Forget the nukes: real issue taxing Korean minds is reunification. Options include: European-style union, a communist-capitalist merger a la Germany and an idea Hong Kongers will find familiar
I t’s going to take a lot more than passion to bring the two Koreas together, but there was no shortage of ardour when South Korean President Moon Jae-in made the first ever speech by a South Korean leader to the North Korean public.
“Our people are resilient,” said Moon to 150,000 Pyongyang residents at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang last month. “Our people love peace. And our people must live together. We had lived together for five thousand years but apart for just 70 years.”
Since April, when Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held their first inter-Korean summit, the Herculean challenge of North Korean denuclearisation has dominated the world’s attention. But on the Korean peninsula, the spotlight has shone with equal intensity on the steps being taken to complete a potentially even more monumental task: reunifying North and South.
In a Gallup Korea opinion poll last month, 84 per cent of South Koreans said they supported unification, the highest proportion since 2004, with most favouring a gradual process over the next 10 years.
“We expect debate about plans for unification to kick off in earnest in the second half of next year,” said Han Sung, a spokesman for the left-leaning civic group People’s Congress for Peace Federation. “When it comes to plans for unification, the government’s job isn’t important, so much as the role of the citizens.”
With inter-Korean relations at their warmest in years, a growing chorus within South Korean politics, academia and civil society has steered discussion towards various models of political integration with the North – ranging from a federation to a union of states – that would mark the first practical steps toward unification. Among the most hotly debated options are a federal arrangement sometimes likened to the “one country, two systems” agreement that has governed Hong Kong since the territory’s handover from British to Chinese rule; a Korean version of the European Union, said to be preferred by Moon; and absorption by the South that would result in the sort of liberal democracy that arose in Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall – held up by supporters as a textbook example of how to merge a capitalist and communist state.
But each of these visions comes with problems. While both Koreas, and both sides of South Korean politics, officially agree on the need for eventual unification, there is no such consensus on exactly how to get there. It is an ideologically charged and often heated debate in South Korea, where the fundamental political divide is centred on the question of how to manage relations with its bellicose and authoritarian neighbour.
Progressives, for whom Moon and his Democratic Party are standard bearers, see an interim political union with the North as a pathway to permanent peace and reconciliation.
“There is almost no chance of one side caving in most of the way,” said Lee Jae-bong, a professor of political science and diplomacy at Wonkwang University in Iksan, who expects Moon to establish a union before the end of his term in 2022. “Whichever way, there is no chance of one giving up its system and accepting the other. Unification by force is absolutely not desirable. Unification by turning each side into a sea of fire and heap of ashes would be a catastrophe. Is there any other path to peaceful unification, through reconciliation and mutual cooperation, than by a federation?”
Many conservatives, historically wary of engagement with the North, perceive instead the first loose soil heralding the erosion of the democratic South’s liberal values and its eventual subjugation by Pyongyang.
“North Korea doesn’t want to give up its communist party, North Korea doesn’t want to give up its juche ideology [North Korea’s official doctrine of self-reliance],” said Park Syung-je, chairman of the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul. “But they ask us to give up everything for our security. So the question is, what is guaranteed for us? Nothing.”
The outcome of this brewing clash, despite attracting little attention from an outside world preoccupied with the North’s nuclear disarmament, could profoundly shape the future of not just the Korean peninsula, but also the region and beyond.
NATIONAL PRIORITIES
Officially, both Koreas have deemed reunification a national priority almost from the moment the Korean peninsula was divided along the 38th Parallel at the end of the second world war.
Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founding leader, sparked the 1950-1953 Korean war when he attempted to reunify the peninsula by force by launching an invasion of the South. And Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president, proclaimed unification to be of such importance that it should be achieved by military force if necessary.
South Korea’s democratic constitution, ratified in 1987, commits the nation to “seek unification”; North Korea’s socialist document describes reunification as the “supreme national task”. Behind such aspirational clauses, however, looms the daunting reality.
South Korea’s US$1.5 trillion economy, powered by household names like Samsung and Hyundai, is estimated to be 40 to 50 times larger than that of the North. By comparison, West Germany’s economy was about triple the size of East Germany’s when they reunified in 1990. The government-affiliated Institute for Korean Integration of Society has estimated the cost of unification at 15 trillion won (US$13.2 billion) in the first decade alone. Culturally, Koreans on either side of the border have grown apart to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they don’t even speak the same language; the Korean spoken in the South today is so infused with “Konglish” – English-derived words and phrases – that North Korean defectors find themselves having to learn essentially a whole new vocabulary.
Public sentiment is another complication. Although inter-Korean relations are currently at a high point, there is some ambivalence towards unification among the public – particularly among younger South Koreans, who have never known family in the North, and for whom appeals to ethnic kinship can seem abstract next to concerns such as joblessness and rising living costs. In surveys carried out by the Asan Institute between 2011 and 2017, about 25 per cent of South Koreans in their 20s have consistently expressed no interest in unification. As recently as last year, almost half of twenty-somethings told pollsters they viewed the North as either a “stranger” or an “enemy”, far more than in any other age bracket.
“I don’t think people are ready enough to understand and accept each other,” said Ban Jae-hoon, a 28-year-old office worker in Seoul, who views unification as important but has concerns over culture and the economy. “We’d need a long, long time for that.”
THE BINDS THAT TIE
The political challenge of reconciling two diametrically opposed systems is arguably the most daunting of all.
In the South lies one of Asia’s freest and most vibrant democracies, and a market-based economy that has produced a standard of living comparable to that of Italy or Spain. To the North is an impoverished, nominally communist dictatorship where almost every facet of life defers to the conjoined personality cults of Kim Jong-un, his father and grandfather.
In the face of seemingly irreconcilable differences, the North and South have throughout the decades proposed various versions of a federation or union as an interim step towards unification.
In 1973, the year after the North and South signed an agreement renouncing the use of force to achieve reunification, Kim Il-sung unveiled plans for a “Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryo” compromising of “one nation, one state, two systems, and two governments”, in which a federal government would manage diplomacy and defence and regional governments would handle internal affairs.
At the 6th Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in 1980, according to unification policy scholar Park Young-ho, North Korea enshrined the DCRK model as a means to establishing a “national unification government with the equal participation from both sides based on mutual tolerance of differences in ideologies and counterparts’ systems”.
