Welfare Under Internal Multiple Modernizations: Inter-Institutional Politics of the Korean “Welfare State” in Comparative Perspective

The contemporary analysis of the welfare state is in a state of paralysis particularly evident in Asia where both the productivist welfare regime as well as a gendered social investment paradigm has reached dead ends. A statement such as this may provoke rebuttals, nevertheless this is the starting point of an elaboration of the present dilemma in the social science current comparative welfare state research. Perhaps a discursive civil society approach – a zone of engagement at the compressed crossroads of modern imagined communities and common-pool-resource-institutions along lines close to the scrutiny of the civilizing process of “financialisation” of present day global Asia – may provide an opening to this stalemate. In what follows is an outline of a different approach than the usual applicable to Korean developments as well as a truly comparative inquiry. This paper highlights that actors pursuing modernization – modern welfare state - have been multiple in their number in Korea, i.e., state, society, and party politicians representing population’s pursuit toward modern state becomes an ultimate purpose in itself with an idea of ‘welfare state’ establishment.