Normal Corruption: Utilitarian Institutional Dualities and Technocratized Authoritarian (In)Justice

In South Korea and other postcolonial societies, modernization began as a reflexive process in that their initial critical self-appraisal was usually focused upon their perceived weaknesses and deficiencies vis-à-vis Western forces that had ruled and/or liberated them. Such reflexive modernization has usually assumed on an institutionalist nature centered upon institutional emulation of the politico-legal, economic, and social systems of “advanced nations”. Paradoxically, reflexively adopted Western institutions did not necessarily enable to solve the impending material and social exigencies for postcolonial societies. In fact, the borrowed Western social institutions – such as market economy, democracy, and social citizenship – are the long historical outcome of their arduous efforts, struggles, and achievements in coping with own material and sociopolitical challenges. That is, South Korea’s immediate, and even long-term, material exigencies of economic and social provision have had to be acquired through various self-taught measures, necessitating very flexible compromise, distortion, or even nullification of West-reflexive formal institutions in public governance. South Korea has ended up establishing an effectively functioning, yet socio-politically vulnerable and chronically unlawful, system of industrial capitalism and social provisioning that effect its liberal order’s endemic legitimation crisis. A general systemic order of normal corruption has thereby prevailed under the pervasively utilitarian institutional dualities between the West-reflexively adopted liberal institutions and the practically devised methods and improvised orders for pragmatic and expedient problem-solving, often beyond legal principles. The state’s judicial organs – prosecution in particular – have had to technocratically mange such systemic corruption for practical national and/or social utilities As the nation’s political leadership, whether autocratic or democratic, has to juggle with such complicated practical and (il)legal necessities, its liberal systemic order has incurred built-in irregularities and instabilities, regardless of its success in practical problem-solving in economic, social, and other affairs.