Democracy and Reform in Korea: A Systems Perspective

A reform process in democratic societies tends to generate a number of surprises, paradoxes, instabilities, and emergent properties. Taking advantage of the complex systems approach, this paper wishes to argue that the reform process occurring in democratic societies should be regarded as a self-organizing process. The policy implication is that a self-referential situation in which the political community as a whole can enact situations in which it is possible for it to experience the disappointing feelings corresponding to deficient social, political, and economic structures should be generated and exploited fruitfully. Moreover, the idea of self-organization has another implication for the reformists. The reformists` role is not to provide a blueprint of what the political community must eventually become, but rather to guide the community in generating self-referential experience by going through disappointing experiences which would break up existing structures.