SEOUL -- Anniversaries are a good time to pause and ask: Where have we been successful and where have we failed? Looking at the past critically is a precondition for avoiding mistakes in the future.

Anniversaries are generally also occasions for celebration. I am not sure, however, whether the members of South Korea's local councils are in a festive mood these days. They do have a reason to celebrate: It is exactly 10 years since the first democratic elections for local councils ended a 30-year-suspension of local autonomy imposed by authoritarian rulers. But it is clear that not all hopes for democracy on the local level have been met since municipal elections were revived. Today, there is even talk of a crisis of local government in South Korea, and some political circles are floating schemes aimed at turning back the clock, abolishing what little local autonomy has been won in the past decade.

The local councils may well be the weakest element of South Korea's local-autonomy system. They are confronted with myriad problems. The main complaint of the approximately 5,500 South Korean councilmen and -women representing the population in the two-tier-system of local government is their obvious lack of political power. "Local councils should be the center of local autonomy," says Kim Yong Rae, a former mayor of Seoul, adding that this is obviously not the case today.

As they compare their influence on local affairs with that of their colleagues in the so-called advanced democracies, local councilors in South Korea have every reason to complain. Their powers are not only curtailed by the central government in Seoul, which over the years has jealously protected the prerogatives of a hyper-centralized authority. On the municipal level, too, the local councils clearly stand in the shadow of the mayors, who are often said to behave like petty kings.

"Local governments in Korea are characterized by strong elected chief executives and weak local councils," says Kim Soon Eun, a professor at Dongeui University in Pusan. Local councilors couldn't agree more, though they put it more strongly. "Mayors are monopolistic and dictatorial; we have no means of checking their powers," said one local councilor at a recent seminar in Seoul.

This state of affairs is problematic for more than one reason. From a democratic viewpoint, local councils represent the heart of local autonomy. Councilors are the democratically elected representatives of the people. Local councils are on the lower level of government what the National Assembly is on the national level. Their primary function is to represent the will of their constituencies, and to check the power of those in government -- in this case the mayors. Given the councils' weakness, it is clear that the system of checks and balances that is so crucial to democracy is seriously flawed in South Korea.

The political impotence of the local councils is also one of the main reasons for the low esteem in which this institution and its representatives are held by the local people. Election turnouts are embarrassingly low, and surveys show that hardly anyone knows his or her council representative woman either in person or by name.

On top of this, energetic citizens' groups effectively challenge the local councils in many municipalities, responding to local concerns in a highly visible manner. It is typical of the dismal state of local autonomy in South Korea that many municipal issues are virtually monopolized by local citizens' groups. In the eyes of many citizens, these grassroots organizations that have patently not been legitimized by democratic elections have replaced the democratically elected local councils as advocates for popular demands.

One of the hot issues in many political discussions these days pertains to the role of the parties in municipal politics. This is not surprising, as next spring's local elections may be considered a political referendum ahead of the crucial presidential elections later in 2002. Political parties are legally entitled to play a role in the elections for upper-tier councils, but are nominally banned from participating in nominating and campaigning for the councils on the lower level (although it is one of the many peculiarities of South Korea's local autonomy system that parties may participate in elections for lower-level mayors).

While some politicians argue in support of party involvement in all local elections, many academics favor a nonpartisan approach. In this instance, I side with the politicians. Considering the paramount role of political parties in South Korean politics, it seems naive to assume that one can keep them out of any electoral contest by law. Instead of banning party involvement in local elections, a liberal answer to the negative effects of partisanship on the local level would be to open up the political parties and democratize them, thus making them more transparent and accountable to local citizens.

Today, a revision of the Local Autonomy Act is once more on the political agenda. Over the past decade, this law, which regulates all local-government affairs in South Korea, has already been rewritten half a dozen times. One focus of the present debate is a proposal to introduce the so-called recall system. This would enable a 30-percent quorum of the electorate to remove an unpopular mayor in a referendum before his term expires. At a first glance, the ruling party's plan looks like a very democratic remedy with which to counter authoritarian mayors. Included in the package, though, is a proposal to strengthen the authority of the deputy heads of local governments. The vice mayors, who already wield considerable power, are not elected, but appointed by the central government. According to one newspaper report, the ruling camp plans to give local councils the right to endorse the appointment of the vice mayors and to extend their responsibilities in setting local budgets, procurements and contracts.

Taken together, this may well be termed a political 10th-anniversary present for South Korea's feeble local councils. But then, skeptics caution, it is still too early to celebrate a major success for South Korea's slow-moving process of political decentralization: "We have 5,000 years of bureaucracy-centered politics in Korea," says Cho Chang Hyun, a leading scholar of local-government studies in South Korea. "This tradition dies hard."