Cultural policy in South Korea: Making a new patron state

Making a New Patron State is the first-ever Englishlanguage book on Korean cultural policy.It provides a contextualized, historicised and accessible account of cultural policies in South Korea covering most of the twentieth century and culminating in the current era: the Korean Wave.The reference to a 'new patron state' in the book's subtitle speaks to the seminal volume The Patron States: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan, edited by Milton Cummings and Richard Katz back in 1987, and refers to South Korea's distinctive cultural policy, which articulates democratic, neoliberal and globalist agendas within the statist policy framework (4).Despite or perhaps precisely because of what Lee calls the broad 'lack of enthusiasm about the state' among cultural policy scholars, who tend to see the state as 'an unwanted and increasingly powerless bedfellow to culture' (5), the book rests on the premise that 'culture and the state are so entangled that neatly dissociating the two is not an easy task' (6) and examines the centrality of the state in South Korea's contemporary cultural policy.In fact, the author entertains three conceptualisations of 'state' or understandings of the state in relation to culture: state as a nation state (inclusive of various possible formations of nationhood); state as a potent organizer of (liberal) governance; and state as a coordinator of social action (6-14).This triad is followed by another: the three types of a state's cultural policy capacity, taken up in the analysis of the state-culture nexus.These include discursive capacity (or capacity to invent and normalise a new discourse of culture), implementation capacity (or ability to provide legal, infrastructural, financial and other arrangements so as to carry plans and decisions out) and reflexive capacity (or ability and scope to negotiate, support and coordinate different interests in the cultural sector while recognising limitations of state-driven cultural policy) (14-15).The second organising idea of the book draws on historical institutionalism and the belief in historical, institutional and contextual embeddedness of Korean cultural policy (or any state's cultural policy, for that matter) (1, 20). Lee studies the evolution of cultural policy as bound up with political, economic and social developments in South Korea and as often co-opted by the government to disseminate state agendas and define national identity.The case of South Korea is fascinating not only for a sweeping lack of (Anglophone) research into it.As Lee amply puts it in the introduction, South Korea 'presents an unusual case of state policy on culture that was successfully reoriented from authoritarian to democratic and has proliferated by vigorously embracing neoliberal and globalist agendas and turning them into national development projects' (1).Colonisation and decolonisation, military occupation and military government, civilisation, modernisation, Westernisation and nationalisation, democratisation, liberalisation, neoliberalisation and globalisation: you name it -South Korea has experienced this political process, project or mega-narrative within less than a hundred years, sometimes a few at a time, always in its own peculiar way.As such, a study into the evolution of Korean cultural policy enables the author to intervene critically on multiple academic debates.More so: it mandates thinking beyond the dichotomies state-market, state-civil society, national-global, so common in the analyses of Western states' cultural policies.Combined with Lee's rigorous engagement with 'local' Korean sources, this approachand this bookprovides an important contribution to de-Westernising and internationalising ideas and frameworks in cultural policy studies.