韓國 保守主義의 딜레마

The Dilemmas of Korean Conservatism

Since the December 2002 presidential election in Korea and continuing to date the conservative forces have held a series of demonstrations, called for a head-on struggle against the rival progressive forces, and harnessed the cyberspace to propagate their ideas. They all constitute unprecedented events that are aimed at articulating their own identity. On the other hand, the two recent discourses - "reformational conservatism"(with a focus on the reaffirmation of anticommunism) and "liberalist conservatism" - appear to reinforce its theoretical and practical retrogression and its existing immorality rather than acknowledging its past mistakes and renewing itself with forming the modus vivendi with the progressive forces. In brief, they all are symptoms of a long-held truism which scholars on conservatism in Korean politics have pointed out: "In Korean politics there are conservative forces, but no conservative ideology." This essay intends to offer the future direction of Korean conservatism by delving into the root causes of its ideological poverty. The genealogical sources of Korean conservatism's ideological poverty are multi-fold but can be grouped into the following three. First of all, since the Korean liberation in 1945 and the subsequent division of the Korean peninsula the political sphere (i.e., both the ruling and opposition parties) has been monopolized by the conservative forces. Even after the so-called "democratization" of Korean politics the conservative political structure has lingered on, thereby laying no grounds for competition and balancing between the conservative and progressive forces from which conservative philosophy would have emerged. Second, Korea's modernization process, which was essentially nonvoluntary and exogenous, has generated a set of fundamental contradictions between political conservatism and philosophical conservatism. Third, due largely to the dependence on foreign sources in the process of its formation and development, even the traditional thoughts and ideas have played little role in the formation of conservative philosophy. Taken together, it seems that there are two alternative paths from which philosophical conservatism in Korea could emerge. One path is to reinforce its existing connections with "sound" liberal democracy and the free-market economy. The other is to utilize the untapped sources of traditional thoughts.