South Korean President-elect Lee Myung-Bak announced members of his transition team in the past couple of weeks. Since the news did not receive much coverage due to the holidays, better late than never as the saying goes.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Lee made history by including a foreigner, David Eldon. Eldon is a financial expert, chairman of Dubai International Centre Authority and former chairman of Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp.

Skeptics will deride the move as a window dressing only, but I think it is significant on both symbolic and practical grounds. I think Lee recognizes that the past globalization pitches from left-leaning administrations in South Korea missed the core element that has driven globalization worldwide — more open international trade, especially in the service and financial sectors. I am convinced that Lee understands South Korea’s globalization cannot occur in earnest without greater exposure to outside investment and participation in the Korean economy. Eldon’s inclusion is a welcome sign in this regard.

Leading the transition team is Lee Kyung-Sook, President of Sookmyung Women’s University. Another “first,” a woman, she is not without controversy in South Korea, as Chosun reports:

Lee [Kyung-Sook] was a legislative member of the Special Committee for National Security Measures under the Chun Doo-hwan military government, but Joo [the President-elect’s Spokesman] said, “Historical judgment has already been made on an event that lies 25 years in the past. We gave higher priority to her outstanding ability and the leadership she has shown in recent years.”

According to Yonhap News:

Lee also named as deputy Rep. Kim Hyung-o, a veteran politician who served until recently as floor leader of the conservative opposition Grand National Party that will hold presidential power for the first time in 10 years when Lee is sworn in on Feb. 25.

The line-up of Lee’s transition team leaders signals a shift in power from young liberals and former pro-democracy activists who helped President Roh Moo-hyun take over five years ago to the right-wing elite. The team members are generally older than the 30-somethings who helped President Roh Moo-hyun take over five years ago.

Key members include Rep. Chung Doo-un, 50, a close aide to the president-elect, Rep. Park Jin, 51, a diplomat and professor-turned politician, former Finance Minister Sa Kong-il, 67, and former Vice Finance Minister Kang Man-soo, 62.

If there is a pattern to these picks, Lee’s critics were quick to detect one: church and school.

First, school. As Yonhap points out:

Rep. Park Jin, a conservative political science scholar who taught in Britain before entering politics, will lead the North Korea and foreign affairs group, along with two scholars from Lee’s alma mater, Korea University. Hyun In-taek, a political science professor at the school, along with Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea specialist, will team up to orchestrate Lee’s policy on toughening demands on North Korea’s nuclear weapons while strengthening the Seoul-Washington alliance. [Snip.]

The appointments to the transition team were criticized by a rival party that said Lee’s religious and academic connections played a major role in the selections. Many in the team are Christian, with the transition chief, Lee Kyung-sook, going to the same church as Lee. Many scholars on his team are from his alma mater, while lawmakers were picked from his election campaign.

University ties are of great importance in South Korean social relationships, so it is no surprise that those tied to Korea University (Goryeo Daehak) are well represented in the group (link to KU’s Wikipedia page here).

Indeed, two KU-affiliated figures are reputedly in the running for the prime minister’s job:

The list of other possible candidates also includes academic leaders like Euh Yoon-Dae, former head of Korea University, and the university’s current acting president and former foreign minister, Han Sung-joo.

As a side note, KU is one of the elite SKY universities (Seoul National, Korea University and Yonsei) and was recently named the second most globalized university in Korea (the first honor went to the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology or KAIST). KU holds about 30% of its classes in English and plans to increase this number to 60% by 2010 (h/t to KU’s Wikipedia page for both links).

A little personal disclosure here — I have some family ties to KU. When I was growing up in Korea, I always cheered for KU during the intense Goryeo-Yonsei sports competitions as my father was a Goryeo graduate and active in alumni circles. Also, my maternal great grandfather apparently owned and then sold the land on which the university now sits (my mother claims to have seen the money from the sale brought to her grandfather’s house in trucks as Korea was plagued with hyper-inflation at that time — tragically for me my mother did not inherit the gobs of cash).

Now, the church part. In a critical tone, Hankyoreh notes Team Lee Myung-Bak’s religious ties (h/t the irreverent Marmot):

The members of the congregation of Somang Church, which is one of the big Presbyterian churches in Seoul and is attended by President-elect Lee Myung-bak, are moving into the spotlight. As Lee works to assemble his transition team and fill important positions in his new administration, the connections he has made through the church he has attended for the past 20 years have increasingly come into play.

Yesterday, Lee Kyung-sook, who is the president of Sookmyung Women’s University, was appointed chairwoman of Lee’s transition team. Both President-elect Lee and Lee Kyung-sook have attended the church for the past 20 years. But she is just one of the people with whom Lee has attended church that he has selected to work in his administration.

Former Vice Finance Minister Kang Man-soo, who is one of Lee’s economic engineers also attends the same church. Kang and Lee first met at the church in 1981. With Lee’s help, Kang took part in a Grand National Party committee aimed at reforming the nation in 2001 and also worked for Lee while he was the mayor of Seoul.

Professor Kwak Seung-jun of Korea University, who is one of the architects of the cross-country canal project, also attends Somang Church, as does independent lawmaker Chung Mong-joon, who supported Lee during his campaign.

According to the leftist media and their anti-Christian allies, this is supposed to be a bad thing, some kind of a nefarious Christian cabal thing. I think selecting people of qualification and academic standing who also share the President-elect’s faith (one that is strongly tied to progress, education, modernity and industry in that “Protestant work ethic” sense in South Korea) is a good thing (another quick caveat: I grew up Presbyterian in Korea although I no longer have that religious affiliation, but I admit I have fondess for the old school Korean Calvinist community). This is especially so compared to the previous administration where a president without a university degree led a group of young, underqualified leftist ideologues who were more interested in “asserting” Korean-ness against the United States and proclaiming “social justice” by waging war on the rich, rather than improving the lives of all Koreans.

There are critics, of course, who argue that Lee’s administration will be elitist or that it will show authoritarian streaks. They are apparently still waiting for the perfect candidate or political movement that combines the egalitarianism of the left with the achievement of the right. But these critics ought to keep in mind that politics is the art of the possible, not the art of impossible perfection.

While I do not condone military dictatorships (after all, freedom is the main reason why I immigrated to the United States), the record is clear. In South Korea, education, competence and, yes, faith have worked — to transform a backward, poor country into a prosperous, advanced industrialized economy.

As the motto of my alma mater goes: In Deo Speramus.