From ‘developing’ to ‘developed’
Development, South Korean style.
Recently (July 2nd), the Republic of Korea was elevated from the status of ‘developing’ to ‘developed’ nation by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which reclassified it from Group A (Asian and African countries) to Group B (developed economies). This is quite an upgrade. It’s the first since the agency’s formation in 1964. As the website KOREA.net explains: ‘UNCTAD is an intergovernmental agency with the purpose of industrializing developing economies and boosting their participation in international trade. Group A of the organization comprises mostly developing economies in Asia and Africa; Group B developed economies; Group C Latin American and Caribbean States; and Group D Russia and Eastern European nations.’
The South Koreans are understandably very proud of themselves. This is an unparalleled achievement. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 the Republic’s gross domestic product - the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year - has leapt 31,000 fold! One could say that the concept of ‘development’ is the nation’s mantra, which is enshrined in the commonly used phrase ‘dynamic Korea’.
So what does development look like on the ground, so to speak? Everywhere you go in South Korea (except the remote mountainous regions) you see construction work going on – for massive elevated superhighways and high-speed rail links, or whole new cities comprised of clusters of giant apartment towers. Even here where I live, near the DMZ, where, because of proximity to the frontier, infrastructural, commercial and residential transformations are restricted, some kind of building work is constantly going on. For example, recently a construction company began slicing into a wooded hillside near us, first uprooting the silver birch trees growing there and then carting away tons of soil in convoys of heavy-load trucks (mostly made by Volvo, so it seems) in order to create a terraced slope upon which, apparently, they will be building hanok-style housing. Hanoks are the traditional one-storey wooden houses of Korea, almost none of which have survived from more than one hundred years ago, not just because of accidental fires or the destruction of warfare but because of the nation’s commitment to a specific model of development. For the past seventy years the hanok has symbolized the ‘undeveloped’. In fact, one could not imagine a greater contrast in housing than between a hanok and an apartment tower, between old-style Korean living accommodation and the contemporary. This alone indicates that for South Koreans development is also Westernization.
a traditional Korean hanok.
But wait. The UNCTAD is concerned only with development in terms of the economy and trade, but obviously the term has other resonances, that go well beyond the economic. So before we start hailing the South’s triumph, here is another recent statistic: The Korea Development Institute announced just two months before the UNCTAD elevated the country to ‘developed nation’ status that South Korea scored 5.85 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the period of 2018 to 2020 on the U.N. World Happiness Index. This score is the third-lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).
Oh dear. The South Koreans are economically ‘developed’ but not very joyful ,satisfied, content or fulfilled. But it might seem disingenuous of me to mention failure when the Republic of Korea has clearly achieved so much for its citizens, most especially when compared to what the North Korean leadership has done for its people. In 2019 South Korea’s GDP was 2 percent while North Korea’s was 0.4 percent, and the gap has widened even more since then thanks to sanctions and the pandemic. But I wonder what North Koreans would say if they were canvased about happiness. But of course, the rulers of North Korea would never allow any such survey to be made, and if they did it themselves the answer is a forgone conclusion, and anyone stupid enough to report that they were unhappy would almost certainly be bundled off to a labour camp, or worse. But if such a survey did take place, done by external assessors, I suspect the North Koreans would still turn out to be at the very top of the happiness league. Why? Firstly, because of the indoctrination I discussed in my last blog entry. In fact, if you think about it, the entire North Korean propaganda machine is directed towards fabricating an aura of universal (I mean within North Korea) happiness. Take a look at these two North Korean posters. The text in the first translates as ‘Wear traditional Korean clothing, beautiful and gracious’, the second; “Working on Friday is patriotic’ (1):
The worrying thought is that the North Koreans really are ‘happy’, in the sense that the word is forced to have within the ruling ideology. But there is another reason. The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen notes that people can internalize the deprivations of their circumstances so they don’t desire what they never expect to have. Such an ‘adaptive preference’ would be another way of understanding a North Korean person’s subjective judgment concerning their well-being, and explains how it would be very different from a neutral observer’s perceptions.
But this is also an indication that we should in general be cautious about using subjective opinions of well-being as valid criteria for assessing happiness. Because just what is it? The indicators used for gauging national happiness levels in the UN World Happiness Index are these: GDP per capita, household income, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity (in the sense of willingness to donate), institutional trust, corruption perception, positive affect/negative affect, freedom to make life choices. These criteria are partly based on the tiny but very wealthy (thanks to oil reserves) nation of Bhutan, which pioneered its own Gross Happiness Index which subsequently become another transcultural indicator. It highlights the following: health, education, use of time, psychological well-being, good governance, cultural diversity and resilience, ecological diversity and resilience, community vitality, and living standards.
Obviously, as the disjunction between South Korea’s development status and happiness status shows, development cannot be reduced to mere economic terms. The trouble is that all to readily it is, and this is because development is the key driving concept behind modernization, and is closely linked to another key concept: ‘progress’. This is what the philosopher John Gray says in Enlightenment’s Wake (1995): ‘The idea of progress….is the modern conception of human social development as occurring in successive discrete stages, not everywhere the same, but having in common the property of converging on a single form of life, a universal civilization, rational and cosmopolitan.’ Gray is a prominent critic from within the West (he is British) of what he sees as the calamitous consequences of this universalizing ‘Enlightenment project’, which has been foisted on the rest of the world by the West. Gray writes: ‘My starting-point is the failures of the Enlightenment project in our time, and their implications for liberal thought. The failures to which I refer are in part historical and political rather than theoretical or philosophical: I mean the confounding of Enlightenment expectations of the evanescence of particularistic allegiances, national and religious, and of the progressive levelling down, or marginalization, of cultural difference in human affairs.
A fundamental error of the ‘Enlightenment project’ was to assume that the progress it celebrated would be limitless, and also to link it excessively to economic growth. Now we know that this could be a fatal error for which the generations to come will pay the price. Development must be sustainable and based on much more than purely upward economic growth. Sen offers one way forward in his Capability Approach to development, which stresses the relationship between development and ethics by focusing on the individual’s capability for achieving the kind of life they have reason to value. This is different from thinking in terms of subjective well-being or having access to the means for pursuing the good life. As the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it, in Sen’s theory, ‘[a] person’s capability to live a good life is defined in terms of the set of valuable ‘beings and doings’ like being in good health or having loving relationships with others to which they have real access.’ In other words, the idea is to place development within a tangible and specific context based on the pre-eminence of sustainability. It thereby counters the slash-and-burn development concept behind the ‘Enlightenment projects ideal of progress.
North Korea hitched itself up to an especially disastrous legacy of this Enlightenment project - communism. It got shipwrecked precisely due to the forces of Gray indicates. In fact, one could argue that North Korea is an exemplary example of ‘particularistic allegiances’. It is also the mirror image of South Korea’s version of development., and one could fruitfully analyze the two Koreas in terms of how they chose antithetical criteria for defining the idea of development. For example, while the South adopted an essentially economic model of development founded on global commerce, which was borrowed from Western capitalism, the North chose first the communist alternative, and then what it calls ‘juche’, the ideal of self-reliance, in the sense of development understood as autonomy and independence. Development for the North Korean state is therefore defined as remaining separate and distinct from the rest of the world, and on being dependent solely on its own strength under the guidance of a godlike leader. But I wonder how many more South Korean hillsides will be carted away in trucks to construct more housing as part of the relentless drive to develop? I imagine a speeded-up movie of South Korean’s development over the past seventy years would look like an earthquake of truly terrible proportions.
(1) For more North Korean posters see: https://library.ucsd.edu/news-events/north-korean-poster-collection/