In a recent book, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed, one of the questions Misagh Parsa asks is: “Why do some countries succeed in democratising through reform while others require revolution to proceed?” Parsa’s focus is, of course, on Iran and he examines in granular detail the Green Movement of 2009, when the pro-moderates’ protests against the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looked for a while like they would deliver a larger institutional transformation in the country, only to be ultimately so repressed that subsequent challenges to the clergy have taken a more muted, less ambitious form. So far.
A special chapter
A country against whose experience Parsa weighs Iran’s options is South Korea, one of the modern era’s big success stories of democratisation through reform instead of revolutionary change. As the the Winter Olympics in South Korea’s PyeongChang holds our attention, it is curious, however, that so many political science books do not interweave the sport narrative with the country’s democratisation. For historians of the Olympics, South Korea is a special chapter, for it validates the great claims made about the power of sport to narrow the gap between adversaries in a win-win manner. South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s use of the Winter Games to reach out to the North Korean regime and bring down tensions amid the North’s high nuclear adventurism has already led to the two Koreas marching together at the opening ceremony under the “unification flag” and fielding a joint women’s ice hockey team.
On the sidelines, the North’s presumed head of state, Kim Yong-nam, and the powerful sister of the supreme leader Kim Jong-un, Kim Yo-jong, attended the ceremony and met Moon, making this the highest-level visit by North Korean leaders to the South. Such close proximity at the ceremony with leaders from the North clearly cheesed off American Vice President Mike Pence. The U.S. has been somewhat blindsided by the peace overture from the newly elected South Korean President, and joint military exercises have been postponed till after the Games, including the Paralympics that will conclude in mid-March. It’s a high-stakes manoeuvre by Moon, and who knows how the coming month may change relations across the 38th Parallel that divides the two Koreas — it may bring the Cold War that still lingers in the Korean peninsula down a notch or two, perhaps even more, or the situation may revert to unyielding hostility. But you have to applaud Moon for showing how sport can unify (even if temporarily), how it can open up possibilities that were not visible otherwise, and hope that leaderships elsewhere will be inspired.
But back to the democratisation of South Korea (part of what’s been called the “third wave of democracy”) and the Olympics. It is insightful to be guided by David Goldblatt’s feisty and very political wrap-up, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. Under the authoritarian army general, Park Chung-hee, who was President from 1963 till 1979, South Korea had developed rapidly. Sporting prowess became a symbolic way of showing off the country’s arrival as an economy to be reckoned with. In 1981, under President Chun Doo-hwan, who had taken power in a bitter struggle after Park’s assassination in 1979, Seoul won the bid for the 1988 Olympics. The Summer Games are among the most memorable, including the great display by the Soviet gymnasts, Florence Griffith Joyner’s 100m and 200m records that still mystify and Carl Lewis’s 100m gold after Ben Johnson failed a doping test.
Ushering in democracy
What’s often forgotten is that in the time between winning the bid and the actually opening of the Games, South Korea democratised. Pro-democracy protests had intensified in 1987, and in Goldblatt’s telling: “In the spring… President Chun attempted to close down the debate by announcing that all constitutional issues were to be postponed until after the Olympics, and that his successor would be their organiser, Roh Tae Woo.” To no avail, and the battles between protestors and the government forces became more fraught and the chances of Seoul being able to host the Games came to be seriously questioned. Writes Goldblatt: “Inside the junta, the hard and soft liners battled it out, the former arguing for a full military mobilisation, the latter for compromise. Precisely what tipped the argument in favour of the latter remains unclear. However, it is unquestionable that the fate of the Seoul Olympics was an important factor in Roh’s thinking and the internal victory of the reformers.”
The 1988 Games had, at the time, unified the comity of nations after the consecutive boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. “In a sense, the Cold War symbolically ended with the Seoul Olympics,” the New York Times this week quoted Lee O. Young, the creative director of the opening ceremony at Seoul, as saying in an interview. “After the Seoul Olympics, we have been experiencing a new Cold War, and the PyeongChang Olympics might set another milestone.” Who knows, but let’s hope.