ABSTRACT
Our world is fundamentally changing as we are witnessing “a major tipping point in history. North-South relations have been dominant for some 200 years and current trends see the onset of an East-South turn” (Nederveen Pieterse 2011, 26). Globally, regionally, nationally, and even locally the impact of emerging countries is felt in economic, political, social, and also cultural terms. This current reconfiguration of the world order is leading to major shifts in power—a global “rebalancing,” although the term is contested—and gives rise to huge challenges and opportunities—“emancipatory potential” (ibid., 22)—for all actors concerned in the North, the South, and the East. In this chapter the focus is on South Korea and South Africa, two emerging nations that share some striking similarities in their relatively recent transition from autocracy to democracy in a period of intensified globalization. Thereby, I am particularly interested in their recent trajectories of democratic deepening and the role of civil society therein. This comparison is particularly valuable since striking similarities in the mid-and late 1990s have given way to clear differences impacted by levels of and accessibility to information technology. Therefore, the question at hand is whether in this context an East-South turn, chiefly in an inspirational sense—another type of Korean Wave 1 —could benefit processes of democratic deepening in South Africa.
