Lesson from disasters
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By Kyung Moon Hwang
This was not supposed to happen anymore. Horrifically immense, man-made accidents that take dozens or hundreds of lives are usually associated with developing countries. South Korea was thought to have gone beyond this.
But their recent history of disasters can perhaps provide South Koreans with a resolve that, amidst unbearable sadness over the senseless loss of so many innocent lives, the victims will not have died in vain.
South Korea is an advanced capitalist country governed by an accountable, elected government. In such a setting, state officials are responsible for regulating the workings of the economy in order to ensure fairness and, most of all, the people’s safety, whether from tainted food or shoddy construction.
Furthermore, the government and people in mature democratic societies are expected to hold an elevated sense of ethics as a check on the pressures, temptations, and potential dangers of a highly competitive environment.
Like government investigators, historians who search for the causes of major events tend to draw connections between human actions and larger “structural” factors.
Historians generally don’t like to dismiss things as “accidents,” there’s always a cause. These causes can range from persons and groups, such as companies or state agencies, to cultural or moral lapses, whether on the part of individuals or of society as a whole.
Such systemic perspectives do not come only from historians, of course; most well-informed, reflective people think this way, especially when a shocking event occurs to shake them from their routines.
About a generation ago, South Koreans underwent a national soul-searching in the face of a series of man-made tragedies. In fact the last civilian maritime accident of enormous scale took place off the west coast in 1993, killing close to 300 who went down with a passenger boat. But that turned out to be also a gruesome omen.
That same year a train derailed while going over an illegal tunneling project near Busan, killing scores. Then in 1994, a section of Seongsu Bridge over the Han River fell into the water, killing dozens.
And in 1995 came a double-whammy of disaster: an explosion at a construction site for a Daegu subway station took over a hundred lives; and, in the worst peacetime catastrophe in South Korean history, the five-story Sampoong Department Store in southern Seoul suddenly collapsed, burying over 500 workers and shoppers in the rubble.
Investigations uncovered a web of deceit, starting with the Sampoong owners and managers who actually knew something was wrong but did nothing to warn others, and ending with corrupt government officials who let such an awful building be built and used.
These people revealed themselves as disturbingly detached from a basic sense of propriety. But Koreans also came to understand that such behavior was symptomatic of a more expansive problem in their society and culture, and that, somehow, they all shared responsibility for it.
Societal elites and common people alike took a closer look at the mentalities and ethics of the period of rapid economic growth over the previous several decades. They wondered whether, in the rush to achieve industrialization, the country had lost its collective soul, willing to take too many shortcuts or failing to consider the broader, less tangible costs of chasing wealth.
These costs included, perhaps, a weakened valuation of human life itself or so it seemed, because something deeper had to be the reason for the succession of man-made calamities.
This prevailing sense of malaise culminated in 1997, when the Asian financial crisis hit South Korea, triggering a series of mass bankruptcies and layoffs that plunged the country into the worst economic emergency since the Korean War.
Thus began the so-called “IMF period,” in reference to the International Monetary Fund’s rescue of the South Korean economy. The Seoul government agreed to undertake immediate economic reforms, including the reversal of the collusion with big business that had produced irresponsible loads of debt and patterns of misbehavior.
Many reforms did take place, though to some people, they did not go far enough. Just as importantly, South Koreans took collective action to escape the crisis, contributing their money and possessions in order to stabilize the economy and the government’s spiraling debt.
Government agencies were committed to detach themselves from and increase their oversight of companies, especially the biggest ones, while more attention was paid to cultivating small- and medium-sized enterprises. The IMF bailout loan was repaid ahead of schedule, and the restructuring imposed on conglomerate firms appeared to lay the basis for an economic and cultural revitalization at the turn of the new century.
Based on the rejuvenation on display in the 2002 co-hosting of the World Cup and other signs, it seemed that South Koreans had learned the hard lessons of the 1990s tragedies and turned the corner toward establishing a more mature, secure, responsible national community. By many indicators, they had, particularly by pursuing a fruitful reflection of how a good society should look and function.
If this history of a constructive, holistic response to hardship is any indicator, then the Sewol ferry disaster will likewise prompt South Koreans again to examine not only what went wrong, but far more broadly and deeply, what is wrong. The victims deserve nothing less.
Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea — An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
The Korean translation was published as “황경문, "맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사" (21세기 북스, 2011).