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Civil Society and Democracy in South Korea

of Western Europe. The revival of this concept owes a great deal to the remarkable political developments in eastern and central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. The sudden collapse of Sovietstyle communist regimes in the region was frequently interpreted as a consequence of the resurgence of civil society in opposition to the oppressive state socialist system. The “resurrected civil society” is looked at as a major weapon against despotism and as a major means of deepening political reforms in the postsocialist societies. The popularity of the civil society concept, however, is not restricted to countries with a European historical background. The concept is often used in Latin America and in East Asia as well. Many Latin American countries can claim to have a tradition of civil society due to the legacy of European colonialism. But even in East Asia, which obviously had a very different history and set of traditions than Europe or Latin America, the language of civil society has great appeal and is used as frequently to talk about the recent transition to democracy as in other continents. To a certain extent, this is because the notion of civil society is both an analytic and normative or political concept. Civil society is generally accepted as something desirable to have, for both promoting democracy and achieving a good society, and as an important barometer of modernity and social progress in the Third World.1 The purpose of this essay is to review how the concept of civil society has been used in one East Asian society, South Korea, in the context of its recent transition to democracy and to examine how the development pattern and the character of civil society that has emerged differs from the patterns drawn from early Western European experiences.