New South Korean leader alters face of Asian politics

In the third of several articles on Kim Dae-jung's accession to the presidency of South Korea, Jakarta Post Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin analyses the impact Kim is likely to have as he changes the face of East Asian politics.

HONG KONG (JP): Nevertheless, this setback apart, the fact remains that at midnight on Tuesday the face of Asian politics changed as a dedicated democrat Kim Dae-jung became president of the Republic of Korea after a political career characterized by imprisonment and suffering, opposition and repression.

It is the first time in the history of Korea -- some would say of Japan and China, too -- that a leader of the opposition has been directly elected to be the leader of the country.

Former opposition leader and outgoing President Kim Young-sam -- who joined the ruling party in order to win power -- left the Blue House, the presidential residence in Seoul, for the last time punctually at 5 p.m. on Feb. 24. While President Kim Young- sam came to power in 1993, as the first civilian head of government in three decades amidst approval ratings of 90 percent, he sadly left office a discredited figure with his ratings in single digits.

The actual legal changeover in administrations between the two Kims took place at midnight. Kim Dae-jung was formally inaugurated as President at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning (Korean time).

The historical uniqueness of the inauguration was only the first reason why the face of Asian politics is likely to change. The likelihood of an opposition leader being elevated to the prime ministership in Japan remains remote, the more so after the recent collapse of the opposition Shinshinto (New Frontier Party) into several feuding factions. The only country in East Asia where a comparable event may happen one day is in democratic Taiwan, where the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could capture the presidency in 2000, or 2004.

In Southeast Asia, transfers of power between government and opposition have only taken place in the Philippines and Thailand.

A second factor is that, as president, Kim Dae-jung, while he will undoubtedly be initially preoccupied with the economic crisis in which his nation is enmeshed, is most unlikely to keep his democratic thoughts limited only to Korea.

As he demonstrated in an exchange with Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew in the columns of the leading U.S. periodical on international relations Foreign Affairs, Kim does not regard "Asian values" as excluding democracy. To the contrary, he most emphatically includes democratic values as part of the Asian inheritance.

In fact President Kim Dae-jung's eloquence on this score will almost certainly be linked to the ongoing Asian economic crisis. As some analysts have noted, the Great Southeast Asian Economic Slide, and the Great East Asian Setback which followed it, are crises which are primarily political rather than merely economic.

Kim Dae-jung has taken this analysis one stage further, and insisted that the economic turmoil is directly linked to the absence of democracy in Korea, and elsewhere. In his view the malfunctioning of the Korean economy was directly related to past authoritarian rule, and the economic and bureaucratic habits which that rule instilled.

Kim stressed this view in his inaugural speech as he promised to push democratic and economic reform in parallel. "Democracy and the market economy are two sides of a coin, or two wheels of a cart. If they were separated we could never succeed. Every nation that has embraced both democracy and a market economy has been successful. Nations that have rejected democracy and accepted only a market economy have ended up suffering disastrous setbacks..."

So, third, Kim's accession to power offers the prospect that the cause of democracy in Asia will now have an articulate spokesman, in power, for the first time in a long while. For various reasons, the leaders of the Asian democracies, -- India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan -- have tended to be internally preoccupied of late, unable or unwilling to articulate a wider democratic vision.

The last Indian leader to really make an impact in this way on Southeast and East Asia, for example, was Jawaharlal Nehru. Former Philippine president Corazon Aquino enjoyed a brief moment in the Asian spotlight immediately after the Philippine people power success in 1986. Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, while widely respected, remains under effective detention at the hands of Yangon's military dictatorship.

While Kim Dae-jung may have the capacity to refocus some Asian thinking in the world of ideas, he must first face the desperate Korean need for accomplishment in deeds. As Kim started his campaign for the presidency a little under a year ago, South Korea was seemingly forging ahead as the world's eleventh largest economy. As Kim takes over the presidency, South Korea has already sunk to being the seventeenth largest economy, according to one Seoul think tank. Some calculations already place Korea even lower on the international scale.

Put another way, in 1996 per capita GDP in South Korea was US$10,548 while today it is only US$6,600 due to the depreciation of the Korean won.

Originally, Kim hoped that, as president, he would be able to crown economic success with greater democratic advance. Now he has to also lead the nation back from economic failure, the full impact of which has yet to be felt in terms of lowered wages, diminished purchasing power, job losses and unemployment increases.

As he set out on this task, and urged his countrymen to make "a new leap forward", Kim Dae-jung did not hide the difficulties that Koreans must confront -- in fact he was so blunt in describing the difficulties that he set a good example of the greater transparency.