8. The Rise of Developmental Liberal Asia: South Korean Parameters of Asianized Industrial Capitalism

In South Korea’s twenty-first century, a sort of public bourgeois consciousness of the South Korean state is blended with the logic of neoliberal economic globalism, so the neoliberal prioritization of corporate interests and prerogatives is even more intensified while social democratic demands of the working population are more and more disregarded. All such social detriments and political predicament accompanying the country’s post-developmental (and post-democratic) transition are widely shared among those other Asian countries similarly industrialized under the respective developmental states. The transnationalized regime of developmental liberal social governance consciously and unconsciously constructed on the basis of capitalist industrial integration between these industrialized countries and those other Asian countries which aspire to dependently industrialize by hosting foreign industrial capital from them is quite likely to help assimilate the latter countries with the former countries in respect to the long-term difficulty in politically evolving into genuine social democratic polities.