4
What explained South Korea’s successive waves of power shift since 1987? Why
did its right lose presidential elections in 1997 and 2002 in spite of its merger of forces
into a unified political party in 1990? This article seeks answers in three steps. Section 1
identifies South Korea’s internally contradictory 1948 “guksi,” or national identity, as a
seed for its trouble. The disintegration of South Korea’s 1948 guksi under a crisis of
success engulfing society after 1987, if not earlier, developed into a crisis of party identity
for its right. As shown in Section 2, however, its leaders’ adaptive strategies of reinventing
Cold War myths, adopting a reformist discourse, and engineering a party merger only
backfired. The conservative bloc suffered a deterioration of public image and saw its
internal organization become even thinner and shallower, without a dense set of linkages
integrating societal actors, as a result of its leaders’ misconceived adaptive strategies. In
particular, Section 2 singles out regionalist rivalries, as played out in South Korea’s unruly
game of party mergers and splits among conservative leaders, as an obstacle preventing its
right from prolonging conservative rule into South Korea’s democratic era. The
conservative leaders individually benefited from arousing regionalist distrust, jealousy and
Figure 1 Ideological Map of Democratic South Korea
Security
Alliance
with
America
Reconciliation with
North Korea
Growth
Q1
Q2
Economy
Distribution
Q3
Q4
Convention