Kevin Hockmuth | Akita International University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Kevin Hockmuth

European Journal of Korean Studies, 2024

South Korea has long been looked to as an exemplary case of rapid economic expansion. Further, pr... more South Korea has long been looked to as an exemplary case of rapid economic expansion. Further, proponents of the South Korean development model have tended to not only extoll its industrial ascent during the 1960s and 1970s but also herald the fact that its breakneck developmental pace was attained in conjunction with a relatively low degree of inequality. This paper challenges this framing on two fronts. First, it delves into the specific historical sequencing of South Korea’s developmental epoch to point to theoretical and empirical problems with the causal association drawn between its state-led development model and the low levels of inequality. Second, the paper draws upon an array of contemporaneous research from the era of rapid growth to reassess the extent to which South Korean society did, in fact, feature a distributional regime that merits the praise found in retrospective accounts. In making both of these arguments, the analysis draws upon Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking work on inequality. The paper demonstrates that the social processes and institutions catalyzing distributional divergence in South Korea were established long before the neo- liberal-inspired reforms in the 1990s. These conclusions bear significantly upon both our understanding of the South Korean case and its implications for development theory more broadly.

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 2024

South Korea has long been looked to as a model of developmental success. Undoubtedly, South Korea... more South Korea has long been looked to as a model of developmental success. Undoubtedly, South Korean society has experienced a remarkable expansion of wealth, social well-being, and technological capacity over the last half-century. The central turning point in this momentous transformation coincided with the authoritarian rule of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979). As such, scholars of political economy and development have paid close attention to the various facets of his regime to glean the primary causes underpinning South Korea’s developmental feats. The most significant of these efforts have emerged from works emphasizing the role of the South Korean developmental state. This paper critically explores the theoretical foundations of developmental state theory to consider the intellectual architecture of the success narrative widely appended to the era. The analysis builds from a premise that, given its widespread use of political violence and surveillance, framing the Park regime as a success carries significant ethical undertones. To this end, the paper centers the interplay of ethics and empirics in the theoretical engagement with this crucial site in both Korean and development history. As such, it demonstrates that developmental state theory’s reluctance to systematically engage with these significant ethical questions corresponds to distorted analytical and empirical representations of the case.

Nationalism: Past, Present, and Future, 2021

This chapter moves nationalism to the analytical fore to examine the complex relations between st... more This chapter moves nationalism to the analytical fore to examine the complex relations between state and society within the context of South Korea’s rapid industrialization. In doing so, it embeds South Korea’s developmental experiences within the broader theoretical and conceptual web that marks the study of nationalism and modernity more generally. This approach highlights the state’s activation of the populace through highly emotive and visceral nationalist entreaties during the authoritarian reign of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979). This tack provides a means for understanding the central role of nationalism in sustaining the more technical aspects of South Korea’s economic expansion. The study’s findings emphasize the ways in which nationalism itself comes to function as quasi-developmental technology. Further, we posit that placing nationalism at the center of South Korea’s developmental experience provides a means for approaching the weighty normative questions one confronts when investigating this period. The insights gleaned from this study potentially speak to a broader set of cases by demonstrating how the technical components of development, or political economy more generally, often rest upon ideological foundations.

AIU Global Review, 2016

This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the complexities entwined with carrying economic... more This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the complexities entwined with carrying economic liberalization by focusing on the politics of development, liberalization, and foreign direct investment (FDI) in South Korea. The first section identifies key political, economic, and ideological components of Park Chung Hee's developmental system and demonstrates that it entailed political and social mechanisms far beyond its notable economic institutions. This analysis is then employed to develop an enriched understanding of the contentious politics surrounding FDI liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s during the presidencies of Chun Doo Hwan and Kim Young Sam. These sections demonstrate that both societal and bureaucratic actors often rooted their resistance to reforms within the ideological milieu that underpinned the Park regime's legitimacy. Particularly, that the fervent nationalist, autonomy-centered language deployed to support the developmental dictatorship served to delegitimize market reforms as well as those who supported them. Finally, the paper incorporates data collected during field research at several universities in South Korea during March 2016 to evaluate the efficacy of official efforts to alter public sentiments, as embodied by the socio-cultural component of Kim Young Sam's segyehwa initiative. The data lends some credence to the notion that this generation of Koreans holds more positive attitudes towards globalization than their predecessors, but that this has done little to change their overriding negative assessment of major political and economic institutions.

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, 2022

This chapter shows that cosmopolitanism, international development and human rights can be articu... more This chapter shows that cosmopolitanism, international development and human rights can be articulated in ways that are more or less supportive of one another and of the expansion of global capitalism. The first section begins by exploring the role of international trade and global capitalism within canonical formulations of cosmopolitanism (Kant, Marx, Habermas). Next, we offer an historical reconstruction of the post-War development project from modernization to neoliberalism, as well as prominent critiques of it, in the form of dependency theory and the New International Economic Order. In the third section we turn to human rights, which we show can be mobilized in ways that are both supportive and critical of global capitalism. The chapter discusses successful appeals to human rights to challenge intellectual property rights, recommendations for infusing human rights provisions in the charters of transnational corporations under the banner of corporate social responsibility, and the impacts on human rights of capitalism’s destabilization of the planet’s ecology. The chapter concludes by considering alternatives to the dominant paradigm of cosmopolitanism, including “bottom up” cosmopolitanism and alternative approaches to development from the Global South such as Buen-Vivir.

Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

How do South Korea’s developmental legacies influence its contemporary political economy? The dis... more How do South Korea’s developmental legacies influence its contemporary political economy? The discourse surrounding this question has tended to diverge over the extent to which South Korea’s state-led developmental model has been supplanted by a market-led, neoliberal mode of political-economic organization. Though this debate has indeed fostered many important individual contributions, it has also yielded a muddled and ambiguous theoretical landscape. To clarify this cluttered terrain, this paper draws from recent advances in the study of neoliberalism to establish critical points of consonance between statist perspectives on Korean development and neoliberalism. To this end, it identifies key threads of continuity binding South Korea’s developmental past with its neoliberal present. The paper finds that critical aspects of the developmental state’s interaction with society, from coercion to ideological suasion, furnished elemental building blocks to those actively constructing a South Korean neoliberalism. Thus, exploring these historical contours produces a fresh means for apprehending the interactions of enduring statist developmental legacies with contemporary neoliberal reforms, both theoretically and empirically. As such, this study yields an improved set of conceptual tools for grasping the complex empirical phenomena shaping the interplay of neoliberalism, developmentalism, and democracy within contemporary South Korea.

Asian International Studies Review, 2018

Dissertation by Kevin Hockmuth

PhD Dissertation, Temple University, 2015

ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the process of foreign economic policy liberalization in Kore... more ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the process of foreign economic policy liberalization in Korea from 1980-2010. It accounts for variations in the degree of liberalization across sectors and issue areas through case studies centered on the policies related to trade, FDI, and finance. Sources of influences on this process such as democratization, the state’s developmental legacy, societal interests, ideational diffusion, and external stakeholders are incorporated into an analysis that identifies their impact on policy outcomes. This project looks at how significant changes in the internal and external parameters of the Korean economy generated coalitions favoring a more liberalized domestic economic order and those which sought to defend Korea’s state-centered, mercantilistic developmental model. It offers a detailed explication of the manner in which Korean policymakers sought to formulate political outcomes that accommodated a disparate array of actors with diverging preferences into the policy process, while seeking to serve their own particular multifaceted interests. It finds that while external and domestic proponents of reform were successful in pushing Korea into increasingly deeper levels of liberalization, these efforts were continually conditioned and often attenuated by the institutional legacies of the developmental era and the social forces that were unleashed by democratization. This left the Korean economy with a fragmented set of foreign economic policies that reflected the incomplete and highly contested liberalization reform initiatives that colored policymaking during this period.