complete the process of concentrating power in the President's hands, begun when Pak first assumed that office in 1963. In fact, the term "revitalization" subsumes all the goals of the original coup. In mid-May 1973, on the twelfth anniversary of the coup and the eve of the first session of the newly emasculated, hand-picked National Assembly, Pak stated that the spirit of the "Revitalizing Reforms" was "identical with the spiritual basis of the Military Revolution."
The early efforts at "spiritual mobilization" had been undertaken partly to prepare the way for the revolution in political life which some of the coup plotters had envisioned. In part, they also served as a substitute for the long-range political program that the military leaders were hardly prepared to provide. These leaders had no ready-made panacea beyond their strong commitment to economic development, and Pak has even yet to develop any systematic program of political organization or ideology. He has, rather, effectively improvised and gradually gathered all the threads of power into his own hands.
No direct attack has been mounted on the concept of popular, democratic government, and a facade of constitutional forms has been maintained. Despite the abuses of democratic forms under President Syngman Rhee, and the subsequent failure of Korea's closest approach to democracy under Rhee's immediate successor, the ideal of democratic government is not discredited. Korea's history and political experience, however, provide a poor base for nurturing democracy. The strong paternalistic and authoritarian traditions of Korean governments, continued by the Japanese and to a remarkable degree by Rhee, inculcated a master-servant relationship between people and government. There had been little or no opportunity for political parties or even interest groups to mature and compromise. Neither has there been any sizable middle class with the interest, training, and opportunity to participate in public affairs.
The "cold war" confrontation between the United States and the U.S.S.R., and the lingering affects of the Korean war played into the hands of the rightwing extremists, whose whole stock-and-trade was anticommunism. Even moderate opposition parties were proscribed before they had any chance to leaven the political process. The government of Prime Minister Chang Myon was fatally handicapped by the barren conservatism and bitter factional bickering among the only political survivors of Rhee's practice of divide, destroy, and rule. The concept of a golden mean, or a middle-of-the-road approach, it totally missing in Korea.
Because the military leaders had no systematic ideology to substitute for democracy, they looked abroad to military-based regimes elsewhere in Asia. The plotting for the 1961 coup began shortly after army takeovers in Burma and Pakistan. After the coup, study missions were dispatched there, as well as to South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan. The example of Chiang Kai-shek's party, the Kuomintang, in particular, influenced the thinking of the junta leaders. Again, the recent "Revitalizing Reforms" followed hard on similar trends in Thailand and the Philippines.
Whatever Pak may have imported from abroad, however, his style is closest to Korean tradition. His "administrative democracy" is little more than the administrative authoritarianism of the past, plus modern methods and efficiency. There is precious little room for any expression of public opinion through political parties, the legislature, or the media, and little regard for the concept of an independent judiciary and the protection of individual freedoms. What the military has managed to exploit successfully, however, is the energy and modern training of a younger generation free of the trammels of tradition. The youthful military leaders were quick to enlist the force and enthusiasm of the new postwar generation released in the 1960 student revolution but not effectively channeled by the Chang Myon regime. In his first years of power, Pak coopted the almost puritanical zeal for reform of his youthful cohorts. The old, Japanese trained bureaucracy was replaced by younger, much more broadly educated recruits to provide a more effective, "revitalized" civil service.
Nevertheless, in the early days following the coup its leaders were so eager to get an economic program moving that many older, less-motivated types were also accepted. In time, the more enthusiastic young
