The legacy of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who died Tuesday, will be hotly debated for years. But already several key themes are coming into focus. He will be remembered for forging Korea into a vibrant democracy, as well as for his courageous personal stand against an unfree regime. And his views on issues like South-North relations on the Korean peninsula will continue to be relevant for policy makers today.
To Koreans, one of Kim's most important accomplishments is that South Korea today is an industrialized democracy. In the early part of Korea's post-war history, conventional wisdom held that the country would be dependent on an authoritarian government for its prosperity. And it is true that authoritarian rule, especially under Park Chung-hee, played a significant role in Korea's industrialization. But Kim believed there was a viable, democratic "third way" between poverty and prosperity-at-the-expense-of-military-dictatorship.
Ironically, his unwitting partner was Park himself. Kim's life-long goal of democratizing South Korea was successful in part due to the Park-engineered "Miracle on the Han River." It's not that state-driven industrialization was a necessary precondition for democratization. Rather, Park's sustained economic drive showed the limitations of an authoritarian government to derive legitimacy from economic development. Wealthier and worldlier Koreans demanded greater rights and freedoms. Kim gave voice to them.
Another part of Kim's legacy will be his effect on Korean politics. Partly this was practical. As the first opposition leader to win the presidency, he saw Korea through that perilous first transfer of power from one party to another. And he lived to see the second, when his successor Roh Moo-hyun was succeeded by President Lee Myung-bak last year. That these transfers happened peacefully, although amid vigorous political campaigning, is a sign of the degree to which Korean democracy has matured. Although Kim criticized Mr. Lee for supposedly regressing on Korea's hard won democracy—a point that Mr. Lee obviously contested—he was able to enter such a debate precisely because the machinery of democracy he helped to build and strengthen remains intact.
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