Democratic Legacy of Authoritarianism: The Resurgence of a New Community Movement in South Korea.

This paper examines the South Korean people's authoritarian experiences in developing and sustaining a popular New Community Movement since its creation in 1970. By analysing three key features of the initial stage of the NCM under the growth-oriented authoritarian Park Chung Hee state (1961-1979), the paper argues that the NCM experience provided the majority of Koreans, particularly rural peasants and women, hands-on-training in participatory village-community democracy, which in turn provided a wide range of social opportunities, even unwittingly, for their own empowerment. The paper also argues that the Korean people's training in village-community democracy also provided a self-awakening experience, through which they built their own set of ideas of self-identity as the people or minjung and of minjung democracy which was essentially an off-shoot of the NCM, more specifically, Park's idea of "Korean democracy". The paper suggests that the recent resurgence of the NCM may reflect the democratic legacy of the authoritarian Park era, epitomized in its "Can-do" participatory ethos and the fierce nationalism of the Koreans, albeit in a highly sophisticated and yet paradoxical way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]