Comparación del comportamiento de las redes

The final landmark of CI policy under DJ’s presidency is that the MCT started to publish information relating to its policies and performance regularly. Although a white paper was once published in 1997, it was only from 2000 onwards that the MCT has been publishing the Cultural Industries White Paper annually. According to Research on the Actual Condition of Cultural Industriezs Statistics (KCPI, 1999), there were no reliable statistics on Korean CI from either the public or private sector at that time.

Consequently, along with the CI White Paper, the MCT also started to publish Cultural Industries Statistics annually. Moreover, white papers on individual genres of CI started to be published under the DJ government. To take a few examples, the 2000 White

132 Paper of Broadcasting Statistics, (KBI, 2000); the 2000 White Paper on Film Promotion (KOFIC, 2001); and the 2001 White Paper on Games (KGDPI, 2001).

There is no doubt that ‘these white papers and statistics have provided much better conditions’ not only for evaluating existing policies and thus formulating new ones, but also for preparing businesses or planning academic research (Park Sea-Young, a founding member of KGPC and KOCCA, September 2009). Before these data started to be published regularly under the DJ government, there were no official data that could be trusted for such purposes. What made this difference? Above all, it should be noted that the ‘Framework Act’ added the production and publishing of an annual report on CI promotion as one of the Minister’s duties. In addition, by clarifying the scope of CI, the act provided the criteria with which existing statistics could be significantly revised and integrated. New quangos such as the KGPC and KOCCA, therefore, recruited experts who specialized in gathering related information and statistics. Meanwhile, as a

‘research control tower’, KCTI (former KCPI) expanded the research division of CI and kept publishing upgraded and more detailed research reports, synthesizing the increased volume of information. With this new tradition, data about the actual conditions of and significant changes in Korean CI could be systematically accumulated, distributed and easily mobilized. This was indeed an important shift.

5.4 Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the processes through which Korean CI policy shifted under the Kim Dae-Jung government. I have examined the main landmarks in CI policy chronologically, and have identified the main forces and factors that shaped how these policies emerged and developed. The role of DJ and his close staff cannot be stressed strongly enough, but key roles were also played by the civil servants at the MCT who faithfully implemented DJ’s philosophy and by the private sector experts who established and ran the new quangos. The conflict between the Ministries and the import of British discourse on the creative industries were also important factors behind the shift.

The first section touched upon how DJ’s overarching philosophy and ideas about CI were formed before he became President. Combining the Third Wave (Toffler) with the Third Way (Giddens), DJ came to the conclusion that the lack of democracy, freedom of

133 expression, a public sphere, social capital and creative capital caused the serious Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. This failure was regarded as the ‘Second National Shame’ (next to Japanese occupation) by the Korean people. As his heavy criticism of Lee Kuan-Yew reveals, DJ believed that this failure was caused by the limitations of the developmental state that had been promoted by Asia’s authoritarian leaders without the guarantee of the public sphere and democratic advantages that sustainable development required (cf. Hall, 2003). Therefore, democratic reform became the prime task of his government, which aimed to ensure the twin advantages of social and creative capital in order to successfully launch Korea’s ‘Second National Building’.

After his inauguration, DJ’s ideas were faithfully translated into concrete CI policies. CI should be regarded as a particularly important sector for the DJ government, because as a forerunner of the new economy, CI were believed to be a kind of touchstone which could prove whether nor not DJ’s reforms were producing the democratic advantages they aimed to ensure. In section 2 and 3, I explored eleven landmarks in the CI policy shift which emerged under DJ’s presidency. These landmarks are very important in understanding the future development of Korean CI.

Table 5.4 Landmarks of the Korean CI Policy Shift during the DJ Administration

Through this analysis, at least four key findings can be suggested concerning the factors and forces driving the policy shift. First of all, the landmarks came about as part of a national survival discourse in a real sense. For example, key policy documents in the early days regarded the promotion of CI as a key task for the Second National Building

134 (MCT, 1998; 1999a). In this vein Korean policymakers believed that without an ‘active response to the advanced countries’ domination over the world market for CI’, Korea would be bound to lose ‘competitiveness in cultural industries’ and would thus lack both

‘national culture and national competitiveness’ (MCT, 2000b: 9). However, they also believed that ‘thanks to the changing environment of competition due to the arrival of the knowledge society’, there was ‘little gap between Korea and advanced countries in terms of the starting line’ for nurturing CI (ibid.). Here, the key word must be national competitiveness in the cultural industries. It was highlighted as essential for national survival in the 21^st century.

Another undeniable finding is that the two significant external events in 1997 set up the perfect backdrop for the survival discourse. The first was the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis which may be regarded as shock at the regional level, ‘as the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s or the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the oil shocks of the early 1970s were worldwide’ (Pempel, 1999b: 224). As with other great crises, this economic crisis challenged and changed the conventional wisdom of society;

namely, the developmental state model. Due to this upheaval, DJ, who had been bullied as the leading ‘communist’ by the developmental state, was able to win the presidential election in December 1997. This was the second event. These shifting conditions in the Korean political economy paved the way for the rapid shift in CI policy to be implemented. Without them, it would undoubtedly have taken considerably more energy and a longer time to form the requisite social consensus, change people’s fixed ideas and thereby initiate various policy changes.

It should be also pointed out that behind almost every key moment in the shift in CI policy lay the visible hand of the ultimate boss, DJ. This is not to underestimate the roles played by cultural NGOs, especially in the film industry, and the civil servants, especially those in the CI Bureau. As a result of the first power change in South Korean history, the interests of these players all converged for the first time on a certain point;

that is, DJ’s firm philosophy of parallel development and information revolution. The belief—Korea could go beyond the old developmental state model and ensure world-class competitiveness by combining the Third Wave with the Third Way—became a kind of ‘credo’ (Schlesinger, 2007) that centred the discursive practices underlying the CI policy shift. DJ and his staff made all the important decisions on the grounds of that credo, while taking advantage of the two unprecedented events. As the slogan of the

‘Second National Building Movement’ implies, the survival discourse and following reforms were very desperate. In this context, in contrast to previous Presidents, DJ was

135 able to take on the full responsibility for the daring realization of traditional cultural pledges, such as the arms’ length policy, the 1% budget, and the opening of the Korean market to Japanese popular culture. This is how the shift could be put into practice so radically and coherently.

The final finding is that the eleven landmarks can be broadly categorized under the two directions: ‘ensuring ALP’ on the one hand and ‘nurturing CI into a national basic industry’ on the other. These are closely related with the two logics of democratic advantage respectively: social capital logic and creative capital logic. With the aid of these mottos, the MCT was able to change its own governance style over the cultural policy field, initiate new types of government plans and acts, nurture the cultural and creative ecology, and establish new types of promotion organizations. Even though each and every landmark shows that these two directions were considered at the same time, some display stronger emphasis on the first principle and others on the second. For instance, while ‘Establishing KOFIC, KMRB and KGPC’ can be taken as the good example of the implementation of ALP, ‘Designating CT as a new driving industry and establishing KOCCA’ can be seen as the clearest case relating to the development of CI as a new national basic Industry. On the other hand, ‘Publishing white papers and statistics’ is an example where both principles were equally stressed, because it ensured that relevant information could be distributed quickly and transparently to both the commercial and public spheres. The two-track strategy composed of ‘Arm’s Length Principle’ and ‘National Basic Industry’ clearly provides the overarching direction for the Korean CI policy shift under Kim Dae-Jung.

To conclude, the Korean CI policy shift was surely a result of the broader shift in the Korean political economy and the Korean state. At first glance, one may notice that this policy transformation initiated by DJ looks similar to the transformation of the Korean state by President Park Jung-Hee, in that the rise of the Korean developmental state was also based upon a sort of national survival discourse posited against international competition and was led by a thorough, powerful and visionary President. For instance, just as President Park declared six national strategic industries to open a new era of Korean industrialization in the 1970s, DJ declared six national strategic technologies to open a new era of Korean (post)industrialization for the new millennium;³⁶ and, just as Park launched a nation-wide mass mobilization movement (i.e. Saemaul movement), DJ initiated the Second National Building movement. This observation is nonetheless half

36 Park’s six industries were steel, electronics, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, machinery and nonferrous metals industries, while DJ’s six technologies were information, biological, nano, space, environment, and culture technologies.

136 right because, even if the second half of DJ’s reform (i.e. making CI into a new national basic industry) corresponds to Park’s policies in some ways, this is not true of the principles, such as the arm’s length principle, that underlie the first half of his reform.

Such principles were entirely absent during the developmental transformation of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. It can be thus said that although DJ promoted CI and several other national strategic industries for the nation’s survival, this logic was not merely based upon a familiar set of industrial mobilization policies, but also on the introduction of completely new kinds of institutions designed to ensure democratic governance over the industries and the policy field. This is where a clear distinction can and should be drawn between Park’s policy regime and DJ’s, marking the latter’s CI policy shift as neo-developmental.

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