This study discusses why South Korea has not always succeeded in the ‘entrepreneurial state’ approach – defined as policy efforts to move away from the old developmental state model to a new industrial system of innovation in which small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are incorporated – by focusing on the limitation of new semiconductor industrial policies of the former Moon Jae-in government (2017–2022). Conventionally, many scholars have exclusively ascribed this limitation to large businesses' (chaebol's) practice of in-house production. Building upon historical institutionalism and its concept of increasing returns, alternatively, we shift attention to the way the Moon government played its entrepreneurial role. We argue that, as the government sought increasing returns from the developmental state idea and institution, the likelihood of wider SME incorporation decreased. Nationalism enabled the government to control the policymaking process but made it difficult to obtain new information through policy contestation. The government depended on developmental alliance to increase policy visibility through the chaebol's capabilities, but demands of small firms were downplayed. This study proposes to construct a more theoretical framework with which to explain how the old political economy model affects new entrepreneurial goals.

No abstract

Since Japan’s imposition of export controls against Korea in July 2019 and its following countermoves, including the termination of the General Security of Military Information Agreement, the governments of both countries have presented their own narratives of the origin of this trade war, both of which mirror theories of international politics. Nonetheless, these narratives mask several domestic origins. Most importantly, this paper demonstrates that behind the trade war, there has been a preoccupation of the two governments with mutually irreconcilable version forms of historicism. One is Korea’s pro-naturalist historicism, seeing Korean history as being preordained by the universal laws of human progress and defining Japan as a historical reactionary. The other is Japan’s anti-naturalist historicism, upholding internationalism as a new driving force of history that will transform Japan from a war criminal state into a proper subject in international society while criticizing Korea as being a drag on this transformation. This paper argues that, resulting from decades-long neoliberal politics that have disturbed the state-society balance, the national structure of post-democracy has encouraged each government to push historicism to its limit as an alternative source of political legitimacy in lieu of democratic accountability. Concretely, it shows that post-democracy has determined (1) the historicist framing of emerging conflicts, (2) the government’s legislative struggles to realize historicist policies, and (3) the incontestability of historicist hostility by other ideas in each country.

After undergoing a series of mass demonstrations during the past three decades, including the 2016–2017 candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, many commentators in South Korea are confident that their country has become a land for what Karl Marx called “free men.” Korean citizens are portrayed as being ready to participate in voluntary political associations and collective actions and to pursue their interests in the public sphere. However, the data are showing the opposite to be true: citizen participation in public-sphere activities has substantially decreased since the mid-2000s, while the government has managed to improve or at least maintain its political responsiveness during the same period. Explaining the unnoticed background to this imbalance, this essay sheds light on the myth of the benefactor state in Korean democracy, arguing that this has emerged because neoliberalism has not only placed an increasing number of people in precarious positions but also neutralized them politically. The Korean government has capitalized on this situation to mythicize itself as a benefactor state that possesses an incomparable administrative capacity to take care of precarious people. By investigating the period of Park’s presidency (2013–2017) and the current rule of President Moon Jae-in (2017–), this essay shows how the myth of the benefactor state has emerged and created a unique cycle of Korean democracy.