Background
Geir Helgesen was born on November 18, 1950, in Skien, Norway, to Bjarne Helgesen, a warehouse keeper, and Lillian Lovoi Helgesen, a homemaker.
Nørregade 10, 1165 København, Denmark
In 1986, Helgesen received a Master of Arts from Copenhagen University, Institute for Cultural Sociology, and then, Ph.D. in 1993.
(This controversial new study, breaks with the tradition o...)
This controversial new study, breaks with the tradition of basing political studies on analyses of institutions and political personalities, by likening the Republic of Korea to a laboratory for the clash of political cultures. In the late 1940s, the Americans embarked upon a democratization programme designed to create a Western bulwark against the spread of communism in East Asia.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Authority-Korea-Cultural-Dimension-ebook/dp/B00KQOAJME/?tag=2022091-20
1998
Geir Helgesen was born on November 18, 1950, in Skien, Norway, to Bjarne Helgesen, a warehouse keeper, and Lillian Lovoi Helgesen, a homemaker.
From 1971 to 1974, Helgesen studied at Nordic Montesorri College. In 1986, he received a Master of Arts from Copenhagen University, Institute for Cultural Sociology, and then, a Ph.D. in 1993.
From 1982 to 1990, Helgesen was a council member at Lejre Municipality in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then, he was a research fellow at the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies of Copenhagen University in Denmark, from 1989 to 1992, and, in 1993, he became a senior research fellow at Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
Then, Helgesen served as Director of NIAS, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research centre attached to the Institute of Political Science at University of Copenhagen.
NIAS is a repository of Asian language sources for Nordic institutions of higher education. Currently, it is providing digital resources to 25 Nordic universities and research centers. Geir retired the position as director of NIAS at the end of 2018, and then took up a position as Research Associate at NIAS, a position he also held at FDDI, the Fudan Development Institute.
(This controversial new study, breaks with the tradition o...)
1998Born into a political family, Helgesen became politically active at an early age. As the youngest delegate, he participated in the National Congress of the Socialist Peoples Party in Norway in 1964, then fourteen years old. Later, after coming to Denmark, he became a member of the municipal council in Lejre representing a collaboration of socialist parties.
Helgesen was a member of the Danish Communist Party from 1975 to 1985. During two election periods (1982-90) in the municipal council, he saw how trivial party politics actually was, how coincidental people’s party membership was, how much politics was a theater with a double aim: for the representatives to convince themselves that they commanded some power, and to convince the electorate of the same thing by stressing every aspect of disagreement and conflict between the different party representatives before disclosing the general consensus across party lines. Every fingerprint on a political decision was presented as a victory achieved thanks to their fighting spirit.
Eight years in practical local politics taught Helgesen that understanding in communication to a large degree depends on the existence of a mutual context, on sincerity and interpersonal respect. An insecure person would mostly stick to his own context and disregard sincerity and respect if he or she could win an ongoing power game. He understood that to reverse this practice was to jeopardize one’s position vis-à-vis one’s supporters, the political party activists and to confuse one’s electoral basis and thereby undermine one’s own political life. But most representatives were insecure persons and would never dream of challenging the procedure and jeopardize their stake in the political system.
Helgesen pointed out that political culture approach in political science, first developed in the United States by Almond, Powell, Verba, Pye, and others in the late 1950s and early 1960s set out to ‘contextualize’ politics, to study it as an integrated aspect of society. This approach in the social sciences underlines the importance of interdisciplinary and of conducting comparative studies.
If power is the core aspect of politics, and people perceive power in different ways according to what they experienced and learned in childhood, and later acquired through education, then it is not enough for political scientists to study institutions, constitutions, and organizations. Politics must be studied at least as partly a cultural manifestation. He also noted that in Korean academia it was first and foremost the famous scholar-bureaucrat Hahm Pyongchoon (1932-1983) who took up this challenge to explain the troublesome venture of South Korean democratization.
Helgesen's writing rests on countless predecessors, not always in his own field of study, but usually people with a desire to promote mutual international and cross-cultural understanding. His goal was to write about that difficult and usually intangible subject so that people with no special qualifications are able to read and understand the text. Helgesen's primary motivation for writing is an attempt to contribute to deepen people's understanding of the role of culture - understood as basic values and norms - for society and politics, and especially for international relations.
Having experienced North Korea in the mid-1980s, Helgesen found that political manifestations there, unintelligible for a foreign observer, became if not reasonable then understandable when linked to peoples’ general world outlook. When power and authority, in North Korea illustrated by a leadership cult and the mobilization of the masses as dependees, was seen in the light of what was taught in the country’s moral education textbooks, it made sense. And again, what moral education textbooks propagated was from a liberal, individualistic, Western point of view almost insane, but related to tradition, to the strong elements of Shamanism and Confucianism in Korean culture, one could understand why people not only accepted the system, but played their role as loyal subjects in an-active-way.
Comparing these experiences with what was going on in South Korea at the time - late 1980s, beginning of 1990s - the parallel was obvious. The two systems were as far apart as they possibly could be from economic, political, and ideological perspectives, but focusing on how power and authority was performed and understood, the relations between the two halves of the country should be clear for all to see. When this was not the case, it was probably mostly due to an ideologically caused blindness.
Quotations: "The political environment was an integrated part of a society much more hierarchical, paternalistic, group-oriented but not collective, leader-oriented but with a notion of power very much different from the notion I knew by experience and learning from my part of the world. This inspired me to try to write about democracy and authority in Korea, to try to reveal the cultural dimension in Korean politics.”
In 1979, Helgesen married Jytte Henricksen, but they divorced in 1999. The couple has a daughter, Mai. Currently, Geir is in relations with Lisbeth Nuechel Petersen, a physician.