World View: There is a palpable sense of change in South Korea these days, which reflects wider changes in Asia's world role, writes Paul Gillespie
A vibrant society of some 40 million people, its economy is now the ninth most powerful in the world, based in good part on high technology innovation, such as flat screens, which build on two previous generations of industrial development that lifted the country from the utter war devastation of the early 1950s.
The capital Seoul is a colossal city and home to 10-12 million people. Vistas of tower blocks unfold as you reach the crest of every hill in an extraordinary display of dynamic urbanism.
All roads, educational routes and career paths lead there - so much so that the reformist government led by the new Uri party and President Roh Moo-hyun has vowed to decentralise the administrative capital hundreds of miles to the south - a proposal just as controversial as decentralisation here, but far more ambitious. They were elected this year and last on a broad platform of social and political reform. Loosely modelled on Third Way policies in European social democracy, the government is committed to the market economy and more equality.
It wants to escape from the legacies of Japanese colonialism, civil war, authoritarian governments and security dependence on the United States based on a continuing military and political threat from North Korea.
The Uri party's chairman, Mr Lee Bu-Young, told a forum of journalists from Asia and Europe in Seoul this week that their programme involves re-examining Korea's history, abolishing its National Security Law and moving from Cold War policies to a path of reconciliation with North Korea, preliminary to gradual reunification of the peninsula. These objectives are linked, we heard, to fundamental changes in the country's geopolitical position as the United States shifts its focus from Cold War structures and comes to terms with a rising China and an international "war on terrorism".
The National Security Law was put in place after the war and reinforced by successive military rulers from General Park Chung Hee in the early 1960s to provide an all purpose means of controlling political dissidence. The proposal to abolish it and substitute amended criminal laws is radical, signifying a break with South Korea's political past.
Park's daughter, Ms Park Geun Hye, leader of the opposition conservative Grand National Party, told us she has accepted this week that the act should be amended and not abolished, and is willing to negotiate changes with the government. North Korea is a "dual entity", she said, "a threat to South Korea's security, but also a partner in reunification and prosperity".
For the foreseeable future, South Korea will need both a security orientation based on military deterrence and a close alliance with the US, along with a reunification one oriented towards exchanges and co-operation.
Where they clash, the security dimension must take priority, so that "our way of life should never be threatened".
These debates signify a more confident maturing of South Korea's politics, foreign policy and a realignment of its party system to reflect new realities. Its leaders were shocked by the unilateral US announcement this summer that some 12,500 of the 37,000 US troops stationed there are to be withdrawn by the end of next year (some of them being redeployed to Iraq where 3,000 South Korean soldiers have recently been sent).
It is suspected this is Donald Rumsfeld's revenge for a rising anti-American feeling there, notwithstanding the commitment to spend $5 billion reinforcing Seoul's anti-missile defences - and a decade long discussion of the principle involved.
The question is posed whether alliances still matter in US global strategy and its campaign against terrorism, according to Mr Sun-Jin Lee, deputy foreign minister. He emphasised the challenges posed by the rise of China, which is now becoming a primary focus for South Korea's trade, investment and tourism (just as is the case with China's other Asian neighbours).
China's important role in the six-country negotiations on North Korea's nuclear weapons demonstrates its growing political role in the region. South Korean leaders have been embarrassed this month by reports of experiments by its own nuclear scientists and insist it has no plan to build such weapons.
This regional realignment of power and influence in northeast Asia has been accompanied by an outbreak of "history wars" among Japanese, Korean and Chinese leaders and writers. Chinese historians have diligently implied an entitlement to parts of Korea dating back to the Goguryeo kingdom (37 BC-AD 66) which have infuriated Koreans and are suspected of preparing claims on a reunified Korea. Japan's tendency to gloss over its colonial past and even to honour its war criminals similarly provokes.
And within South Korean politics, the Uri party's need to justify itself by resurrecting its opponents' record in suppressing dissent is taken by its opponents as partisan, rather than a genuine effort to encourage reconciliation based on an accurate account of the past.
The veteran American commentator William Pfaff, who addressed this forum, spoke of a geopolitical change which will inevitably continue to distance the US from its allies in Asia and Europe, no matter who wins the November election.
Both Bush and Kerry take it for granted that the US is permanently the central actor in the world system and world security, rejecting in principle the argument for a multi-polarity of power between several centres of influence. On this view, French, German and other opposition to its invasion of Iraq, as that of China and Russia, is dangerous and destabilising.
The desirable US policy was graphically and cynically defined by the geopolitcal theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski in a book published in 1997: "In brief, for the US, Eurasian strategy involves . . . three grand imperatives . . . to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep the tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together".
In another book this year he criticises the Bush administration trenchantly for upsetting this strategy of dominance, arguing that if the US were to withdraw from Asia or Europe war would break out in Korea, Japan would re-arm, Germany destabilise, the EU break up and Russia gain dangerous influence.
Pfaff doubts seriously that this is true. He sees Asia and Europe "returning to history" at a time when the American claim to legitimate international leadership has been greatly weakened - not least because its large trade and budgetary deficits supported by Asian savings are unsustainable.
This creates a growing absence or a void of power which will make great demands on Asia and the European Union. This forum vividly illustrated their growing interest in learning from each other how to cope with it. A striking feature is how China (which has no intention to provoke US enmity while it rises as a power over the next generation) has already succeeded in creating a buffer of friends and informal Asian allies around it to protect it against any renewed US containment policy.