The Jungle Needs a Fence — But Who's Building It?

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won stood up at a business forum in Tokyo this week and said the quiet part out loud: the old World Trade Organization system isn’t coming back, and South Korea and Japan need to build a combined economic community just to survive. For decades, the catechism of the comfortable was that the “jungle” of global competition would naturally sort winners from losers. But when the jungle gets too crowded, the predators start looking for a fence.

Let’s pause for the raised eyebrow. Chey isn’t proposing a bilateral merger because he’s had a sudden conversion to the gospel of solidarity. He’s proposing it because the math has changed. Energy costs are climbing, semiconductors have become geopolitical weapons, and two mid-sized economies can’t absorb the subsidy wars and duplicate supply chains of Washington and Beijing. Together, South Korea and Japan would represent a $6 trillion bloc — with, Chey estimates, another trillion in synergy. That scale isn’t optional; it’s the floor for survival in a world where the U.S. and South Korea are already aligning on nuclear-powered submarine plans and where Beijing is dispatching its leader to Pyongyang to firm up the alliance. The choice isn’t between capitalism and some theoretical utopia. The choice is between being a rule-maker and being a rule-taker.

I won’t pretend this will be easy. Japan and South Korea carry a century of historical grievances that don’t resolve themselves over a joint investment fund. But the mechanism Chey is proposing is boring, unglamorous, and deeply familiar: scale through cooperation. Joint AI and electrification infrastructure to slash costs by 10 to 20 percent. Joint energy purchasing and shared stockpiling. A permanent “big tent” organization coordinating government, political parties, and industry. In other words, he’s talking about building the plumbing.

It is funny how quickly the language of “socialism” evaporates when it’s a conglomerate chairman saying it in a five-star hotel. If you proposed a permanent bilateral authority to coordinate national energy strategy at a town hall in a conservative American state, you’d be accused of wanting to hand the keys to the Kremlin. But when the people selling the phones and the chips say it, it’s called “realpolitik.” The lesson is the same: the invisible hand is fine for buying sandwiches, but it won’t build a grid, and it won’t defend a supply chain in a trade war.

And here is where the eyebrow drops and something colder comes out. Because what Chey is selling is a chaebol-coordinated cartel dressed in the language of cooperation. It’s the wrong common market, built by the wrong people, and it will reproduce the very extractive dynamics a genuine cooperative economy must overcome.

Look at the silence at the heart of this vision. Where are workers, cooperatives, and democratic institutions in the design? The European Union, for all its democratic deficits, at least has a Parliament, a Court of Justice, and a charter of fundamental rights. Chey’s big tent has none. It’s a corporate coordination mechanism, not a polity. A common market built solely to drive costs down for multinational conglomerates will inevitably externalize costs onto labor and the environment. Chey says energy costs must fall “for the basic costs of society to fall.” But the mechanism he proposes — joint purchasing and stockpiling — is about buyer-side pricing power, not public ownership of energy. A cooperative common market would place energy infrastructure under democratic control, using the bloc’s scale to build a shared renewable grid and phase out the fossil fuel dependency that makes both nations vulnerable to Middle Eastern instability. Chey’s model leaves the extractive supply chains intact and just haggles harder.

The semiconductor and AI ambitions are even more revealing. Chey wants to strengthen the ecosystem so “it would become difficult for any country to pressure our two countries.” That’s nationalist industrial policy framed as defensive resilience — but it’s being led by a conglomerate whose interest is vertical integration and market dominance. A cooperative approach would structure joint semiconductor investment as a public trust, governed by a regional technology cooperative with worker and community representation, ensuring that the gains from AI are distributed through shorter working weeks and expanded social provision, not channeled into corporate profits.

And that promised 10 to 20 percent cost reduction from joint building? The efficiency gain is real — building infrastructure at larger scale routinely brings down unit costs. But who captures the saving? Under Chey’s plan, it goes straight to the bottom lines of the companies holding the contracts. In a cooperative economic community, those savings are reinvested in the social wage: universal childcare, income security for gig workers, and collective transport. The difference is not marginal; it’s the entire political economy.

The model Chey is reaching for — the bloc — is exactly the logic that built the infrastructure the American middle class still relies on, and then promptly forgot. The rural electric cooperatives that brought power to roughly 42 million Americans didn’t do it by waiting for an investor-owned utility to find a profit margin in the Dakotas. They did it by forming a bloc. They pooled their capital, they bought generation jointly, they lobbied as one. It wasn’t magic; it was the recognition that a single homeowner has zero leverage, but a federation of nine hundred co-ops has the leverage of a small nation.

Imagine a South Korea-Japan Cooperative Council with parity between worker federations, community land trusts, and regional governments, tasked with developing a common market that harmonizes labor standards upward, guarantees supply chain due diligence, and runs cross-border sectoral bargaining. That would be a real economic community. Chey’s version is a business lobby with state backing.

The case for a common market between Seoul and Tokyo is overwhelming. The two economies face identical structural pressures: aging populations, high energy import dependence, and the risk of being crushed between Beijing and Washington. The dream of returning to the old WTO-led order is a fantasy. But the path Chey charts — corporate consolidation under the banner of cooperation — is a dead end. It will concentrate power, suppress wages, and hollow out democratic control.

You cannot copy-paste a genuine common market. The institutional trust, the political will, the actual “big tent” — that’s the iceberg beneath the policy tip, and it takes decades to build. But the first sentence is the hardest, and Chey just wrote it: We need more size.

So what gets built? When the market fails to provide security, you don’t retreat; you organize. You build the joint purchasing authority — but you put it under democratic governance, not the conglomerate that supplies the parts. You federate the grid — but as a public trust, not a private monopoly with a diplomatic passport. You stop pretending that economic sovereignty means every family pays full price for its own energy and every company fights alone for its supply chain. The menu has more than two items. It isn’t the gulag, and it isn’t the lonely, unprotected strip-mine. It isn’t even the chaebol’s gated community. It’s the cooperative commonwealth. And if the people who own the strip-mines are building a fence, maybe it’s time the rest of us started building something better on the land.