hankyoreh

A drive-thru screening center set up in the parking lot of a market in Daegu’s Dalseong County on Mar. 2. (provided by Dalseong County)

Opportunities don’t always come naturally for people or states. Sometimes we make our own opportunities, but other times they arrive as if by destiny through wars or disasters. At this moment, South Korea is facing a major opportunity to restructure its socioeconomic order. While it is the result of the Moon Jae-in administration’s effective response and the dedication of many health professionals and volunteers, South Korea’s national stature has greatly risen through its containment of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Additionally, the ruling Democratic Party realized an amazing achievement in capturing 180 seats in the general elections on Apr. 15. This moment is an excellent opportunity for us to re-establish the basic direction of the state and rebuild our frail social safety net and social policy framework.

South Korea previously had opportunities to attempt changes to its growth-centered approach and family welfare-based social system after the June Democracy Movement of 1987 and the subsequent arrival of the Kim Dae-jung administration and the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. But in the case of democratization, the expansion of public services ran into difficulties amid the waves of globalization and neoliberalism. The financial crisis was an opportunity to recreate the chaebol-dependent, labor-excluding political and economic order, but immense pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and international finance left South Korea with no room to conceive its policies as a sovereign state.

It is laudable at least that amid the severe crisis of national solvency, the Kim Dae-jung administration was able to enact the National Basic Living Security Act and more or less put the finishing touches on the four major forms of insurance. The achievement of this much in social policy terms was made possible by the fact that it was the first truly democratic administration after the country’s democratization movement. Yet even those policies were defensive in nature -- minimum measures to prevent social collapse, like a shovelful of dirt before a crumbled dike.

The current situation is quite similar to the one during the Asian financial crisis, with mass unemployment becoming a reality as the COVID-19 epidemic has forced several companies in the service industry to the brink of collapse. The difference now is that the disaster is global, leaving exports closed as an outlet, and the current economic crisis is not something South Korea can overcome on its own. At the same time, South Korea’s financial scale is much larger than before, and some of its industries appear more likely to grow substantially thanks to success in disease control. And with welfare states in Europe and elsewhere revealing major plays in their disease control response and direct challenges being posed to free market ideology, globalization, and neoliberalism, South Korea finds itself in the position of having to create its own model rather than modeling itself after any one state.

Major disasters have always been opportunities for societies to reflect upon themselves, as well as chances to create new systems. Great Britain produced its welfare state vision of minimum livelihood guarantees for its people (the Beveridge Report) amid the ravages of World War II; US President Franklin Roosevelt created the framework for a welfare system at a time when the economy had thoroughly collapsed amid the Great Depression. The current coronavirus disaster is essentially a war. The daily death toll in the US a few days ago was on par with the total number of US troops who died in the Iraq War; the bodies of people without family or friends are being buried on islands like garbage. At the moment, there are no free market ideologues speaking out against the anti-market, anti-liberalism state intervention policies that the US and countries of Europe are freely introducing.

The man-made disaster that is the coronavirus pandemic can be traced to humanity’s reckless destruction of its natural environment; more proximally, however, it stems from the profit orientation of healthcare and the disappearance of public service, as the US case illustrates. To be sure, social spending -- public healthcare spending in particular -- is not a safety valve for danger, as the situations in Italy, France, and other countries show, and public ownership of healthcare does not guarantee public service. South Korea lags far behind those countries in public spending, and the fact that it’s been successful so far in controlling the outbreak by mobilizing societal resources through suitable government/private sector cooperation, transparency, trust, and civic engagement presents fundamental questions for the advanced welfare states of Europe.

For now, the government needs to increase its fiscal spending to address the most immediate dangers, while doing everything it can to prevent people from losing their jobs. Yet other structural embarrassments remain as ticking time bombs just waiting to go off: severe labor polarization, an unstable working class, a massive segment of workers who do not have the option of “distancing” (as the call center episode showed), and an excess of “special employment” workers and microbusiness owners. Instead of simply adopting a stopgap approach, we must come up with a vision for building a major edifice on the foundation of these issues.

With organized labor and progressive parties being as weak as they are, South Korea is not in a position to become an advanced welfare state overnight -- but the favorable environment domestically and overseas offers some real political capital. The administration needs to set aside its urban middle class-oriented, developmentalist-era policies of promoting a pathway of investments in education and apartments and family-based welfare and work to increase the autonomy of democratic public service through voluntary solidarity and civic engagement, while building a labor-friendly form of public welfare. The “advanced country” of the 21st century is a “security/life state.”

By Kim Dong-choon, professor of sociology and NGO studies at Sungkonghoe University

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