It's our party and we'll
cheer if we want to
By John Feffer
Imagine if nearly three-quarters of the U.S. Congress were thrown
out on its collective ear and replaced by a new generation of
30 and 40-somethings, many of them considerably more progressive
than John Kerry. Imagine if the number of women in Congress
doubled. Imagine a new labor party securing ten seats and a
pivotal minority position.
A fantasy? Not for South Koreans.
When voters went to the polls in South Korea on April 15, they
performed just this electoral miracle. Impeached president Roh
Moo Hyun and his Uri (“Our”) Party were the chief
beneficiaries of the results. The Uri Party, which tripled its
share, now commands a majority in parliament, with the renascent
Democratic Labor party to its left.
Some U.S. pundits have bent over backward to assure the public
that the electoral results were far from revolutionary. As Georgetown
Professor Victor Cha wrote in Far
East Economic Review, “the Uri Party’s bark may
be worse than its bite” for it won’t fundamentally
challenge military relations with the United States, bail out
North Korea with unsound economic projects, or tinker with the
Constitution. But as the Bush administration continues to fumble
its North Korea policy and China stakes out a larger foreign
policy claim in East Asia, the Uri Party may well herald a fundamental
transformation of politics on the Korean peninsula and beyond.
A month ago, it was revenge and not revolution that was brewing.
In March, the two major parties in the South Korean parliament–the
conservative Grand National Party (GNP) and the party of former
president Kim Dae Jung, the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP)–ganged
up to impeach President Roh Moo Hyun, who had barely spent one
year in office. The pretext for impeachment was a minor electoral
impropriety, but both parties were in fact eager to take advantage
of corruption scandals and Roh’s declining popularity to
make political gains of their own.
It was the mother of all miscalculations. Tens of thousands
of demonstrators took to the street in protest. Korean voters,
who have a warm spot for underdogs, repudiated the party duopoly
to give Roh and his new party of supporters a much clearer mandate
than when he first took office.
This was no mere political infighting. Roh and his breakaway
Uri Party articulated a fundamentally different vision of South
Korea, both to win the December 2002 elections and to beat back
the most recent challenge. They have urged greater independence
in South Korea’s relationship with the United States and
a more assertive engagement policy with the North.
South Koreans, particularly the younger generation, want a change.
They’re tired of the cozy, business-as-usual corruption
culture of the older generation. They overwhelmingly oppose
Bush administration policies, which is so often mistaken for
anti-Americanism by U.S. observers who fail to distinguish between
political and cultural motivations.
And over 90 percent of South Koreans don’t want to pursue
policies that would lead to war on the peninsula. The conservatives
have never put forward an alternative to engaging the North,
a policy that Roh largely adopted from his predecessor Kim Dae
Jung. With the Uri Party commanding a majority in parliament,
expect this engagement policy to accelerate despite hostility
from Washington.
John Feffer (www.johnfeffer.com) is the
author most recently of North
Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven
Stories, 2003). (Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special
report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0404ourparty.html.) Thanks to the US electronic news and comment
service Progressive Response (http://www.fpif.org/progresp/ for this article. Progressive Response is
produced by the Inter-Hemispheric Resource Center.
For more information see:
Between Kim Jong Il and
a Hard Place
By
John Feffer (March 1, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402kimjongil.html
The Tug of War
By John Feffer (October 22, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0310korea.html
Hexagonal Headache
By John Feffer (September 4, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0309nk.html
