South Korean democracy and Korea's division system

Democracy is still the issue in South Korea. Under the Lee Myung-bak administration, much of the progress in South Korean democracy since 1987 has been either interrupted or reversed. Yet such a “reversal” actually represents a consistent and long-standing pursuit on the part of anti-democratic forces with deep roots in Korea's division system. The division of the peninsula was consolidated into a kind of system with considerable powers of self-reproduction when the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953 and the armistice agreement was never replaced by a peace treaty. The result is an inherently anti-democratic political regime on either side. Democratization in the South did render a blow to, but did not abolish, this peninsula-wide system, so that anti-democratic forces have remained potent under the “1987 regime” and even succeeded in regaining political power in 2008 (under Lee Myung-bak). The idea of a “2013 regime” is to accomplish, when the change of administration occurs in early 2013, a change ...