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Park Geun-Hye's Election As President of South Korea: Implications For Park Geun-hye’s Election as President of South Korea: Implications for Northeast Asia 129 Park Geun-hye’s Election as President of South Korea: Implications for Northeast Asia Ming Lee Professor, Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi University Abstract Park Geun-hye, the first female South Korean president, has brought immense implications to South Korean internal politics as well as external relations. Park’s future foreign policy especially will have a great impact on Northeast Asian international relations judging from her mandate as the responsible politician with years of intensive self-training and keen visions into world affairs. The current Korean Peninsula and its adjacent areas are particularly unstable due to the complicated interaction of competitive nations, which are superpowers (like the United States and Russia), regional powers (like China and Japan), and middle powers, along with unstable and provocative North Korea. In which way and to what extent Park Geun-hye will safeguard her country and interact with others, along with how Park will help to shift the international politics in Northeast Asia, will be one of the pivotal issues for the next five years. Keywords: Park Geun-hye, South Korea, North Korea, Korean Penin- sula, North-South Korean Relations 130 Prospect Journal No.9 I. Introduction December 19, 2012 was marked as a glorious day for Ms. Park Geun-hye, as she was elected the new president of the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), and she would be the hostess of the Chungwadae (Blue House, where the South Korean Presidents live) for the next five years. That date was also an epoch-making milestone for South Korea, since Korean people unprecedentedly elected a female politician as their national leader. Their decision in endorsing a female politician as their chief executive is also seen as unprecedented because of the cliché that, unlike in Western democracies, Korean females are not appropriate for assuming the office of the president was overthrown during the 2012 South Korean presidential campaign. The South Korean people stated to the world that, regardless of the gender of the political figure, anyone who can be trusted can be their president. Park Geun-hye’s victory shows that there exists no difference between the so-called Western and Eastern, particularly Korean styles of democracy. Also, due to this great process of presidential election, Korea shows that it has passed through the difficult ordeal of whether Korean people can select their national leaders via rational and impartial choices, rather than merely being dictated by gender. Park Geun-hye’s success further shows that Korean political democratization since the late 1980s has entered into a formidable stage of democratic solidification—the most difficult part and usually a rocky process common for many developing democracies, but a necessary path leading to a ripe post-modern democracy.1 “In 1987, there had been for the first time a peaceful transfer of power through a reasonably democratic election. Over thenextdecadeandfurther,thefocus would be on developing the substance in terms of fairer elections, individual Park Geun-hye’s Election as President of South Korea: Implications for Northeast Asia 131 Park Guen-hye was sworn in as the eighteenth South Korean president in front of tens of thousands of local and overseas guests on February 25, 2013. She delivered her inauguration speech and gave her Korean compatriots a clear message that she is going to devote herself to her country.2 In her speech, entitled “Opening a New Era of Hope,” she took an oath to “live up to the will of the people by achieving economic rejuvenation, the happiness of the people, and the flourishing of the Korean culture.” To Park Geun- hye, this is her new era, as it is to the Korean people and the Korean Peninsula, where North and South Korea are in confrontation, especially as the Pyongyang regime has threatened to invade Seoul and put the whole South Korean territory under attack of missiles and bombardment (along with their continuous intimidation of nuclear detonation).3 Park’s takeover as the Korean president, in the meantime, has brought some implications to South Korean internal politics as well as external relations, which both South Koreans and their foreign counterparts highly expect from Ms. Park. Park’s future foreign policy especially will have an immense impact on Northeast Asian international relations, judging from her mandate as a responsible politician with rights, and a democratization of the culture.” Please refer to Michael Breen, The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies (London: Orion Business Books, 1998), p. 221. Park Geun-hye, “Opening a New Era of Hope,” The Korea Times, February, 25, 2013, <http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2013/02/116_131077. html>. As North Korea again launched an inter-continental ballistic missile on December 12, 2012, and detonated its third nuclear device on February 12, 2013, South Koreans tend to think North Korea, under the leadership of young Kim Jung- un, is imminently threatening South Korea. Some South Koreans would open the possibility of owning its own indigenous nuclear weaponry. Please refer to Martin Fackler & Choe Sang-hun, “As North Korea Blusters, South Flirts with Talk of Nuclear Arms,” The New York Times,March11,2013,p.A1. 132 Prospect Journal No.9 years of intensive self-training and keen visions into world affairs. The current Korean Peninsula and its adjacent areas are particularly unstable due to the complicated interactions of many nations, consisting of superpowers (like the United States and Russia), regional powers (like China and Japan), and middle powers (like North and South Korea). In what way and to what extent Park Geun-hye will safeguard her country and interact with others, in addition to what Park will do to help shift international politics in Northeast Asia, will be the major interests of this analysis. II. Why Park Geun-hye? Park Geun-hye lived in Chungwadae before she was twenty- eight years old, when her father President Park Chung-hee was assa- ssinated by his own intelligence chief in October 1979. Park Chung- heewasthe3rd president and served between 1963 and 1979. He was a controversial figure in South Korean history due to Park’s arbitrary and authoritarian rule while contributing to the South Korean robust economic development, which became known to the world as the “Miracle on the Han River.” When he took power via military coup d’ état in 1961, South Korea had barely recovered from the damage of the Korean War and the annual per capita income of the South Koreans made it one of the poorest countries in Asia. It was Park Chung-hee’s government that launched the first 5-year economic development plan in 1962, and they consecutively launched many other ones. Up until the mid-1970s, Park Chung-hee helped to revive the Korean economy as one of the four Asian Tigers, along with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.4 One of Park Chung-hee’s achievements was Stephan Haggard & Chung-in Moon, “The State, Politics, and Economic De- velopment in Postwar South Korea,” in Hagen Koo, ed., State and Society in Contemporary Korea (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 51-93. Park Geun-hye’s Election as President of South Korea: Implications for Northeast Asia 133 his close alliance with the United States for the purpose of defending the ROK. Kim Il-sung’s militant attitude and policy vis-à-vis South Korea pushed Park’s tilting further towards Washington for better insurance for national security. Under the mediation and persuasion of Washington, Park normalized diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965 (20 years after the Korean national emancipation from the Ja- panese colonial rule) to echo the U.S. proposal of establishing a solid trilateral alliance among Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington. Regarding the North-South Korean relations, Park Chung-hee’s policy was bold and progressive. In order to pursue a stable situation on the Korean Peninsula, Park sent envoys to North Korea soliciting the possibility of peaceful dialogue. In July 1972, North and South Korea inked an agreement called the July 4th North-South Joint State- ment, proposing a peaceful resolution of Korean national unification, based on independence from the intervention of external powers.5 Although the agreement did not last long, Park Chung-hee was regarded as a nationalist leader that was concerned about Korean na- tional unification. Park Chung-hee’s decision to revise the South Korean constitution to allow him to stay in power for perpetuity caused serious opposition, both local and overseas. The Fourth Re- public, based on the Yushin Constitution, started from 1974, when Park was at his peak of political power; meanwhile, he was described by opponents as a dictator and met with numerous demonstrations demanding his deposition. Also, in 1974, Madam Yook Yong-soo, Park Geun-hye’s mother, was assassinated by a Japanese-born North Korean assassin. Park Geun-hye returned from France (where she had been studying language), helped her father, and acted as the first Soon-sung Cho, “South-North Korean Relations in the Year 2000,” in Sung- joo Han & Robert J. Myers, eds., Korea: The Year 2000 (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics & International Affairs, 1987), p. 101. 134 Prospect Journal No.9 lady of South Korea until Park Chung-hee also was assassinated in 1979. After Park Chung-hee’s assassination, Park Geun-hye left the Chungwadae at the age of twenty-seven. Park Geun-hye gradually passed through the dark years after her family was broken, and she showed her potential of marvelous determination, perseverance, and resoluteness. She did not stop learning, traveling, or getting prepared to become a politician.
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