Late on Tuesday evening, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law. A BBC analysis cited as reasons the opposition parties’ majority in the National Assembly, their continued boycott of the national budget and the impeachment of key officials and prosecutors, leading to frequent government gridlock.
During the years that Taiwan and South Korea traveled the road to democratization, our countries hit many potholes. Taiwan cannot return to the Martial Law era. Despite the similarities in our authoritarian past, Yoon’s political travails are far removed from the issues Taiwan faces. Yoon’s actions are a wake-up call to the world about just how invaluable democratic constitutional systems are.
On Wednesday, the South Korean legislature convened a quorum with members who were able to make it past military police and soldiers into the besieged and barricaded building. The 190 lawmakers who made it in, including 18 from Yoon’s People Power Party, unanimously cast a vote demanding the immediate lifting of martial law.
Taiwan’s laws about martial law differ significantly from those of South Korea. The implementation of martial law would require ratification within a month of its declaration — a period during which many things could happen.
Over the past several months, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party have recklessly attempted to expand the powers of the legislature, paralyze the nomination of grand justices and operations of the Constitutional Court, and slash the annual budget for the indigenous submarine program. It surely must have crossed their minds that if they went to the extreme, the Democratic Progressive Party, which holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan, might bring the weight of those institutions to bear.
Countries governed by the rule of law can operate normally, because they do so by unspoken understandings. A legislature respects the balanced relationship among the various powers jointly established by a constitution, and cannot arbitrarily expand its own powers. Likewise, presidents cannot rashly declare martial law or reduce the rights of their nations’ citizens.
The inherent discipline of declining to use a power even if one’s position affords you that power is crucial for maintaining political stability. In a highly polarized society, if one side were to rashly abandon this unspoken ethical and moral baseline, the other side would be forced to adopt even more extreme methods.
I hope Taiwan would never tread the path Yoon has taken. I also hope that this whole affair would stimulate the willingness of both political sides to broker a new path that benefits all Taiwanese. Much like the Cold War between the nuclear-powered US and Soviet Union, if both sides hold devastating power, then the most reasonable way forward would be a “balance of terror.”
Hopefully, cooler heads would prevail in the legislature. Even if some of them do not, most Taiwanese do, and can keep watch over and exert pressure on politicians, giving our dueling parties the impetus to seek a better way forward for all.
Taiwan has not seen martial law in more than 30 years, and we should never desire to go back to those days. The absolute panic that struck South Koreans after Yoon declared martial law has created political instability, despite the declaration being overturned in less than half a day. There is also the damage to South Korea’s reputation from the outcry against despotism within the international community. Such developments are something Taiwan does not need.
Hou Tsung-yu is an assistant professor in the digital content and technologies program at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Tim Smith
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