ABSTRACT
While the modern state capable of dominating society emerged after the Korean War (1950–53), this did not immediately give rise to what is referred to as the developmental state. This chapter contextualises the transition from a merely autocratic state (the Rhee Syngman government) to the developmental state (the Park Chung-Hee government) within the changes in the economic and geopolitical positioning of Korea in the world-system; the changes in the US aid policy; and a concomitant shift in the predominant mode of capital accumulation from commercial to industrial, on the one hand, and a new class power balance ushered in by the April Uprising of 1960, on the other. The Korean state was given a chance to become ‘developmental’ when the world-systematic imperative to ‘catch up’ met favourable geopolitical conditions for rapid growth, i.e. the Cold War in the face of regime competition with North Korea and the pressure from below to live up to the (nationalist) revolutionary sprit of the April Uprising. After demonstrating the global and social origins of the Korean developmental state, this chapter analyses the statist concept of the developmental state from the perspective of a critique of the ‘fetishism of national development’ set out in Chapter 6.
