ABSTRACT
Korea has come a long way in the last five decades. Since liberation from colonial rule in 1945, the nation has seen division from 1948, civil war (1950–1953), and the complexities of state building, industrialization and democratization. South Korea compressed the multiple stages of industrialization and democratization into a few turbulent decades of national division, the ruins of the war, the repression of military dictatorship, and the constraints of a massive military standoff between the opposing states on the peninsula. President Y.S.Kim took office in 1992 as the first civilian president in thirty years. Despite reliance on former military elites and conservative privileged classes in the election, President Kim established firm civilian control over the military. He also opposed close political ties to the business community in a strategy defying the predictions of theorists like O’Donnell and Schmitter1 who count the military and the capitalists as the queen and the king of the democratic chess game. If threatened, the king and queen ‘may simply sweep the opponents off the board to kick it over and start playing solitaire.’
