The External Dimensions of Democratization Revisited : Comparing the Transnational Protection Regime in Taiwan and South Korea

Between 1986 and 1987, Taiwan and South Korea experienced democratic breakthrough as the zeitgeist of democracy began to sweep into the Pacific Asian region. Soon after, the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall exploded the notion that democratization was a domestic process largely insulated from external influences, but no systematic comparative study of what these international factors might have been in the Pacific Asian region was subsequently carried out. The potentially destabilizing expansion of political space in Taiwan and South Korea drew attention toward the impact of democratization on regional stability and the direction of inquiry became an “in-out” one instead.This paper first argues that the premature foreclosure of a systematic inquiry into the external influences of democratization in Taiwan and South Korea has obscured certain important international factors and led to a partial understanding of democratization processes there. A re-examination of these cases has also yielded new empirical findings with wider theoretical implications, however. Indeed, it has been found that the protective function of the “transnational protection regime” – complex networks of transnational non-state and substate actors – was vital to the development of an effective opposition movement in Taiwan and South Korea in the late 1980s. Working within an international normative environment that allowed them to flag political repression as human rights abuses to the international community, these actors were able to generate external pressures that increasingly constrained the repressive behavior of the authoritarian governments in question. In systematizing the study of these complex networks of non-state and substate actors within the context of democratization, these case studies help to fill a gap in the comparative literature.The protection regime did not operate in exactly the same fashion in both cases, however. These differences in fact point to the need to consider how geopolitical circumstances immediately surrounding each case determines the menu of responses available to the authoritarian governments and thus, the extent to which such external pressures can effectively translate into constraints on the authoritarian governments. As such, this paper not only brings into sharp relief the international-domestic interface of democratization previously neglected, it specifies the structural contexts that are important to the operation of agency