Lenin and Wine: The Birth of "Civil" Movement Sector As a Institution

This paper investigates the birth of the field of "civil movements" in South Korea, focusing on the rise of the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice that established its own niche in the movement field that used to be overwhelmed by revolutionary "Minjung" movements. Drawing on the perspective of the New Institutionalism, this paper examines the role of entrepreneur of the movement organization in creating the field of "civil movements" as a new institution. The success of the Citizens' Coalition is due to its two-stage strategy in the movement development. In the inception stage, the Citizens' Coalition chose a reserved strategy by presenting itself as non-political and oriented to the public good. Once the organization became stablized, it launched hegemonic struggles against the Minjung movements shifting extant classification of democracy/anti-democracy to that of safe movements/dangerous movements, us/them, people/citizen, liberalism, social democracy/ radical leftism. This study has implication to the reestablishment of the relationship between the state and civil society in South Korea after the democratization in 1987.