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This chapter focuses on South Korea’s newly found regional leadership, as the emergent middle power of East Asia, in order to advance regional integration and institution-building. Policy leadership is observed and analyzed from an international lens, linked to the literature of middle powers. The chapter first conceptualizes middle powers in connection with the issue of international leadership, since such states often play important roles in promoting cooperation. The chapter looks especially into South Korea’s foreign policy behavior toward East Asian regional processes and how it has manifested innovative and capable leadership. More specifically, the last three presidencies of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2002), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) are scrutinized in the hope of underscoring how their particular administrations, political leadership, and strategic approaches to foreign policy toward the region influenced South Korea’s regional leadership attempts and middle power status.

After the Korean War, South Korean politics was dominated by national security concerns. Reversing Carl von Clausewitz's well-known dictum, in South Korea, “politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Until the late 1980s, politics in South Korea was far from democratic. South Korea had five direct presidential elections (1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007) and six national assembly elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008) after the democratic transition of 1987. In 1992, a civilian candidate, Young Sam Kim, was elected president. Young Sam Kim (1993–1998) prosecuted and punished former generals turned presidents Doo Hwan Chun (1980–1988) and Tae Woo Roh (1988–1993) for corruption, mutiny and treason in 1995. Dae Jung Kim (1998–2003) was elected president in 1997. For the first time in South Korean political history, regime change occurred between a ruling party and an opposition party.

In this chapter, the change and continuity of civil–military relations through the fluctuating dynamics of the democratic transition and consolidation in South Korea is examined. A positive consolidation of democratic reform is one that, while securing indisputable civilian supremacy, grants the military enough institutional autonomy for the efficient pursuit of its mission. Civilian supremacy should be institutionalized not only by preventing military intervention in civilian politics but also by ensuring civilian control over the formation and implementation of national defense policy.

In sum, despite three terms of civilian presidency, civilian supremacy has not yet fully institutionalized. Although significant changes in civil-military relations did occur after the democratic transition, they were not initiated by elected leaders with the intention of establishing a firm institutional footing for civilian supremacy. South Korea's political leaders have not crafted durable regulations and institutions that will sustain civilian control over the military.

More than six decades, Korea is still divided. The most highly militarized zone in the world lies along the demilitarized zone. How to draw the line prudently between seeking national security and promoting democracy shall be the most delicate task facing all the civilian regimes to come in South Korea. That mission will remain challenging not only for civilian politicians but also for military leaders.

Neoliberal globalization is not a process in which capital freely moves around the globe and exploits labor tied to families, communities and nation states. Labor often moves, wants to move and has to move in this process. Labor required by the expanding circuit of capital exists as mobile labor. However, the movement of labor is allowed in a highly selective manner, depending upon the changing needs in the spaces of capital accumulation. Nation states continue to utilize borders to control labor mobility. These borders are boundaries built upon segregation between and discrimination against people of different races, genders, nationalities and residential statuses. Whereas this “bordered global capitalism” certainly made migration more costly, uncomfortable and risky process, it could not stop the increasing flow of migration. In fact, the mobility of labor has always been central to the reproduction of capitalism while the excessive mobility of labor or “escape” of labor often threatens capitalism maintained by borders as an external expression of exclusive citizenship that gives coherence to the otherwise class-divided population. This chapter looks into the ways in which migrant labor, despite all the constraints imposed upon them by borders, struggles to form “citizenship from below” by exercising social movement citizenship and thereby ruptures the fixed notion and institution of citizenship and migrant control regimes. The chapter does so by critically engaging with existing theories of labor migration and citizenship and presenting cases of the struggle of mobile labor in Hong Kong and South Korea.

The Hanbo (meaning Korean treasure) scandal or “Hanbogate” occurred on January 23, 1997, with the bankruptcy of Hanbo Iron and Steel Company, the second largest steel company and 14th largest conglomerate in South Korea, as its debt had accumulated to US$5.6 billion. Hanbo's bankruptcy triggered an investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office that resulted in the imprisonment for 15 years of Hanbo's founder, Chung Tae-Soo, for bribing politicians and bankers to pressure banks to extend hugh bank loans to Hanbo. Nine other persons were also convicted including Chung's son, who was jailed for three years for bribery and embezzlement, and Kim Hyun-Chol, the second son of President Kim Young-Sam, who was sentenced to three years jail and fined US$1.5 million (New York Times, 1997).

With their national economy rapidly and structurally turning away from the long-cherished stable employment regime since the national financial crisis, South Koreans’ poverty is increasingly manifested through financial entrapment ensuing from heavy personal indebtedness to banks, kin members and friends, and, the worst of all, private usurers. The world’s once most aggressively saving population turned into one of the world’s most indebted populations merely in a decade. Having lost its once-proud capacity of a developmental state, the South Korean government has instead been busy devising various public schemes for offering grassroots consumer loans in supposedly preferential terms. Consumer credit, instead of social wage, has been offered rather generously by this increasingly neoliberalized state. This is another crucial component of financialization in the contemporary world political economy. South Korea’s emergency measures for escaping the national financial crisis have paradoxically ended up transplanting the financial trouble from banks and industrial enterprises to grassroots households.

This paper is a focused examination of the parallel collectivistic and individualistic tendencies of South Korean consumers. The “We-Me” concept argues that the two seemingly countervailing tendencies can actually co-exist. The paper discusses the phenomenon, its underlying causes, and the strategic implications of how to market to such consumers.

Prodemocracy protest in South Korea in the 1980s can be described in terms of two waves of sustained activism between 1979 and 1987. One wave was brutally repressed in the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, while the other succeeded in bringing in a transition to democracy in June 1987. How did activists recover from the repression in the first wave, and how did they create a viable movement in the second wave? This work focuses on the role of memory work about the Gwangju Uprising in the mobilization of the prodemocracy movement. Drawing on a wide assortment of documents collected from various archives in South Korea, the author demonstrates how memory work contributed to the movement dynamics. Cognitively, memory work radicalized movement participants such that they became completely disillusioned with the legitimacy of state power. Emotionally, memory work triggered a moral shock among recruits that motivated them to take the high risks associated with activism. Relationally, memory work provided a bonding experience for activists within a network. The findings also show a process through which memory work becomes a powerful social force: emergence of a challenger, proliferation of an alternative narrative, and then a full-blown contention between the state and a challenger. The process also means changes of the status of memory in terms of ownership, salience, and valence.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are converging world cultures by creating common consumer lifestyles across countries through standardized products. However, little is known about how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultures affects their purchase experience from the country. This study explores this gap in the literature by investigating how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultural source (e.g., entertainment) shapes their attitude toward its country. This attitude is conceptualized to influence the perceived product quality and corporate ability of the country’s MNCs, which are further hypothesized to influence consumers’ purchase experience with products offered by the MNCs. Furthermore, the impact of product quality and corporate ability on consumer purchase experience is expected to be moderated by consumer ethnocentrism. The study framework is tested in the context of the Korean Wave (or “Hallyu”) using data consisting of 533 Indonesian consumers. The results support most of the study hypotheses. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

The theme of this issue of Advances in International Marketing is cross-cultural buyer behavior. In developing the call for papers for this issue, we intentionally defined buyer behavior in a broad sense in order to allow for papers on innovative and cutting edge issues in buyer behavior to be included. Additionally, we made a special point of publicizing the call in various parts of the world in order to ensure multiple perspectives.