THE RISING EAST
Well-rooted democracy shifts Korea's direction of growth
By Richard Halloran
As the dust settles after South Korea's April 13 legislative elections, it is clear that the results were not just a landslide that brought a new party to power, but an earthquake whose tremors are being felt in the United States and China — and to a lesser extent, in North Korea and Japan.
Associated Press
Moreover, the outcome of the election shows that the democracy for which many South Koreans struggled from 1960 to 1990 has a solid foundation and has become robust in all of its quarrelsome and muddled splendor.
Chief Justice Yun Young-chul, center, presided over a hearing at South Korea's Constitutional Court in Seoul last week over the impeachment of suspended President Roh Moo-hyun.
The elections also produced a touch of nostalgia with the defeat of Kim Jong-pil. As a young lieutenant colonel, he played a vital part in the 1961 coup that brought Col. Park Chung-hee to power and eventually made him president. Kim, a member of the National Assembly, was the last of the old guard to retire.
At the same time, a symbolic torch has been passed with the emergence of Park's daughter, Park Keun-hye, as a political leader. Park became her father's official hostess after her mother's assassination in 1974; her father was assassinated five years later. Today, Park Keun-hye heads the Grand National Party.
The landslide occurred when the new Uri Party vaulted from 47 seats to 152 seats in the 299 member National Assembly, giving it a simple majority plus two.
The party, formed last November, supports President Roh Moo-hyun, who was impeached by the former National Assembly for alleged political improprieties but expects to be reinstated by a court. Polls show that 70 percent of the voters were angered by the impeachment, which helps to explain the drop of the Grand National Party to 121 seats from its pre-election 144.
Uri, which means "open," represents a nationalistic younger generation of South Koreans, many of whom are anti-American and pro-Chinese. The Dong-A Ilbo, a leading newspaper, found in a survey that 55 percent of the new National Assembly thought their nation "should value China more than the U.S." in foreign policy.
In addition, legislators split over a commitment by Roh to send 3,500 soldiers to Iraq at the Bush administration's request. About half asserted that the troop deployment would be a "barometer" of South Korean relations with the United States, while the other half said the decision should be reversed or at least reviewed.
At a conference at the Pacific Forum, a think tank in Honolulu, Korean scholars suggested that the election results would quicken a debate in Seoul over the tilt toward America or China in South Korea's security posture. One framed the issue like this: "The question for South Korea in the beginning of the 21st century is whether it should strive to prolong, strengthen and modernize its maritime alliance with the United States or strive to seek 'strategic accommodation' with its traditional, pre-20th-century patron, China." (Under conference rules, the speakers cannot be identified.)
As for North Korea, the election results indicate that South Korea will continue to move toward an accommodation with the North, which will put it even more at odds with a Bush administration that has firmly opposed North Korea's plans to acquire nuclear arms.
Antipathy toward Japan is a given in Korean politics, no matter who is in power, although Roh, early in his term, traveled to Tokyo to urge the two rivals to put the past behind them. Japan ruled Korea from 1905 to 1945.
Nearly 40 years ago, during the oppressive days of Park Chung-hee's regime, South Korea's foremost constitutional scholar, Yu Chin-o, asserted in a private conversation that democracy was not just a Western political system but a universal order to which Koreans could aspire.
He contended that Korea, despite its long history of authoritarian rulers, would fashion its own brand of democracy that would take into account its Confucian values and ways of making decisions. Korean democracy would be home-grown, not imported.
In the last decade, South Korea has had three peaceful transfers of power from the old guard represented by Kim Jong-pil to leaders of what had been opposition parties, first to Kim Young-sam in 1993, then to Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and finally to Roh in 2003.
If those transfers of power and the tumultuous legislative election of 2004 mean anything, they have proven that Yu Chin-o was right.
Richard Halloran is a former New York Times correspondent in Asia.
