Territorial Politics and the Rise of a Construction-Oriented State in South Korea

Abstract

There have been some critical debates about the construction-oriented, developmentalist

nature of the Korean state among the Korean scholars. However, no clear explanation has

emerged for why the Korean state adopted such construction-oriented, developmentalist

selectivity. This paper seeks to answer this question of why the construction-oriented state

has developed in South Korea by employing the strategic-relational approach to the state. In

this paper, the author argues that the construction-oriented, developmentalist nature of the

Korean state has been strengthened because at the local and regional scales, highly politicized

territorial interests have been mobilized as a result of complex interactions among spatial

selectivity of the Korean state, uneven regional development and territorialized party politics

from the 1960s to the present. More specifically, the author emphasizes that the following

conditions were the most influential in the formation and intensification of constructionoriented

state building: 1) As the central cleavage structure of party politics is based on

locality, parties and politicians easily accept local developmental politics, and thereby

influence governmental decision-making according to regional interests; 2) Due to the weak

development of class politics (at the national scale) and immature grass-root democracy (at

the local scale), place-based interests and identities tend to be strongly territorialized; 3)

Continuing from the 1970s and influenced by the politics of regionalism, the ways in which

the Koreans interpret the political and economic realities has been constructed on the basis

of the discursive frame of the highly politicized center-local relations, which has led to

the intensified inter-local/inter-regional competition for the central governments spending

on local/regioinal development projects. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that the

situation of South Koreas neo-developmentalism and construction-oriented tendency needs

to be understood through the mechanisms of more complex political, social, and economic

conflicts and interaction effects among social forces acting in and through the state, and that

the question cannot be explained simply by the irrationality, incapacity, and immorality of the government and its officials.