Asian Democracy and the Problem of Membership: Rules of

Exception and Legitimate Discrimination against Migrants in

South Korea
Sohoon Lee
Abstract
This chapter explores the relationship between sovereignty, exclusion/exception
and membership in South Korea and the ways in which this affects migrants
membership. Specifically, the paper pays attention to the notion of the national
interest (gukik), and its role as foundational rhetoric for membership and
(economic) development. South Korea serves as a useful case study for its sociotemporal particularities, particularly political and economic arrangements arising
from its history of being a developmental state and, subsequently, (neo)liberal
democratic state, post-Asian Financial Crisis. Consequently, I postulate that certain
forms of discrimination are tolerated, if not legitimised, according to particularised
democracy and membership discourse. The first line of argument uses Beng Huat
Chuas account of Asian Values and communitarian ideology, with an emphasis on
Asian realisation of equality. Instead of economic, social, civil and political
equality (as defined in many variations of communism or liberalism), many Asian
states have constructed a notion of a national interest, which is equated with the
overall well-being of an imagined community. The second line of argument draws
from Jesook Songs description of neoliberal welfare society in South Korea,
which is built on exclusionary membership discourse. The theoretical arguments
are supported by two legal case studies pertaining to two categories of migration
schemes, examining two different types of restrictions and exclusions the legal
mechanisms codify; and the rationale for such discriminatory measures. The first
case study draws from a constitutional court case on the right of movement of
temporary migrant workers on employment permit visas. The second investigates
the laws on naturalisation of marriage migrants. Throughout both, the contradictory
dynamics between inclusion and exclusion of migrants, as subsumed in the debates
on membership, are explored.
Key Words: Migrant workers, marriage migrants, exclusion, discrimination,
Agamben, state of exception, inclusive exclusion.
*****
If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty
is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical
category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule
of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure
in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending

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it The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has
been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made
indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and
threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and
inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say
whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the
juridical order. It is in this sense that the paradox of
sovereignty can take the form There is nothing outside the law.
The originary relation of law to life is not application but
Abandonment. 1
1. Introduction
In this chapter, I examine discrimination against migrants who are non-citizens
and the ways in which the conflation of their identity as non-citizens, racial
minorities and/or women compounds the discrimination. Specifically, I focus on
cases where distinctions are made in legal bodies in a way that discriminates
against migrants, while at the same time the distinctions are legitimised by the
rationale of their identity as non-citizens.
The case of migrants in South Korea is useful to consider for four reasons.
First, South Korea is one of the model cases of a developmental state among
newly industrialised countries in Asia where experiences of rapid economic growth
under authoritarian regimes were shared in the late twentieth century. 2 The
developmental state model is characterised by state-led macroeconomic planning,
frequently by military regimes, with preference for protectionist economic
planning rather than the free-market economy. 3 Secondly, the South Korean
developmental state established a particularised nationalism based on ethnicity,
specifically homogenous South n nation from a single ancestry. This
homogeneity of ethnicity played an important role over the course of nationbuilding and economic development, especially during developmental state from
the 1960s until the establishment of democratic governments in the 1990s. 4
Thirdly, although Korean society has maintained ethnic homogeneity, the
majority of the 2 per cent of foreign residents are non-citizens who are temporary
migrant workers. The coming of foreign workers is attributed to the opening up
and liberalisation of its market in the 1990s, which coincided with the process of
democratisation after the fall of authoritarian regimes. 5 Finally, liberalisation of its
markets intensified after the Asian Financial Crisis and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) intervention in 1997. This period (early to late 1990s) coincided with
the fall of military dictatorship and democratisation, resulting in a neoliberal
consensus adopted among the government elites of the early democratic
governments. This in essence led to a merger of two conflicting concepts:
democracy and neoliberalism. 6

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These four elements comprise four theoretical entry points on which I build the
following arguments. First, developmental state as elaborated by Woo-Comings
edited book; homogeneity and nation building as told by Giwook Shin;
liberalisation of markets and importing of foreign labour (such as the account of
Donghoon Seol); and, the coincidence of Asian Financial Crisis, democratisation
and (neo)liberalism (for example, as told by Jesook Song). 7
In looking at the case of South, I present the ways in which exclusion serves to
mark the boundaries of national membership, by distinguishing deserving and
undeserving members and legitimising the exclusion of the latter. In this sense, I
treat discrimination not just as a result of the exclusionary rationale but also a
symptom of a particular membership discourse that a sovereign nation state
pursues. I treat democracy as a socio-temporal product that particularises social
membership while exploring the idea of Asian Democracy, the rhetoric of
national interest and the influence of these concepts on membership discourse. In
so doing, I argue that the emphasis on collectiveness has legitimised outright forms
of discrimination against migrants, and these discriminatory practices have become
tools of exception by which the membership is defined. Two legal case studies on
temporary migrant workers and marriage migrants are examined to further
illustrate these claims.
2. Asian Values (AV), Equality and the National Interest
In Asian Values: Is an Anti-Authoritarian Reading Possible?, Beng Huat Chua
is interested in Asian Democracy overcoming authoritarianism. 8 The term Asian
Democracy has attained notoriety, especially among human rights organisations,
as authoritarian states and their dictators have justified their regimes as being
Asian-style democracy. 9 Chua, however, is interested in overcoming the tainted
Asian specificities and argues that while Asian Values may not sufficiently
safeguard against authoritarianism, authoritarianism is historically incidental,
arising from historical turmoil post-World War II, and the collective will for a
strong leadership to restore order. He argues that Asian societies exhibit a tendency
for achieving a collective good, and a benevolent authoritarian has the propensity
to achieve this goal effectively.
Chua proposes Asian Values communitarian ideology as an alternative to
liberalism as a basis for democracy, and his conceptualisation of equality in
communitarian democracy deserves particular attention. Chua says that Asian
politicians fundamentally disregard (or are unable to realistically believe in) the
equality of people. 10 Asian Valuess bridging of communism and liberalism
saves politicians from having to believe in either socialist egalitarianism or liberal
equality. Asian Values is thus pro-capitalist but anti-market individualist. That is to
say that by shaping and promoting the concept of the common good, the regime
provides a sense of fairness among its members without providing either economic
egalitarianism or the individual freedom in the market.

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Nevertheless, this communitarian rationale comes at some expense of equality.
Asian Values communitarians do not believe in economic equality of communism,
neither do they believe in political/civil equality of liberalism. Rather, Asian
Values justifies inevitability of inequality for the purposes of the common good.
Equitable economic development (as opposed to equal redistribution) is in fact the
strongest justification for the regime, whether authoritarian or democratic, and this
idea of growth is linked to the understanding of achieving the common good of the
nation. Much development under the tiger economy in fact owed to political work
of nation-building where the citizens were taught to imagine the collective, and
South Korea is a good example of this clenched relationship between collective
imagination, nation-building and economic development. In South Korea,
authoritarian regimes have imposed two types of collective imaginations in this
rhetoric of the national interest (gukik), concerning the national and the interest.
Ethnic nationalism (and belief in a homogenous nation under a common ancestry)
tightly knitted its people under the name of community of fate (unmyong
gongdongche), and this transformed the personal sacrifices into the good. 11
Arduous working conditions, a strict control of the labour movement, and other
authoritarian surveillance measures were justified on the basis of national
economic growth and development. 12 In this sense, the national interest was the
common good that is not only imaginative but also transformative, that it is able to
transform adversity into good.
This form of hegemonic knowledge production in creating the common good
continued after the fall of dictatorship and subsequent democratisation. On one
hand, this was the result of contradictions in the history of social movement, which
experienced a confusing mixture of liberal ethos and socialist ideals. 13 On the
other, there was (to an extent) state deliberation, which articulated a direct
relationship between liberal economic development and democracy. South Korean
President Kim Dae Jung, who was inaugurated immediately after the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis, linked IMF-style structural adjustment and neoliberal economics
with democracy; comparing the coincidence of the open market economy and
democracy to two wheels of a wagon. Lim and Jang for this reason criticise post1997 democratic states as being hijacked by neoliberalism; while Song 14
identifies the liberal socialist movements contradictory (and unintended)
convergence with neoliberalism. 15
3. Sovereignty and Bare Life Exclusion
Agambens account of sovereignty focuses on a sovereigns ability to make
bare life, drawing on the Schmittian concept of the sovereign power to rule on the
state of exceptions. At the juxtaposition of a legal ban and abandonment, Homo
Sacers inclusion in the law is to the extent that he is excluded from the law,
which Agamben elaborates to term inclusive exclusion, or to include what is
excluded. 16 The results are extreme cases of Foucauldian biopolitics, where

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individuals are stripped of their civil, political, social and economic rights, such as
in concentration camps.
Agambens conceptualisation of sovereignty is useful in understanding the
relationship between exclusion, membership and the national interest. This
relationship is vividly illustrated in Jesook Songs description of homeless people
in Seoul Train Station after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the states selective
help for those who became homeless during the Crisis. 17 In providing social reintegration and recuperation services, Song says that the state distinguished the
IMF homeless, or those who were the people recently made homeless by societywide restructuring following the IMF bail-out, from those who were permanently
homeless. Those called IMF-homeless were understood as the people struck by the
unforeseeable and unfortunate events of the crisis, and as such, deserving of
government services to be reincorporated into the national economy. In contrast,
the permanent homeless were ostracised and pathologised, not worthy of (or
beyond) help from government services. 18 This was particularly the case for
women, who were pathologised as mentally ill and/or immoral. In the process,
recuperation of recent victims of the Crisis (the IMF-homeless) was elevated as the
common good, and it was in the interest of the state to provide services to such
deserving citizens, while excluding those who were not considered to be of the
same calibre. In this sense, Songs understanding of South Korean democracy
forms a stark contrast to Chuas account of collectiveness; her conceptualisation of
national membership postulates exclusion for the purpose of inclusion, and it is
those who are included that constitute the state discourse on national interest.
Using the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, what she calls the creation of
neoliberal welfare society is based on distinguishing deserving citizens from
those undeserving, based on a neoliberal ethos. 19 Similarly, such exclusion is made
explicit in the case of non-citizen migrants who are brought in to South Korea for
specific and overtly economic purposes. For migrants, the experiences of a legal
ban, abandonment and exclusion from rights protection are often the only means to
a membership in the host society.
4. Case Study: Legitimate Discrimination against Migrants 20
This case study examines two temporary and permanent migration schemes to
South Korea and the distinct ways in which the relevant laws create exceptions.
The Employment Permit System (EPS) dictates the temporary stay of migrant
workers employed in various types of low-skilled industrial labour. 21 Additionally,
low birth rates, an aging population, and decreasing rural populations are
motivations for the Government to allow (if not encourage) Korean men to seek
foreign women for marriage. 22 Marriage migrants are allowed by law to stay in
Korea permanently and are protected by the four main legal bodies, including the
Support for Multicultural Families Act and the revised Nationality Law. 23

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On 29 September 2011, the Constitutional Court produced a long-awaited
verdict on three cases that had been filed between 2007 and 2009. 24 The plaintiffs
were five migrant workers who were terminated from their jobs and could no
longer work: they were not allowed to find new jobs due to the limit on workplace
transfer posed by the EPS. This is because the EPS limits migrant workers ability
for workplace transfer to three times over their three-year stay. This measure was
put in place to protect domestic employment while still benefiting small and
medium- size businesses. 25
Civil society organisations have long pointed out the danger of this EPS
restriction. The key concern is that the limit creates a bonding relationship between
the migrant worker and the employer and reinforces the already-unequal hierarchy,
especially if the worker has used up all three transfers. 26 The plaintiffs lawyers,
from the non-government organisation Minbyun, appealed on this point and argued
that the limit was unconstitutional, on the grounds that it infringes the right to the
pursuit of happiness and the right to choose work. The action, however, was
rejected and it was evident that the verdict (which came after four years) was the
outcome of heated judicial contestations. Out of eight judges present, two partially
disagreed with the verdict, one disagreed with the verdict, and one dismissed the
case. 27
There was disagreement over determining rights to which the migrant workers
were entitled, and what constituted the basic human rights of citizens. The seven
ruled that the migrant workers were entitled to the freedom to choose work or the
freedom to write labour contract, yet the majority of them ruled that the restriction
in the EPS is wholly or partly justified by the purpose that it serves. The restriction
was justified as its purpose was to protect the domestic labour market by limiting
the movement of foreign labour and to ensure a continuous supply of foreign
labour in small and medium enterprises. In other words, the judiciary ruled
national interest (i.e. interests of citizens) a justifiable ground for infringement of
basic rights of persons who are otherwise entitled to such rights. 28
Civil society immediately criticised the court for protecting the interests of
employers at the peril of migrant workers. 29 The Korea Federation of Small and
Medium Business (KFSB) and migrant workers organisations had long argued
over the restriction of migrant workers rights, with the central claim of KFSB
always being that the benefit of South Korean employers equals the national
interest. 30 One can wonder if the logic of a national interest can be a legitimate
reason to maintain a restriction that severely curtails human rights of migrant
workers. There is also an irony worth noting in which the rights and the well-being
of migrant workers are understood in effect to contradict the national interest,
although their continuous labour supply inevitably contributes to the South Korean
economy. 31
In contrast to the EPS workers whose temporary residency the state is invested
in maintaining, marriage migrants are expected to become South Korean citizens.

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Critics point out that the government saw foreign women as an easy way to address
the problems of an aging society, with a declining rural population (particularly
female) and pressure from unmarried rural men who want to marry. 32 Foreign
women are brought in to become the brides of Korean men in rural areas, 33 but
they too are expected to satisfy conditions in the national interest. The laws
explicitly demonstrate the preference on the basis of their functional roles in
society, which is well-exhibited in the Nationality Law (2010), which codifies the
role of marriage migrants in South Korean society. According to Lee, marriage
migrants right to stay is conditional on their commitment to the marriage, as
citizenship is only granted to those who have stayed in a marriage for a minimum
of two years or those who have given birth to South Korean children. 34 The legal
prescription of functional membership tells the marriage migrants their citizenship
duties, which is to say that of wife and mother. 35
Hierarchy is reiterated, reproduced and codified by the legal structure, which de
facto burdens marriage migrants to obtain their husbands approval when acquiring
citizenship, unless the woman has given birth to a (South Korean) child. In
addition, gender relations in family structures, as well as the structural legal
insecurity of migrant wives, contribute to their vulnerability to (escape) already
rampant levels of domestic violence. In 2007, the Ministry of Gender Equality and
Family reported that 47.7 per cent of foreign wives have experienced domestic
violence. As is commonly the case with sexual and domestic violence, many
experts say that this is likely an underestimate. 36 In July 2012, media reports on a
homicide case of a Korean-Chinese (josunjok) wife by her South Korean husband
described a victim who was stabbed to death while the police were forcing their
way into the premises. According to one newspaper report, neighbours had long
witnessed the victim suffering domestic violence. The husband caused her to be
further legally and socially vulnerable by refusing to give consent to obtaining
South Korean citizenship after seven years of marriage. 37 The article reported that
the neighbours had witnessed the husband using the threat that he would tell the
neighbours that she was illegal. 38
In response, the Immigration Office issued a press release saying that the
husbands consent is not legally required but only recommended. 39 Indeed, civil
society organisations and scholars have repeatedly articulated concerns on the
hierarchy reified by a womans dependence on her husband for social integration,
information, resources and legal status. The UN Committee on Elimination of
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has already expressed its concern about
the difficulties foreign women married to South Korean men may face in acquiring
South Korean nationality if they do not comply with the prerequisite of being
supported by their husbands in order to file a naturalisation application and if they
do not have children. 40

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5. Conclusion
To borrow Songs account, in South Korea, migrants presence is justified by
the neoliberal understanding that a persons economic and pragmatic role in the
nations market determines their worthiness as a citizen to the nation state. Both
the case studies reflect ways in which these migrants have become essentialised
into a contributory role for the state-perceived benefit or the sake of the national
interest. In reality, this means an exception and exclusion from equality before
law. Yet the experiences of discrimination are intrinsically related to raison detre.
Individual well-being is stratified, with the lives of the most marginalised making
little impact on the meaning of the national interest.

Notes
1

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 28-29.
2
Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., Developmental State (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1999).
3
Ibid.
4
Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Geneology, Politics, and Legacy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
5
Dong-Hoon Seol, Migrant Worker Movement in Korea (Hangukui iju Nodongja
Undong), in Minority Movement in Our Time (Uri Shidaeui Sosuja Undong), by
Sujong Yoon and Dong-Hoon et al. (Seoul: Ihaksa, 2005), 69-109.
6
Hyun-Chin Lim and Jin-Ho Jang, Neoliberalism in Post-Crisis South Korea:
Social Conditions and Outcomes, Journal of Contemporary Asia 36, No. 4 (2006):
442-463, and Jesook Song, Historicization of Homeless Space: The Seoul Train
Station Square and the House of Freedom, Anthropological Quarterly 79, No. 2
(2006): 193-223.
7
Woo-Cumings, Developmental State; Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea; Seoul,
Migrant Worker Movement in Korea; Lim and Jang, Neoliberalism in PostCrisis South Korea.
8
Beng Huat Chua, Asian Values: Is an Anti-Authoritarian Reading Possible?, in
Contemporary Southeast Asia: Regional Dynamics, National Differences, ed. Mark
Beeson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 98-117.
9
Woo-Cumings, Developmental State.
10
Chua, Asian Values, 109.
11
Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea.
12
Woo-Cumings, Developmental State; Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea.
13
Young-Sook Kweon, Korean Labor in the Nexus of Democracy and
Neoliberalism, Syumposium on South Korea under Neoliberalism, Seoul,
December 18, 2009 (Seoul National University, 2009), and Jesook Song, Between
Flexible Life and Flexible Labour: The Inadvertent Convergence of Socialism and

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Neoliberalism in South Korea, Critique of Anthropology 29, No 2 (2009): 139159.
14
Jesook Song, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal
Welfare Society (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).
15
Song defines liberal socialism as socialism with a strong stance against the state
and social power over individual. Ibid., 142.
16
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21.
17
Jesook Song, Historicization of Homeless Space: The Seoul Train Station
Square and the House of Freedom, Anthropological Quarterly 79, No. 2 (2006):
193-223.
18
Song, South Koreans in Debt Crisis; Song, Historicization of Homeless Space.
19
Song, South Koreans in Debt Crisis.
20
Note on methodology: the case study presented here was a result of a
combination of desktop research as well as participant observation while working
as a volunteer activist at migrant organisations in Seoul, South Korea from 2009 to
2012.
21
Seol, Migrant Worker Movement in Korea.
22
Daniele Belanger, Marriages with Foreign Women in East Asia: Bride
Trafficking or Voluntary Migration?, Population & Societies No. 469 (2010): 1-5;
Daniele Belanger, Hye-Kyung Lee and Hong-Zen Wang, Ethnic Diversity and
Statistics in East Asia: Foreign Brides Surveys in Taiwan and South Korea,
Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, No. 6 (2010): 1108-1130; and Seol et al., MarriageBased Immigrants and Their Families in Korea: Current Status and Policy
Measures, Government Advisory Report, Seoul: Ministry of Gender Equality and
Family, 2006.
23
Four bodies of law include: Support for Multicultural Families Act (2013);
Nationality Law (2010); Basic Act on the Treatment of Foreigners (2011); and
Immigration Control Act (2013).
24
The details of the case comes from the jurisprudence (South Korea
Constitutional Court, 27 Sep. 2011, 2009hunma1083; 2007hunma230(combined);
2007hunma352(combined)).
25
Ibid.
26
Minbyun, Press Release We Condemn Constitutional Courts Verdict on the
Migrant Workers Workplace Limit Transfer [Yiju Nodongja Saupjang
Byungyung Hoesu Jehane Gwanhan Hunbub Japanso Gyuljungel Gyutanhanda!],
2011 29-September .
27
A two-thirds majority of nine judges is needed to declare legislation
unconstitutional. At the time of the case (29 September 2012) one seat was left
vacant and therefore only eight judges were present.
28
The two judges had partial objections in regards to what basic rights the migrant
workers were entitled to but agreed on the principle of the national interest first.

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One judge ruled the legislation unconstitutional; and the other dismissed the case
on the basis that non-citizens were not at all entitled to the rights provided in the
constitution.
29
Civil society organisations do not believe that the migrant workers threat
domestic employment since they are placed in small and medium enterprises local
workers avoid. The difficulty of finding workers in those places was what drove
the South Korean government to recruit workers from abroad in the first place
(Minbyun, Press Release).
30
Seol, Migrant Worker Movement in Korea, and Tomothy C. Lim, NGOs,
Transnational Migrants, and the Promotion of Rights in South Korea, in Local
Citizenship in Recent Countries of Immigration: Japan in Comparative
Perspective, ed. Takeyuki Tsuda (Lexington Books, 2006), 235-269.
31
It is the least presumptuous to conclude that restriction of the right of movement
of workers leads to greater productivity, let alone national interest (unless the state
envisages the employers to abuse this restriction and exploit workers for greater
productivity).
32
Belanger, Lee and Wang, Ethnic Diversity and Statistics in East Asia, 11081130; Hyun-Mee Kim, Migrants and Multiculturalism, Modern Society and
Culture (Hyundae Sahoewa Munhwa) 26 (2008): 57-105; and Hyun-Mee Kim,
The State and Migrant Women: Diverging Hopes in the Making of Multicultural
Families in Contemporary Korea, Korea Journal 47, No. 4 (2007): 100-122.
33
Ibid.
34
Sohoon Lee, Those Who Can Become Foreign Koreans: Globalisation,
Transnational Marriages and Shifting Nationalist Discourse in South Korea,
Theory in Action 5, No. 3 (2012).
35
Kim, Migrants and Multiculturalism, 57-105; and Kim, The State and Migrant
Women, 100-122.
36
To die or to kill [in Korean, jukgona jukigona, ijuyosong janhoksa]. SisaIn 28
February 2008, accessed February 3, 2013,
http://www.sisainlive.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=3907.
37
Kyongchali Bangbumchang Detnunse Josunjok ane Bimyongi. Dong A Daily 7
July 2012, accessed February 3, 2013,
http://news.donga.com/3/all/20120705/47538290/1.
38
Ibid
39
Immigration Bureau. Clarification. 6 July 2012, accessed January 31, 2013,
http://www.immigration.go.kr/indeximmeng.html.
40
Para 26, CEDAW. Concluding Observation of the Committee on the Elimination
of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW/C/KOR/CO/7, New York: Committee
on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women Forty-Ninth Session, 2011.

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Belanger, Daniele, Hye-Kyung Lee, and Hong-Zen Wang. Ethnic Diversity and
Statistics in East Asia: Foreign Brides Surveys in Taiwan and South Korea.
Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, No. 6 (2010): 11081130.
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Sohoon Lee, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy
at the University of Sydney. Her area of research are migrant women in Asia with
particular interest in the relationship between labour and gender, migration laws
and illegality, social movement and resistance. She is writing her doctoral thesis on
migrant care workers in South Korea from social movement perspective. Her latest
publication is Contribution to Migrant Domestic Workers to Sustainable
Development (with Nicola Piper, 2013) published by UN Women as policy paper

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for the pre-GFMD High Level regional meeting on migrant domestic workers at
the interface of migration and development.