Hofstra University’s Professor Julian Ku explains the various factors at play influencing Korean reunification.
Hofstra University’s Professor Julian Ku explains the various factors at play influencing Korean reunification. Following is a transcript of the video.
Julian Ku: Unification is way down the road, so that’s the ultimate goal that everyone says they want, but no one thinks they’re very close to that.
South Korea is so much wealthier, more powerful, it’s just a totally different type of country than North Korea now that it’s hard to imagine them unifying in any sort of easy way. The societies have grown so far apart, so I think that the South Koreans would see North Korea as a burden, they’d have to invest an enormous amount of money to rebuild North Korea, reeducate, or at least deal with the costs of unification.
We have a country essentially living in a dark period where they have very little internet access. It’s not like any other country in the world; North Korea is one of the most isolated, closed off, totalitarian societies in the world. South Korea, on the flip side, is one of the most open, free, technologically savvy societies in the world.
So, to combine those seems almost unbelievable, especially the younger generations in both countries have really no memory of any connection between the two sides. There’s not a huge amount of popular support in South Korea for unification. People talk about it as it’s something that’s great, but they I think recognize how different the countries are and how unbelievably costly and difficult an actual unification would be.
The main obstacles, I think, are North Korea’s difficult relations with all the other countries besides South Korea, and that includes the United States and China.
