Seoul National University’s Center for Contemporary Korean Studies held an international conference titled “Korea as Symptom” over two days, on August 22 and 23. On the second day of the conference, the Political Economy Team and the Democracy and Democratization Team organized the second session, titled “Korean Democracy at a Crossroads,” at Youngwon Hall in the Asia Center at Seoul National University. Chaired by Professor Kwon Hyeong-ki of Seoul National University, the session featured the following four presentations.

In the first presentation, Professor Hong Chul-ki of the Korea Institute for National Unification critically examined the conventional view that liberal democracy served as South Korea’s founding ideology in his presentation, “How Liberal Democracy Became the ‘Founding Doctrine’ of South Korea.” He first showed that the term “liberal democracy” rarely appeared at the time of the country’s founding and was not used in the same sense as it is today. He also pointed out that, between 1945 and 1963, “liberal democracy” was used not as a translation of “liberal democracy” in its contemporary sense, but as a political tool for legitimizing anti-communist dictatorship.

In the second presentation, Professor Hong Tae-young of Korea National Defense University analyzed the reasons for the failure of liberalism between the democratization of 1987 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 in his presentation, “Liberal Transition of Korean Democracy after 1987.” He argued that although liberalism became a dominant ideology in Korean politics after democratization, liberal self-government failed to take root due to the combined effects of the neoliberal turn in 1997, the insufficient institutionalization of the labor movement, the narrow structure of representative politics, and the conservative character of democratization.

In the third presentation, Professor Hannes Mosler of the University of Duisburg-Essen characterized President Yoon Suk Yeol’s “self-coup” as the culmination of Korea’s constitutional crisis. In particular, he analyzed how the People Power Party contributed to democratic backsliding and constitutional corruption through three stages of behavior, situating the crisis of Korean democracy within the broader international context of democratic backsliding.

In the final presentation, Professor Kim Joo-hyung of Seoul National University interpreted the subway protests by Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination, known in Korean as Jeonjangyeon, through Jacques Rancière’s concept of “democracy as dissensus” in his presentation, “Dissensual Citizenship in Korean Politics.” Professor Kim understood democracy as “the part of those who have no part,” explaining that this process generates new political subjects. He further viewed Jeonjangyeon’s subway protests as a site of such political performance, suggesting the possibility that dissensual citizenship may contribute to the democratization of democracy.

Overall, the session focused on how Korean democracy has been formed and developed, drawing out a range of political implications from that process. By illuminating the current state of Korean democracy, the session also contributed to repositioning Korean democracy within an international context and deepening our understanding of democracy.