Introduction

It is a crude generalisation to regard contemporary East Asian welfare regimes as being based only on Confucianism and then to create the hypothesis that eastern particularity coexists with western influence. Such hypotheses will be examined against the experience of the Korean welfare regime. First, the particularity of Korean society will be outlined and then the universality of Korean social welfare will be discussed.

Revisiting the ‘Confucian’ welfare regime in Korea

As well as there being a series of studies identifying Korean welfare regime as ‘Confucian’ (Jones, 1993; Hong, 1999), the legacy of Confucianism seems to have played an important role in the making of the contemporary Korean welfare regime in that this tradition either backed or hindered important changes towards a modern welfare system, such as industrial development and political democratisation. Korea has a long tradition of Confucianism and this is believed to remain intact, governing a large part of everyday life (Jones, 1993; Hong, 1999; Cho, 2001). However, the influence of Confucianism in Korean society is diminishing gradually. Nevertheless this aspect of Korean society should be kept in mind when looking into its welfare regime, just as we need to understand Protestantism or Christianity to study western ones.

There are three core meanings of Confucianism: ‘authoritarianism’, ‘patriarchy (or famililaism)’ and ‘irrationalism’. First, Confucian norms have formed the basis of modern authoritarian dictatorship. Confucianism was the traditional precondition that de facto circumscribed and ruled the role of politics in Korean society, at least before the 1990s’ democratisation. In Confucian philosophy, there was no distinction between the state and society. In the monarchical era, up until about a hundred years ago, the king was identified as the state itself under the doctrine of Confucianism. In this tradition, the raison d’être of the state was defined as the cultivation of the moral values of people through the accomplishment of various moral rites. The relationship between the ruler and the ruled ought to be hierarchical. It was the state that would educate and, in so doing, transform the behaviour of the ruled, not vice versa: the people never determined the role of the state.