globalization, and, mostly recently, ethnonational reformation, its citizens have been exhorted or have exhorted themselves to engage intensely in each of these transformations, and their citizenship, constituted by identities, duties, and rights, have been very much framed and substantiated by the conditions, processes, and outcomes of such transformative engagements.
As explained in Chapter 6, “Complex-Culturalism vs. Multiculturalism,” the literally explosive growth of transnational marriages between Korean men and mostly Asian women from the beginning years of the twenty-first century seemingly signals that South Korea has entered a genuinely new epoch of cosmopolitan existence and change. This unprecedented phenomenon has drastically reconfigured diverse corners and peripheries of South Korea into manifestly multi-ethnic entities. The national and local governments have been quick in initiating a comprehensive policy of “multicultural family support,” whereas various civil groups, media, and even business corporations have echoed the governmental drive with their own multiculturalism initiatives. On the other hand, as agencies of what I define here as complex culturalism, South Korean institutions and citizens have instrumentally, selectively, and flexibly incorporated into themselves various historical and civilizational sources of culture in order to expediently consolidate the postcolonial sociopolitical order and then to maximize socioeconomic development. In this vein, neither the legal acceptance and physical integration of rapidly increasing numbers of foreign brides into South Korean society, nor the accompanying governmental and civil drive for multiculturalism, implies that this society used to be culturally isolated, or that it only now wishes to convert into a multicultural or cosmopolitan entity. The mass presence of “multicultural brides” seems to have further reinforced complex culturalism by enabling South Korean citizens and institutions to conveniently interpret that their open accommodation and active support for the marriage migrants help make their cultural complexity a more self-contained civilizational property. However, the more their multiculturalism as part of their self-centered globalism is framed through arbitrarily staged experiences, the more the Asian marriage migrants will remain differentiated, if not discriminated, from native Koreans. What remains to be seen is if these foreign brides would permanently be asked or forced to preserve and display their home-country cultural characteristics as an indispensable condition for native South Koreans’ still elementary multicultural experiences and feelings.
In South Korea (and other East Asian societies), as indicated in Chapter 7, “Productive Maximization, Reproductive Meltdown,” compressed modernity is to a critical extent the process and outcome of the developmental(ist) political economy that has been forcefully initiated from above (i.e. by the state), yet actively accommodated from below (i.e. by ordinary citizens). Modernity was conceived in a fundamentally developmentalist or productionist manner, so modernization principally became the politico-social project of achieving time-condensed economic development and thereby joining the world rank of “advanced nations.” Such purposeful approach to modernity in terms of condensed national development has been substantiated by various policies, actions, and attitudes that are designed to maximize economic production and, not coincidentally, to systematically sacrifice the conditions and resources of social reproduction. After decades of successful economic development, such asymmetrical approach to production and reproduction seems to have critically lost its instrumentality. In spite of their enviable façade, covered with hyper-advanced industries, physical infrastructures, services, and lifestyles, the civilizational and even economic progress of South Korean society is now crucially impeded by the disenfranchisement and demise of those classes, generations, communities, cultures, and wisdoms that have been treated practically as disposables, unworthy of social reproduction support, under the narrowly focused developmental political economy.
In a fundamentally family-dependent way, as emphasized in Chapter 8, “Social Institutional Deficits and Infrastructural Familialism,” South Koreans have managed their modern history and made various internationally envious achievements. The compressed nature of their modernity is structurally enmeshed with various social infrastructural utilities of families. This feature of South Korean society has been derived not just from its traditional – say, neo-Confucian – heritage of family-centered life but, more critically, from the processes and manners by which South Koreans have coped with various modern sociocultural, political, and economic forces. Even after the state managed effectively to govern national economic development and social institutional modernization, South Koreans’ reliance on familial norms, relations, and resources have remained unabated. In fact, the familialized nature of South Korean modernity has kept intensifying, albeit in continually refashioning modes, as the state and its allied social actors have found and consciously tapped various strategic utilities from ordinary people’s eager effort to sustain their family-centered/devoted lives. This has been evident concerning nearly all major features and conditions of South Korean development and modernization, such as early Lewisian industrialization based upon stable supplies of rural migrant labor, universalization of high-level public education enabling constant improvements in human capital, and sustained common ethic for familial support and care buffering chronically defective public welfare. The state’s own practically driven familialist stance is not reducible to sheer private family values, but represents a distinct line of technocratic deliberation, conceptualized here as infrastructural familialism. Conversely, the state’s such utilitarian familialism has made individual citizens realize that their developmental and sociopolitical participation in national life is systematically facilitated through familial allegiance and cooperation. Infrastructural familialism has been upheld both from above and from below.
Since the early 1960s, as detailed in Chapter 9, “The Demographic Configuration of Compressed Modernity,” South Korea has undergone extremely rapid and fundamental transformation in both demographic and developmental dimensions. The rates of migration/urbanization, fertility, and mortality all kept changing at such unprecedented and incomparable paces that also characterized those of economic growth, industrialization, proletarianization (occupational change from agricultural to industrial sectors), and so forth. This dual transformation was no coincidence, as the country’s developmental experiences directly involved critical demographic conditions, processes, and consequences. South Korean development, though dominated by state-business network, relied on human resources in extraordinary scopes and degrees; whereas South Korean citizens – quite often through demographically flexible familial endeavors – rendered their human resources a strategic platform for active developmental participation and gain. Conversely, South Korea’s recent economic crisis and restructuring – namely, its post-developmental transition – have both required and caused drastic reformulation of human resources, family relations, and reproductive behaviors, so that earlier demographic trends have been further accelerated in some aspects (e.g. fertility, population aging, etc.) and suddenly slowed down or reversed in other aspects (e.g. natal sex imbalances, divorce, suicide, etc.). Through half a century of radical sociodemographic changes, the country has dramatically turned from a society known for very high fertility, universal marriage, rare divorce, etc., into one of “lowest-low” fertility, widespread singlehood, rampant divorce, etc. As these demographic transformations tend to fundamentally undermine the hitherto taken-for-granted material and cultural conditions for socioeconomic sustainability, the country has aggressively explored strategic measures for reversing or relieving demographic deficits and imbalances.
As pointed out in Chapter 10, “The Post-Compressed Modern Condition,” South Korea’s “miraculous” achievement of modernization and development has not exempted the country from what Ulrich Beck explained as the risks of “second modernity” – namely, the inherent dysfunctions and increasing failures of modern institutions such as capitalist industry, labor market, education system, science and technology, national government, middle-class family, and so forth. While these onerous risks are only now recognized, South Koreans are struggling with additional predicaments derived from the particular measures and processes of their compressed modernization
