean history, and from my point of view as a historian, this has been a very welcome development with all kinds of new information. And this is a matter of establishing some kind of balance in our understanding of postwar Korean history, between the official story of what happened and the story of the victims or of critics, we will eventually arrive at a rather complete history of post-Liberation Korea. That was a very positive development in South Korea.  It isn’t “left wing” to uncover truths that have been covered up by dictatorships. And sometimes you wonder what kind of advice President Lee is getting because he took a hard line against North Korea almost at the same time Bush turned around and dropped his hard line and began engaging North Korea.  And the textbook issue only draws attention to the stories that he doesn’t want people to pay attention to, so I think those two things have been a kind of disaster for President Lee.

 

P: The fact that he was genuinely elected while Bush was not speaks better for Korean democracy than for the American, but for President Lee Myung-bak this seems to have encouraged him to embark from the very first year on the kind of reckless unilateralism for which Bush needed 9/11. To be sure, Lee was reputed to be a pragmatist and some people still believe so, but I think he is a pragmatist only in the sense that he doesn’t have any firm principles except looking out for short term gains. A real pragmatist wouldn’t try to put the toothpaste back into the tube. And although it isn’t his fault that global economic crisis has erupted, you know the Subprime Mortgage crisis had already begun and well advanced in the US when he was promising a 7% GDP growth during his campaign. So this kind of poor judgment, inability to analyze the situation and collect competent advice must be counted as his fault.

 

C: Well, I think you have two governments in East Asia that try to gain legitimacy on the baseis of certain percentage of growth. China is growing at 9 or 10% a year. Lee Myung-bak said 7% a year and of course the model for that kind of thinking is Park Chung Hee who always faced a question of his legitimacy, delivering growth year in and year out. When you listen to Lee Myung-bak, you have to say that at the core level of his assumptions, he thinks things were wonderful when Park Chung Hee was president and he was moving up in the Hyundai Corporation, and then something terrible happened in 1998, whereas I think most of us look at 1998 as a watershed where the opposition for the first time truly came to power and opened a new era in South Korean politics, with labor getting rights for participating in politics and becoming an essential part of the South Korean political system, with the opening to the North which I think received tremendous results with the Sunshine Policy. So they were not ten lost years. But I don’t think Lee Myung-bak wants to be a dictator. I mean one of the greatest achievements here is that the military is firmly in the barracks. He is the President and maybe because he’s President for only five years he wanted to move quickly at the beginning of his term, but I do think at the core level of his assumptions he thinks of postwar history very differently from how you or I would.

 

P: Well, wanting to be a dictator and actually making it are two different things. I don’t know what Lee Myung-bak does want, but I would agree that he will not succeed in becoming a dictator even if he wanted to. We are a people who, as you observed, achieved democratization from the bottom up, and won’t let anybody to turn the clock back. As you mentioned, he talks of ‘ten lost years’, which is itself a preposterous proposition, but actually, as you also point out, he often seems to be thinking of twenty lost years, dreaming of the good old days before 1987.

 

C: Right. There’s a curious convergence between his view and that of Americans in Washington who fancy themselves as kind of handlers on Korean policy. On the bipartisan basis they liked Kim Dae-jung better than Rho Moo-Hyun but they did, many of them, feel that we needed to get back to the good old days of Korean-American relationship where we understood each other, and you didn’t have a President talking about independence from the United States or getting American troops out of Yongsan base and things like that. I think Lee Myung-bak may have been thinking he had a constituency in Washington more than here in Korea for the kind of comments he made when he first assumed office, and I think it’s very shortsighted on the part of Lee Myung Bak, because most of those people are quite old now in Washington, they’re not going to be around a long time. I don’t think they’re going to influence the Obama Administration. I wondered how he could warm up to President Bush the way he did at Camp David and elsewhere.

 

P: That wasn’t very pragmatic!

 

C: It wasn’t, when President Bush already had become the most unpopular President in American history, but even if you discount that, what about the fact that he only had less than a year in office. So that was short-sighted, but it may have been based on the idea that the Republicans would win again in 2008 and then Korean-American relations would be very good and very close, but of course that didn’t happen.

 

P: Well, you cited China and Korea as two cases where the government leaders had to have economic growth for their political legitimacy, but the sad thing is that in South Korea a President no longer has to achieve a 7% or 6% growth for his legitimacy.

 

C: That’s exactly right. And then that’s why it was strange that President Lee would always run on that basis, but as I’ve indicated, that’s what Park Chung Hee always argued, that he delivered rapid growth.

 

P: Because Park Chung Hee didn’t have constitutional legitimacy. But another factor may be that both in China and South Korea there is a big gap between rich and poor, so you do need a very high percentage of growth if you are to throw out some crumbs to the poor, and I think that since Lee Myung-bak has no policy for reducing the gap, he has to aim for a growth rate that’s impossible to achieve and probably more than is good for the country. But ‘ten lost years’ was a campaign slogan rather than the official motto of the new administration, which is, in Korean, sŏnjinhwa wonnyŏn—in English something like ‘Year One of Moving Toward an Advanced Nation’. The argument goes that we’ve accomplished industrialization, then democratization, and now it’s time to join advanced nations. If you take it at face value, it means that you embrace the fruits of both industrialization and democratization, and go on from there to become a more advanced economy but also toward a deepening of democracy. But what he is actually following is not the slogan of becoming truly advanced but the other one of ‘ten lost years’ or even twenty lost years.

 

C: Well, I remember in 1996 when Kim Young-sam was trying to have Korea join the OEDC there was a lot of talk about Korea becoming an advanced nation. In some ways it may be an inferiority mentality, but I think that from the standpoint of South Korea’s economy, and especially the human capital, Korea is an advanced country. And sometimes I think that Koreans don’t recognize that as much as people on the outside do, that maybe Lee Myung-bak thinks Korea is not advanced enough so it needs to be more advanced, and that he doesn’t really care so much about democratic development that has happened. I don’t really think he’s a politician. He was a businessman and manager in a very large firm and I would imagine that he looked at the protests and the long struggle for democratization as not something that really meant a lot to him.  But I don’t see where the appeal is to talk about ten lost years, to what constituency he is appealing with that.

 

P: It managed to appeal to two very different groups simultaneously, which is why he won. One, those who during the 10 years really lost nothing except political power, in other words the rich and privileged—as you can see from the profiles of his ministers and buddies. They are all quite rich and have been increasing their wealth during the past decade, most of them. But they had lost political power ago and had great grievances because they never thought their God-given right to domination would be taken away from them. And their reckless use of that power since taking office shows how keenly they had been feeling the loss.

 

And then, there were a large number of ordinary people whose living conditions had deteriorated drastically after the IMF bailout in 1997. Even though Korean economy began its recovery under Kim Dae-jung and was doing pretty well under Roh Moo-hyun in terms of macroeconomic indices, decent growth rate, high stock prices, current account surplus and so on, lives of common people had indeed become impoverished. So the slogan of ‘ten lost year’ resonated among both the rich and poor, for entirely different reasons; there came about a sort of grand national coalition, an unbeatable coalition at the time. It now turns out that Lee Myung-bak not only cannot sustain economic growth, which is not all his fault, but he has really no thought of improving ordinary people’s lives. All the economic measures he’s launching are in favor of the rich and the powerful.

 

C: I was very interested in this coalition that Lee Myung-bak put together because it had the direct analogy in the Bush coalition in the US, and a lot of people whose livelihoods had deteriorated voted for Bush. But in the US much of this can be explained by cultural and social issues like abortion or fundamentalist religion or opposition to gay marriage, things like that, whereas in Korea I don’t see that there are cultural or social issues that would bring poor people to vote against their own interest.

 

P: Well, the general perception here was that Lee Myung-bak was a pragmatist, and in that respect people made a sensible choice in picking Lee Myung-bak over Park Geun-hye when they had gotten tired of Rho Moo-hyun. But I think we are lately waking up to the fact that he’s not a real pragmatist, at any rate not competent enough to act pragmatically. Another image of Lee Myung-bak that I would question is his being a successful CEO, because as you can imagine there were no real CEOs under Chung Ju-young in the Hyundai conglomerate, they were all COOs whatever their formal title, with only one super-CEO. Lee Myung-bak prides himself on his nickname of a bulldozer, but I say he was a bulldozer driven by Chung Ju-young, and without the driver he is more of a bull in a china shop.

 

C: Well, let me ask you a question because this is the same question North Koreans would have. I assume that Lee Myung-bak as a Hyundai executive would actually want to develop relations with North Korea, mainly economic relations the way Chung Ju-young did. But he doesn’t seem to care.

 

P: You know, I never had any illusions that Lee Myung-bak would fulfill his campaign promise of making South Korea an advanced society, but I did think that he would be pragmatic at least in his relationship with North Korea, that in some ways he could launch even bolder initiatives than previous administrations because as a conservative he could act more confidently in engaging North Korea. But things have turned out quite otherwise, and that is really another reason why I’ve come to revise my image of him as a pragmatist.

 

C: It’s very hard to explain because I don’t see what interests are being served by his policy toward North Korea.

 

P: I think one reason may be that he ran into strong domestic opposition in the early days of the Administration and his popularity ratings dropped quite drastically. So what he decided at that point was to appeal to his conservative—or to be more blunt, reactionary—constituency rather than trying to gain broader support. Since then he has been a sort of hostage to those people.

 

C: That’s a good way to put it.

 

P: There are quite a few people in South Korea who live in a fantasy world as George W. Bush did, believing that North Korea would collapse very soon, and that if we kept pressure on it and had the patience to wait, then all sorts of good things would come to pass. Now as you have argued since the days immediately following the unification of Germany, it’s not going to happen any time soon, and certainly things wouldn’t be so good even if it did happen. Lee Myung-bak himself has been sort of vacillating in his attitude towards the North. At first North Koreans were very patient, they waited about a hundred days between his election until the end of March, then they started attacking him harshly and personally, which hasn’t helped.

 

C: I’m afraid this situation rather exemplifies what you’ve written about so often and so well, regarding the ‘division system’. This new situation just emerged in both North and South spontaneously to the human eye, but in fact it’s just a matter of getting the old forces in motion again and it’s very disheartening to see how rapidly the division system essentially came back to life.

 

P: I have argued among other things that there are forces on both sides of the peninsula sustaining the division system. Even though on the surface they are very opposed to each other, they share this common interest.

 

C: Oh, I think that’s true. I think we’ve talked about this before, but I think the hardliners in the Pentagon also have a symbiotic relationship with hardliners in North Korea, especially with the Soviet Union gone, so that their defense projects really depend on having enemies like North Korea. But here the system that you’ve analyzed is so deep and so longstanding that it can be instantly reenergized by events like Lee Myung-bak's attitude and the North harshly condemning him.

 

But I was very impressed by the agreement that came out of the second summit meeting between Rho Moo-hyun and Kim Jong Il, particularly the economic agreements for opening up the ports on the West coast and Haeju and Nampo, and so on, and I wrote a couple of articles here in Korea that were about the political economy of that agreement and how it would fit with Rho Moo-hyun’s ideas of a hub economy in Northeast Asia. What’s astonishing to me is that Lee Myung-bak has been more critical of the second summit than the first, and yet it laid out a blueprint for a very rational kind of economic engagement with North Korea, and one that would be of great mutual benefit.  So it may be that he’s just like George Bush, in that he doesn’t want to do anything that his predecessor did.

 

P: The second summit agreement of Ocober 4, 2007 laid down a concrete program for implementing the earlier June 15 Joint Declaration of 2000. So for anybody who is opposed to what has been going on, the second one would be even more unpalatable than the first one. Of course, you can understand how any successor would naturally feel some displeasure about a predecessor who just before the end of his term makes all these agreements for the next President to carry out.  But all he has to do is to announce that he supports the October 4th Declaration in principle and go on from there, proposing that the two sides get together and see what to implement first and what should be put off. The plan for a special peace and prosperity zone in the West Sea is the part of the Declaration that Rho Moo-hyun himself was most proud of. Not that it could be implemented right away in any event, but because it finally resolved, or more accurately defused, the dispute about the Northern Limit Line in the Western coastal area, which had been a serious obstacle for any further extension of inter-Korean relations in other areas as well.

 

C: I was very excited by those plans when I read them, but politics just intervened. Think of it from the North Korean standpoint, they make agreements with Kim Dae -jung and Rho Moo-hyun and those agreements don’t count for the next administration, just as when they made agreements with Bill Clinton that didn’t count when Bush came in. People forget that Clinton signed an agreement, signed a statement that North Korea and the U.S. would not have hostile intent toward each other.  And Bush just ripped it up and put North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’. It’s no way to conduct diplomacy.  It means that North Koreans can’t count on the word of democratic leaders to be continued by whoever succeeds them. I’m sure it’s very frustrating for them.

 

P: What do you think of the prospects for US-DPRK relations under Obama?

 

C: Well, I think an obvious point to make is that he has hired many people from the Clinton Administration and Hilary Clinton herself as part of his team, and it would be very easy for them to go back to agreements that Bill Clinton had made like the one I mentioned, but especially the missile agreement to buy out North Korea’s medium and long rage missiles. Clinton had essentially completed that agreement in November and December in 2000, but the Bush Administration didn’t like it and let it drop to the floor. So on a pragmatic level you could imagine them going back to find the papers and put them into implementation, but there are also many people in the Obama administration from the Clinton period who are concerned about proliferation and that has a good side and a bad side. It means that we’ll want to make agreements with North Korea, but it also brings back people who in 1994 planned for a preemptive attack on Yŏngbyŏn plutonium facility, so that’s a danger. But I think Barack Obama is a remarkable person, and in his own vision head and shoulders above those people. I don’t know Obama personally, but I know of him because a number of friends of mine knew him quite well and lived very near him in Chicago. Many professors and friends of mine live in the same neighborhood as Obama, in the area called Kenwood just north of the University, and they have a kind of rolling political discussion that goes from one person’s house to another, at Friday night dinners. In that neighborhood he was exposed to a range of political views much wider than any other President in recent memory. Professor Rasheed Khalidi who was a Middle East expert who went from Chicago to Columbia was a good friend of Obama’s. He would sit at Rasheed Khalidi’s table and discuss the Middle East, and Rasheed is a very moderate Palestinian but he’s still a Palestinian, so he’s going to give a different view than an Israeli would.  And I’ve talked to those friends of mine, they play basketball with Obama and they all think that he has a wider vision, a wider range of vision and wider political spectrum of acceptability than any recent President. If you compare that to Bill Clinton who came out of Arkansas as an Arkansas politician, I think you can see that Obama is a very worldly person, not only in his own upbringing and the places he lived, but in the associates he had at the University of Chicago and in the city of Chicago, and so I think that you’re going to see a very different kind of diplomacy from Obama than even the Clinton years. I don’t think Clinton’s North Korea policy was really sorted out very well. I don’t think he paid much attention. He nearly got into a war with North Korea in 1994, then came the Agreed Framework and he didn’t pay any attention to that because of the right wing and Republican Party opposing it, and then in 1998 and ‘99, mainly I think through the prodding from Kim Dae-jung, the Clinton Administration developed a second set of engagement policies with North Korea, but Bill Clinton himself never paid much attention to North Korea or Iran for that matter. So I think Obama is—I mean I think we can have high hopes for him being a post-Cold War President, a very worldly President and one who is going to use unorthodox means toward dealing with American adversaries. I don’t think he’s going to run off and meet with Kim Jong Il anytime soon, but I do think he has a sensibility that is quite different from any President going back quite a long way.

 

P: Well, I would think his diplomacy will be not only different from Bush’s—

 

C: That goes with out saying.

 

P: But also from Clinton’s. For one thing, as you say, Clinton didn’t have any vision about settling the relationship with North Korea. And secondly I think the whole situation has changed during the past 8 years. At that time it was the missiles, this time it’s nuclear weapons plus the missiles. Also, I think the North Koreans probably feel more insecure, in a more precarious position than 8 years ago. So if Obama just digs up the old papers from the last days of the Clinton administration and try just to implement those, the North Koreans may not be ready to go along. By the way, have you read a recent article by John Feffer on the Japan Focus web page?

 

C: Yes.

 

P: I found it very interesting. It’s called “The North Korean Conundrum: Change You Can Believe In or Policy Status Quo?” He argues that you can’t solve the North Korean nuclear problem just by offering more goodies than Bush was willing to give. You would have to really engage North Korea in an entirely different way, mainly by supporting what he calls a regime change that North Korea has already embarked on. Their turn from doctrinaire socialism to what Kim Jong Il calls ‘real gain socialism’ should be encouraged and supported by an American program of much more active engagement.

 

C: I think the most vulnerable period in North Korean history after the Korean War was in 1996, ‘97, ‘98 when they had the floods and famine and very sharp confrontation with the Clinton Administration over the long rang missile test at the end of August 1998. Then of course Kim Dae-jung had come to power and was implementing his reconciliation policy with the North and this slowly had an impact on the Clinton Administration to change its policies. But I think that was the period when maybe even the North Koreans themselves wondered whether they were going to survive. And the very fact that they’re still in power 10 years after the famine probably gives the Northern leadership more confidence than it had in the late ‘90s. I think what is vulnerable in North Korea is precisely the reforms that Feffer talked about. I mean in that article he described the extensive marketization of North Korea and that has turned it into a different place than it was 10 years ago. Most Americans including very well-informed American leaders don’t really know that about North Korea. It’s another reason why the second summit was so important because it coincided with the economic plans we talked about earlier, coincided with the move toward more markets, market allocation in North Korea.  So I think John is right about the new markets, but I think he was wrong to use the term “regime change” because that implies over