The political economy of energy-corporate-urban integration in South Korea

This study seeks to explain the institutional basis of the political economy of South Korea and its integration into the global order. Through an investigation of the rise of technological (especially energy), corporate and urban networks under military/state direction, the analysis documents and explains why and how the contemporary South Korean political economy was formed and demonstrates that recent material progress actually leaves the country in a state of dependent development with environmental degradation and social inequality as necessary, even functional, characteristics of this progress. The central thesis of this study is that the rise to power of what I term a centralized, technicized regime (or CTR) has placed the civil society of South Korea in fundamental conflict with the prevailing institutional conditions of national political and economic order.;The interconnected network of energy, corporate and urban systems that have formed since the late 19th century serves as the institutional foundation for South Korea's political economy. This network arranges the society and its resources in a definite political-economic structure that at once gives rise to certain social problems such as inequality, environmental degradation and alienation, and shapes the society's search for answers to these problems.;Building new energy, industrial and spatial structures compatible with political and economic democracy, cannot be driven by technocratic considerations and the rationalizing norms of conformity and compliance, but by the politically creative energies of a people who place social ends before instrumental means in deciding the shape and structure of the society. A crucial failure of mainstream social thought and practice has been the diversion of creative energies from the development of a critical evaluation of the society's energy-corporate-urban integration.;Political conflict will continue because the aims of the CTR and civic society are opposed. Such conflict can only be resolved by the replacement of the CTR with institutions that realize Korean aspirations of political and economic democracy. This study assesses the prospects for democratic change in South Korea. The role of political opposition movements in exposing the conflict between the civil society and the conditions of institutional order is explored, and a proposed reconstruction of Korean politics is outlined. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).