Is Korea falling prey to a lawless society? It's a creeping fear many of us develop as we watch the endless lines of violence rocking the country. From Seoul to Buan to Ulsan, Korea has been skating on the edge of anarchy as people from all walks of life, unionists, squatters, even politicians and foreign workers, all resort to extremism in demanding redress to perceived injustices.
That's what we mean by a Hobbesian war of all against all, as all manner of people take up fights against each other for all kinds of grievances. It's a phenomenon that engenders plenty of scofflaws as well as violence. At the bottom layer of Korean society a feeling runs that, if political and business elites take the liberty of corrupting each other, common people can themselves reciprocate by challenging the limits of law and good sense in fighting for what they want.
Politicians foster such perceptions by trivializing their action. Opposition party leader Choe Byung-yul is now on hunger strike to protest President Roh Moo-hyun's refusal to accept a special parliamentary counsel to investigate suspicions of corruption amongst his aides.
Why is he going to such extremes when he can actually put to vote a bill demanding a special counsel, especially as his party controls a solid majority in the National Assembly? Isn't parliament supposed to be a venue for debating issues and resolving differences by means of vote, not a battlefield where life is put at risk in the cause of political confrontation?
A government party member is staging a hunger strike of his own to rival Choe's hunger strike in a tit-for-tat retaliation. Hunger strikes as a weapon of political protest have been used amply before under the military rule when democracy-fighters had no other way to get their views across to the nation at large.
Choe's fasting, however, appears far from being desperate; it seems designed more to win sympathy from the streets for extra-parliamentary pressure, hardly a parliamentary way of resolving differences. Under democracy, a hunger strike in the cause of unrest is not a virtue; it s a form of violence.
In the southwestern fishing town of Buan, tens of thousands of people have been on the rampage for weeks, opposing the government's plan to set up a nuclear waste dump site on one of their islands. They've taken the law into their own hands by ransacking local government offices and beating up the local town mayor. Daily protest marches fill up the town square.
Anarchy rules over Buan, but the central government stands mostly powerless to deal with this not-in-my-backyard (nimby) campaign, in effect signaling to people of other areas that they, too, may get what they want by employing similar violence.
But in intensity and scale of lawlessness, nothing can match the bloody violence involving squatters and the riot police in Seoul last week, which left dozens of people wounded on both sides of the dispute. Shanty-town residents resisting housing developers hurled flame-throwers and fired homemade guns and missiles to prevent construction workers from demolishing their houses. As bullets and Molotov cocktails flew across the police line, their confrontation turned into a veritable combat zone.
The angry residents justify their violence in the name of keeping developers at bay, but in doing so, they are signaling to other poor householders to employ similar violence in extracting more compensation from developers seeking to evict them.
Koreans are acquiring a notoriety around the world for using violence to get what they want, be it from foreign invested firms or local factories. Korea is the only OECD rich-country club member where unionists routinely use fire-bombs in pressing demands for redress. It no longer stands for a kind of civil society where differences are resolved through dialogue and negotiations. Foreign investors are packing their bags and leaving, while Korean investors take their projects to other, more friendly, countries.
Korea badly needs lessons in self-rule. Democracy is not just about changing governments or freedom to organize unions. It's about the rule of law, about acquiring the system of resolving differences through enlightened self-interest. When we were fighting for elected government and freedom of speech under the military rule, we had little idea how difficult it would be to develop a consensual society based on the rule of law. Now we realize it's much harder to maintain a democracy than fighting for it.
In the absence of political leadership, it's the media that must play a key role in developing Korea into a mature civil society. It can start doing so by defining and debating the kind of values and institutions we need to shape in order to move ahead as a viable nation.
The central plank of this vision is to place reform at the head of our national agenda - reforming our archaic corporate, judicial, educational and political institutions to match the international standards of an increasingly globalized world. It's a world where only the best can survive, and win, not a place for lawlessness and violence.
Shim Jae Hoon is a Seoul-based journalist and commentator. - Ed.