On a lovely spring day, I had the privilege to have a one-on-one interview with Professor Aurel Croissant, a distinguished political science professor at Heidelberg University in Germany, who came to Seoul as a Frontier 10-10 visiting professor at Ewha GSIS. Delving into his ongoing research and shedding light on the concerning trends in contemporary politics, our conversation promises insights worth your time, even if it may extend a bit longer than usual.
Could you briefly introduce yourself, your reasons why you decided to come to Korea, especially at Ewha GSIS?
My name is Aurel Croissant. I’m a professor of political science at Heidelberg University. I’m German by birth, I graduated from a German University, then I taught in the United States in California and I got an offer and accepted the offer for a full professorship at Heidelberg University in 2006, exactly 18 years ago now.
Well, I have a relationship to Korea because I did study in Korea at Dongguk University in 1993-1994, 30 years ago, and then again at Yonsei University when I was a PhD student for one semester with Moon Jung-in in 1998.
My relationship to Ewha is that I had been offered one of these Frontier 10-10 visiting professorships and I am in a fairly close working relationship with Professor Thomas Kalinowski, who is associate professor here at GSIS and we’ve known each other for at least 25 years or so. So that’s how I came to Ewha.
When asked about how he finds Ewha GSIS so far,
It’s great! It’s my third time since I became a visiting frontier 10-10 professor. It’s the third time now that I stay at Ewha. The first time was a year ago for one month, from March to April, then from November to January, and now again from March to April.
It’s the most beautiful campus in Seoul by far.
It’s a super university, very nice graduate students at GSIS, and very good colleagues. It’s a very good environment to do research, especially because I’m on a sabbatical, so I don’t have to teach this semester. Technically, it’s almost over now, and I will return next week to Heidelberg. (The next week happened on the 2nd week of April 2024)
So for my sabbatical, for my research semester, this is a really perfect environment, because I can do my work, I can talk to people, I can write up my papers, and at the same time, no one is really disturbing me.
Now that you mentioned your research, you’re a research reviewer and at the same time, you’re doing your research. Could you briefly introduce your on-going research/area of interests?
I’m editor of the journal Democratization, so that’s when I review papers.
Like most of us professors, I’m an active reviewer. I do review papers for other journals, so papers written by colleagues whose name I don’t know, because it’s this so-called double-blind peer review. You don’t know who the author is. The authors don’t know who the reviewers are. That’s the whole idea, so that you can be frank and you won’t be biased because you like or you don’t like something. I’m not a particular colleague, but my research right now is mainly on three topics.
Number one is democratic backsliding and democratic resilience in Asia. That’s a long-term project. We just published a piece in Professor Howe’s journal, Asian International Studies Review, and also just over the weekend, Global Asia published a special issue. Which I edited, so that’s about “What makes democracies in Asia resilient”, so they withstand autocratization and backsliding tendencies.
Like in Korea, which recovered from Park Geun-hye, or in Thailand, which did not recover and democracy broke down. So what keeps them alive, basically, right? That’s number one.
Number two is military and democratic backsliding. So a colleague of mine and I are researching the reasons or explanations why military officers, armed forces behave in very different ways during situations of crisis of democracy.
So, to give you an example, in Thailand in 2006 and 2014, the military organized a coup d’etat against a democratically elected government. So, that was not good for democracy. On the other hand, when President Donald Trump in the United States of America in late 2020 and very early 2021, tried to block the certification of votes and the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States at that time, General Milley, made it very clear through public statements but also, especially through networking, talking to other high-ranking military officers in the United States armed forces, that the military would not become an accomplice of President Trump’s attempts to block the transition to democracy. So, that’s a very different role, right?
That’s more like a guardian of democracy or supporters of those who want to prevent democratic backsliding. We’ve been doing this research on a worldwide scale since 1990.
We have about 150 cases to 200 cases. And we want to know ‘Why do some military officers or some militaries play the role like in the U.S.? And why do other militaries play a role similar to Thailand? And there are things in between, like when Park Geun-hye was president in South Korea, and then she was accused of weakening democracy, and at the end of the day she was impeached. The military didn’t do anything. So it was more like a bystander, which I guess was a good thing. But then again, it’s different from what the soldiers did in Thailand, it’s different from what the military officers did in the U.S. We want to explain why that is.
Can you share any key findings?
We had a very early study, at the first stage of the research, so all findings are very tentative and preliminary. Well, the most important finding, as always, it’s complex. We think it’s not plausible to assume that there is a single explanation. For example, because they are professional soldiers, they share a certain worldview. That doesn’t explain why. Because usually, we have democratic backsliding in democracies where the military does not have this professional mindset, like in Denmark or Germany or in the U.S. So we don’t think that explains why.
At the same time, we also don’t believe that a history of military intervention in politics alone is sufficient to explain. Take South Korea, which had a military dictator from 1961 until 1988. So with a pseudo-civilian party and elections and all that in parliament. But still, the military was very influential in politics. So we think it’s a combination of factors.
But we think one important factor is whether elected civilian authorities, presidents, prime ministers – have the support of a well-institutionalized political party. If they have the support of a fairly well-institutionalized political party, they do not depend on the military as their main supporter. Because through the political party, they can organize elites, they can mobilize support among voters and citizens.
They have the institutional structure on the ground, or at least nationally, that allows them to organize policies. That makes them more independent and less reliant on the military. At the same time, a military that wants to purge an elected government, stage a coup, has to take into account what will be the reaction of society and political elites if they stage a coup, right? Because there’s always a day after the coup. If the incumbent can rely on a well-organized political party, the chance increases that that political party will organize a protest. So it’s more difficult for coup-staging officers to marginalize the civil and political elite, the politicians, which makes it more costly to implement the coup, to implement military rule, and they have to face a higher risk of mass protest. And mass protest is often something that leads them to conflicts within the military.
How to react to mass protest? Should we shoot the protesters? Should we let them protest on the streets, but try to contain it? Especially, like in Korea, if you have a conscription-based army.
So probably many of these young students, who (let’s say) staged a protest first, at least. Many of these young students know many of these conscripts, because these conscripts are the same guys from high school or so that they know, or from the village, or the community where they live. So those are all factors they have to take into account. So political party institutionalization is a very important factor.
But again, more than one factor, it’s the combination of a number of factors. And we find some quite nice patterns, but it’s too early to say, this is the definite result.
As we are talking about politics, it will be interesting to know Professor Croissant’s point of view regarding the year of elections 2024 where 40% of the world’s population will cast their vote.
Can you share any recent trend or development with how global politics is going on right now, that you feel is very intriguing or concerning?
Number one, in democracy research for the past 10 years or so, the assumption was that if governments try to limit democracy, they will mainly focus on the courts, on parliaments, what we call horizontal accountability, rule of law, freedom of media, and civil liberties. So they will try to manipulate or weaken those elements of democracy, but they will stay away from elections because elections are what give them legitimacy. But there is some evidence now that this is no longer the case.
So that violation of principles, processes, or practices of democracy is spreading from minority rights, civil liberties, freedom of the media, horizontal accountability, into the electoral regime, at the core of democracy. That really is a worrisome development. Democracy is more than elections, but you can’t have representative democracy without free and fair elections. It’s simply impossible. It’s not sufficient, but it’s necessary.
So this necessary requirement for democracy is under stress. For example, in India, and that’s the second trend, where there will be elections in a few weeks or months. The campaign is already underway, and you see that in elections, number two has become a tool to entrench illiberal rule.
So these guys are elected, perhaps in sufficiently free and fair elections, but the idea of elections in representative democracies is that the center of power is thought to be not occupied by certain political actors for a permanent period of time. But principally, it’s thought to be a vacant position, which can be filled through elections, and you have turnover of governments over time.
But now elections more often become a tool to entrench those who are already in power.
Those are the worrisome trends. So what made democracy working in many places, even in hard places, or where the conditions for democracy were very difficult? South Korea is an affluent modern society, highly urbanized, with high levels of education, but for democracy it’s a very favorable environment. But you have countries like East Timor, Indonesia, where for various reasons the conditions for democracy are very, very difficult, challenging, the hard places for democracy. Their elections at least used to function, used to work, but now they tend to become tools of authoritarian manipulation.
So the fact that we have so many elections this year probably means that we will see a dramatic or at least a substantial decline in the quality of elections, erosion of the quality of elections.
Can you recommend any published article or books that you believe will interest students about global politics, and make them understand how it actually works? Because it’s too complicated.
There’s no single book that would allow you to understand the world. There are so many interesting books. Many more than you can possibly read or recommend.
A book I really would recommend for those who are interested in understanding the current challenges to democracy is Levitsky and Wei, How Democracies Die. It was published in 2018, so it’s already six years old. But they also published a follow-up book last year, in late 2023, and that’s called The Tyranny of Minority.
You know, in democracy thinking, democracy theory – Alexis Tocqueville, a very important French thinker in the 19th century, is my favorite political philosopher or theorist. He coined the term “tyranny of the majority”. So in a democracy, numbers count. The majority decides and the majority tends to oppress and suppress the minority, the individual. Tyranny of the public opinion, for example.
Well, the clue with Levitsky and Wei is (very much about the U.S. then) that in the U.S., it’s not the tyranny of the majority. It’s the tyranny of the minority. So a substantial, but still relatively small part of society that, through various institutional loopholes, is able to dominate democracy and, de facto, to weaken or even eliminate democracy. So these two books, I would recommend.
How is your living experience in South Korea so far? Any favorite things about Korea, or most challenging ones?
Well, as I told you at the beginning, I’ve been visiting Korea for the past 30 years. So I think this country, this city (Seoul), for foreigners, it’s great. I mean, it’s one of the most convenient places to live as a foreigner. Many Westerners have problems with Korean food. I love Korean food. I have no problem with it. It’s a functioning city, number one. Everything seems to work. The subway is on time. The trains are on time. You have a very fast internet. Everyone is polite. Crime is very low compared to Western society.
I know Koreans worry about crime as well, of course. They always do, everyone, everywhere in the world. But it’s so safe. It’s so convenient. For foreigners,
it is so good to be a citizen or an inhabitant of a city like Seoul. It’s great. The food is excellent, I think.
Then, because for the last 30 years, when I came to Korea for the first time in 1993, I lived near Gimpo Airport. I had to commute every day by bus from there to my university, which took me about two hours one way. So I passed the river every morning and every afternoon. That was a terrible place at that time.
It was really just concrete. No trees, no green, no whatsoever. Just this brownish water, smelling even through the windows of the bus. That was terrible. It was just ugly and the air quality was so bad. Now look around, we have all these parks. It’s a really green city. Air quality is still not good, it’s true. But there’s only so much you can do against yellow dust, right? This city has changed so much.
It’s not only fast, many societies are changing fast or rapidly. But this is a dynamic society, you know? This is a society that learns, learns from challenges, and that finds solutions. I mean, there are many problems, as always. Injustice, inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality. I know that there are many problems, like every society.
But this is really a society that is dynamic and that tends to be able to learn and find solutions to problems.
And that’s exceptional, I think.
Any message to the voters who will probably cast their votes for the next few weeks or few months? Anything that they can watch out for, any signs that this is a good candidate or not? Because sometimes it’s not that easy for us to see due to the lack of media transparency or factual media exposure.
And then next is, any message to the students who are interested in your field of expertise or students in general? I also saw that you are an achiever. You were summa cum laude and magna cum laude during your master’s and your PhD. So that’s very impressive for us.
With the students, well, number one,
whatever you do, do it because you are interested in it. Don’t do it because you think you have to do it.
There are always constraints here. But the most important thing is if you want to pursue an academic career, maybe thinking about PhD or something like that, follow your heart and do what you are really interested in because you spend so much time [studying]. It would be a shame to do things that you think are boring or your heart is not involved.
Passion and discipline are the most important things. There are many smart people. There were many students who were probably smarter than I was. I was a lazy student for many semesters but passion and discipline is the most important. Talent is also important, but passion and discipline, that’s the most important thing.
For the voters, oh my gosh.
I mean, what is a good candidate? Probably depends also on your policy preferences.
Number one, turn off social media. Social media is bad for your mental health. Social media is not where you should get your information from because it’s always very condensed. Social media is a pain in the neck. Get out of Facebook. Get out of Instagram. It’s all nonsense.
Number two, don’t focus on what they say, focus on what they do. Sometimes they do what they say, often there’s a difference between the two. They say one thing and they do the other thing. Focus on what they do, what they’ve done in the past. That gives you a fairly good idea what they will do in the future and then you’ll have a better idea how to decide who’s a good politician.
And number three, if you want to be an informed voter, it takes time. Like with everything, you don’t become a good doctor if you don’t study hard medicine, right? So you don’t become an informed voter if you don’t study politics and policies. That’s why it takes political scientists.
There is one paradox with politics by Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian national economist, very important in democracy theory, who mentioned this in the 1940s.
If you want to build a chair, you ask a carpenter, because you need some skills, right? If you are sick, you go to a medical doctor. You don’t ask your high school teacher, because you know it takes some skills. Politics is the exception.
In all societies, people tend to know nothing about politics, but believe they know everything.
That’s why they always like to judge and discuss and have strong opinions, although they lack good information. And that is a strange paradox.
They know nothing, but they think they know everything.
Ewha GSIS 