Cornerstone of the Nation: The Defense Industry and the Building of Modern Korea under Park Chung Hee

The factors leading to South Korea’s 1970s industrial rise became a matter of heated debate in the 1990s, when scholars seeking to challenge neoliberal free-market ideologies pointed to the successes of East Asian industrial planning. Since then, historians and social scientists have pushed beyond the core assumptions of both the developmental state and neoliberal schools, especially by highlighting the geopolitical conjuncture in which South Korea’s meteoric rise occurred. But no one has made the case for a geopolitical perspective on South Korean industrialization as forcefully as Peter Banseok Kwon. His new book, Cornerstone of the Nation, situates the country’s heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI) of the 1970s squarely in the context of a faltering US–South Korea alliance and Park Chung Hee’s pursuit of “self-reliant national defense” (chaju kukpang). Drawing on newly declassified documents and on author interviews with key figures in the Park administration, Kwon not only explains how South Korea developed a domestic weapons industry, but he also argues that the pursuit of self-reliant defense was a key factor behind the heavy industrialization, authoritarian rule, and societal transformation that characterized the Yusin years (1972–79).The opening chapter of Cornerstone lucidly sets the scene of the late 1960s, when South Korea was still completely reliant on the United States for arms. Concerned about Park’s irredentist orientation toward North Korea and worried about sparking a destabilizing arms race in East Asia, the United States exported arms to South Korea but offered very little technical assistance toward the cultivation of a domestic weapons industry. After a spate of North Korean attacks—most notably, a raid on the presidential Blue House in Seoul—yielded only a subdued response from the United States, Park started to openly use a discourse of “self-reliant national defense” in public speeches. Cracks in the alliance deepened when Richard Nixon announced plans to withdraw thousands of American troops from the Korean Peninsula in 1971. Preparing for the withdrawal, Park initiated the Lighting Operation, a secret program that enrolled private manufacturers in weapons production. Under Park’s leadership, manufacturers were churning out machine guns and rocket launchers within six months.The bulk of Cornerstone is dedicated to explaining how the Park administration nurtured a domestic weapons industry by synchronizing military objectives with industrial and scientific objectives. If the 1971 Lighting Operation transformed workers into “industrial warriors” and proved the workability of partnerships between the state and private manufacturers in the weapons sector, subsequent clandestine military modernization programs ushered in an era of scientific nationalism oriented around military technology acquisitions. In describing these linkages in detail in the fourth chapter of the book, Kwon delivers several fascinating anecdotes that illustrate the extreme measures the Park administration took in its effort to increase South Korean technical capacity: in at least one instance, his administration sent researchers to the United States on a scientific exchange program to covertly steal details of key weapons components from unwitting American collaborators. The crowning achievement of South Korea’s decade of military modernization occurred in 1978, when the country launched its first domestically produced ballistic missile. Citing newly declassified documents, Kwon persuasively argues that the nuclear advancements made under the 1974 Yulgok Operation gave Park leverage to extract military aid and technology transfers from the United States and to renew American commitment to South Korea’s defense. As Kwon suggests, the story of the Yulgok Operation brings to light a more complex relationship between South Korea and the United States than “free rider” client-state interpretations of South Korea’s Cold War industrialization would suggest.Kwon documents the wide-ranging impact Park’s pursuit of self-reliant defense had on South Korea’s economy, political power, and society. Most strikingly, he argues that defense objectives drove Park’s industrial strategy, not the other way around. He makes this case in the second chapter of the book, where he carefully explores debates on industrialization and military modernization within the Park administration between 1971 and 1973. In the same chapter, he also argues that the drive to self-reliant national defense was at the root of Park’s authoritarianism marked by the establishment of the Yusin Constitution (1972). The constitution gave Park extraordinary powers to create an industrial and scientific ecosystem for a domestic weapons industry.The fifth chapter of Cornerstone focuses on citizen participation in the national project of military modernization, giving substance to Kwon’s claim in the book’s introduction that South Korea’s militarized industrialization was a “bottom-up” process that involved “a more reciprocal, integrated, and dynamic state-society dialogue” than developmental state theorists focused on top-down policy implementation have tended to recognize (13). Focusing on defense donation drives and contributions to the national defense tax, and invoking Jie-Hyun Lim’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Kwon suggests that the pursuit of self-reliant national defense in South Korea was not a straightforwardly coercive project but rather an ideological and consent-based one.Cornerstone falls short only in how Kwon positions his intervention in relation to extant research on Park-era industrialization, which he divides into two camps in the book’s introduction: first, developmental state theory characterized by top-down understandings of state industrial policy, and second, those studies that portray South Korea as a client or “free rider” state of the United States. The impact of Kwon’s remarkable empirical work would have been accentuated by more rigorous engagement with recent critiques of the developmental state, particularly from other scholars foregrounding the geopolitical context of East Asian industrialization. The geopolitical economies approach, for example, uses a Gramscian understanding of the international system to criticize constructions of East Asian bureaucratic states as rational, efficient, and autonomous entities and to argue instead for conjunctural and geopolitically informed interpretations of East Asian industrialization.1 Although Kwon missed an opportunity to deepen the theoretical impact of his book by bridging Gramscian critiques of the developmental state idea with Lim’s theory of mass dictatorship, Cornerstone is a rich text that will be enjoyed by students of authoritarianism, development, and security in East Asia.