The 12‧3 Self-Coup Attempt and How the Military Should Respond

How should we define the incident on December 3, 2024, in which President Yoon Seok-yeol declared martial law, mobilizing the military to disrupt parliamentary activities and ordering them to arrest the Speaker of the National Assembly, representatives of the ruling and opposition parties, judges, and members of the National Election Commission? Immediately after the incident, the media and investigative agencies commonly described it as an attempt at “insurrection.” An insurrection is defined as a general use of force to undermine or destroy the state’s supreme power and constitutional rule, or to erase the state’s territorial sovereignty. In many jurisdictions, it is referred to as “treason” and is punishable.

According to the views of experts who study military coups and civil-military relations, the events of the night of December 3 can be seen as a “self-coup.” The Illinois State University Klein Center for the Study of Coups defines a self-coup as “when the incumbent president or prime minister takes extreme measures to remove or neutralize other components of the government (legislature, judiciary, etc.), or when the national leader exercises special powers in an illegal and extrajudicial manner, such as a state of emergency or martial law.” Scholars think that the incident on December 3 meets this definition because the president himself used illegal and extrajudicial methods to mobilize the military and neutralize the legislature.

The ROK military’s primary prerogative has been mostly to counter the long-standing external threat of North Korea, and it has mainly focused on strengthening and modernizing with that goal in mind. It is of paramount importance that the military does not intervene in domestic politics, remains neutral, and focuses on external defense. However, the military has neglected to systematically educate and provide guidelines on how the military should understand the values of democracy and the constitution and how members of the military organization should respond when these values are being undermined by personal interests.

The actions and statements of several high-ranking commanders in the recent coup showed that they prioritized loyalty to a specific person rather than being “soldiers among the citizens.” It was clearly revealed that selfish people who only sought promotion and glory through the so-called “promotion line” occupied the upper echelons of the organization. No matter how good you are at operations and tactics, and how good you are at organizational and personnel management, it is unacceptable as a soldier in a democratic country to engage in activities that ultimately threaten the very democratic system that you are sworn to protect, or to blindly follow blatantly illegal orders to attack unarmed compatriots and elected legislators.

In order for the ROK Armed Forces to cement itself as a trustworthy “military of the people” after democratization, it is necessary to reexamine structural issues within the military organization based on a solid understanding of the constitution and democratic values, and to strengthen the institutional mechanisms that can check and balance the power of the president. This coup attempt will be a valuable opportunity to reflect on how far the relationship between the military and democracy has come and how to move forward, beyond this mere political scandal.

By Jin Hwal-min
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations