Public Reason and Public Sphere in Korean Democracy An Analysis of Citizens Competing Rallies and the Constitutional Court s Decision on the Presidential Impeachment

This paper attempts to explore practical and theoretical implications of the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in conjunction with Korean democracy from a perspective of political philosophy by employing the ideas of Rawls public reason and Habermas public sphere. It examines how public reason or public use of reason works to form an overlapping consensus in the process of the citizens competing rallies of Candlelight vs. Taegeukgi leading to the Constitutional Court s decision, from October 2016 to March 2017. The paper, with the analyses of the Candlelight vs. Taegeukgi rallies, the decision on the motion to impeach the president in National Assembly, and the Constitutional Court s final jurisdiction on the impeachment, attempts to argue that public reason or public use of reason tacitly or explicitly was, albeit sporadically, expressed in the public sphere so that it drove public institutions to make a decision from a perspective of public reasonableness. However, advancing differently in parallel public reasons or public uses of reason in the Korean public sphere exposes some practical limitations of communicative action or deliberative politics in its capacity to form a social consensus or solidarity particularly when citizens are divided in political ideologies. It may also arguably reflect a distinctive aspect of Korean political culture. For this reason, it further argues that the Korean constitutional court s decision for the impeachment, though equipped with the procedural legitimacy and contributed to maintaining stability of Korean democracy, reflects an overlapping consensus as a modus vivendi in the sense that it is open to further public reflection in the future.