I can understand a divided nation always yearns for unification, the cultural ties run so deep and rich.
I see in the news today they are tearing down things in what seems like more steps toward a unified Korea.
Any idea what they’re aiming for? What’s that gonna look like? Where’s Kim Jung fit in? What could he gain? Why exactly would the South risk so much? Won’t they be carrying the entire financial weight going forward?
Care to guess how it might come together? Because I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts, as I’m currently wildly imagining all sorts of things!
It’s not going to happen, so I wouldn’t be sweating it too much. The South doesn’t want 25 million impoverished people who have no concept of the outside world mucking up their first-world democracy. South Koreans could expect lower wages as the market gets flooded with labor and much higher taxes to get the North up to even a quasi-respectable level and for what gain exactly? It would be like if tomorrow Mexico said it wanted to join the US. Sure, we have some historical and even some cultural ties and a few people might think it would be nice to own the Riviera Maya, but we don’t really want 130 million randos mucking with our government and screwing with our economy and Mexico is a heck of a lot more developed and has had much more experience with democracy than North Korea. It’s the 15th largest GDP in the world and we wouldn’t want to unify with them. Imagine having to unify with a country that is like the 120th. Just not a lot of upside to the merger.
The only way I could see it maybe (and this is a big maybe) happening is if the North was somehow made a territory of the South and some sort of phased citizenship plan went into place over 30 or 40 years. Otherwise, I think everyone is content with roughly the status quo although they’d like a little less belligerence from the North. I also think that the window for reunification is rapidly closing. The older generation still has ‘the feels’ for their Northern kin. The younger generation doesn’t give a rip about them (relatively speaking of course.) When South Korean “Millennials” take over government, there’s an effectively zero chance at reunification.
NK is much worse off, relative to SK, economically and politically than East Germany was to West Germany, from all I’ve read. And Kim Jong-un is arguably a worse tyrant and more dangerous person than anyone who ever led East Germany; I really doubt he would ever peacefully relinquish power, and don’t forget that he’s got nukes. Reunification, if it ever comes, is going to be a mess.
The best solution would be something like the Marshall Plan, funded by South Korea, US, China, and Japan. Each would invest an equal amount to rebuild infrastructure, educate the populace, and develop agriculture, industry, and commerce. Something like $10 billion per year.
Replace the current regime with a new constitution-based system, with a twenty-year timeline until reunification. Have an elected legislature and executive, but legates from each of the four powers with vetoes. Disband and replace the North Korean military with South Koreans. No American, Chinese, or Japanese troops.
Give the current leadership a cushioned escape to someplace in Europe and immunity to prosecution. It’s not just, but it would ease the transition.
Possibility of the above happening: extremely slim. Although, it is in the best interest of the four powers, getting their agreement and removing the current regime is extremely difficult.
Note that Kim Jong-un’s goal is to take over the South. That’s it. He will never give up any control of the North. So a significant regime change has to occur in the North before any semblance of re-unification can take place (barring war).
Trying to get the South to lower its defenses along the border is just a current tactic to achieve his goal.
If (and that’s a big if), someday a group takes out the Kims and tries to update the country, re-unification will be a long way down the road. They have to completely re-educate the population about how things in a normal country work. That could take quite a few years.
South Korea doesn’t want to spend 2-3 trillion to fix the damage done by the Kim family regime.
I’d guess what will happen is North Korea becomes a global territory administered by South Korea, Japan China and the United States. They keep their borders but are occupied.
Nobody wants to absorb a nation of sick, poor, brainwashed, ignorant, unproductive slaves. The world will probably try to help North Korea rebuild while not actually absorbing them into South Korea until several decades of rebuilding have occurred already.
The funny thing about this is how little it’s discussed publicly in South Korea, the country which more than any other would have to make an arrangement work somehow, nor in big power countries (China, US) that would be expected to take a leading role helping, or international organizations that would.
As already mentioned. It couldn’t possibly be an immediate unification with full internal travel and voting rights of NK’ans, and generous exchange rate for existing North Korean money (as happened in Germany). As everyone knows, the NK population is too high as % of the ROK population and too much poorer relative to the ROK population, as compared to the E/W Germany situation, for that to work.
Then again, it’s hard to see how you could flood NK with enough aid to prevent a mass migration without shooting people, either the NK govt still doing that, or the Chinese or South Koreans having to do it. Or else you’d still have a very large migration, even if the NK situation was improving as fast as it conceivably could.
The Kim dynasty or some very similar replacement would be willing to keep the population imprisoned, but then again how could it keep legitimacy under a plan of huge outside aid which is an admission of its total failure. This was the basic problem with any post-Communist E. German regime: why in the hell do you even exist? The reason for instant unification which not everybody wanted even in that relatively easier case. That part would be the same I think, as different as the situation is otherwise. Hard as it might be for outsiders to understand, the Kim dynasty has some legitimacy among the NK population now. Rules by fear also, has apparently somewhat limited control now in parts of the country far from Pyongyang, but at least the memory of the previous Kim’s, especially Kim Il-sung, has some meaning to people. Defectors through struggling to explain the logic, often say this.
Maybe that’s why it’s not talked about, nobody knows a way it could work.
That might be what some news websites or other ‘experts’ say, but I don’t buy it. Kim Jung Un’s okay with simply surviving as the head of North Korea. Seriously, for all the fear mongering over North Korea, taking over the South isn’t as easy as people think. The South Koreans have American military hardware and training, and for now, they have allies, including America. It would be the end of North Korea if they tried taking over the South, and North Korea knows it. North Korea just doesn’t want to be taken over. They act out because they want the US to understand that they can’t be controlled with sanctions or embargoes or whatever other forms of pressure the US can inflict on the North.
It was a priority for the current generation in power and the earlier ones, but it’s less of a priority for the generation coming up. They don’t have any personal memories of people from the North, and they do understand it’s not going to be easy or cheap. There really is a question of how much they’d be willing to do for reunification if push came to shove.
Perhaps we could combine the two notions in some way. Give Kim a big enough payout to ensure his continuing comfort levels, but also give him some kind of symbolic power position in a new government. No actual power, but something with the trappings of power, like the Governor General in Canada. Let him prance around as the titular head of the reformed NK while we work to bring NK up to a standard where it can actually reunify with SK without it being a complete disaster.
We know such a process would probably take decades, so Kim would have decades of just playing around as Supreme Big Honcho, with enough money to make that fun, which makes it more likely that he’ll accept this plan.
Of course, any such plan would require a mature, phased-in approach that to people like Trump would appear “weak”, and make it look like we were “losing” to Kim and NK, so this plan won’t actually happen.
Nobody knows what he actually wants or thinks is realistic. But just in terms of capability not intentions, the somewhat plausible way for DPRK to achieve dominance over ROK is: build an intercontinental nuclear capability. Use it giving it up as a bargaining chip to break the ROK/US alliance and get the US out of Korea to avoid a direct threat to itself. Then hold a shorter ranged nuclear capability over the ROK.
Now, would or will this work? Not necessarily. It’s not clear the US (under any President, it doesn’t need to devolve to politics) could be leveraged out that way. It’s not clear the ROK would never build its own nuclear capability in time (the ROK’s time to a nuclear capability starting from no nuclear weapons program would probably be among the handful of shortest ones in the world). But it’s a heroic assumption to proclaim that Kim knows that strategy could, or will if the’s actual reason for the NK ICBM program, never work. It’s a somewhat aggressive assumption that it actually never could work. It assumes a determination to counter it on US/ROK side which might be overestimated in the ‘rational free world’, as opposed to Kim being the one who is deluded.
Both sides say they want reunification, but neither actually means it. We should be entirely in favor of anything that reduces tension. However, we should not assume that these gestures will lead to an actual reunification. (Nobody talks about it because nobody takes it seriously.)
The North’s strategic calculus is premised ENTIRELY on the long-term stability and survival of the regime. That’s it. They don’t give a shit about the people, or reunification, or the economy, or any of that other nonsense. Any steps they take towards disarmament or de-escalation are useful only insofar as they pursue that goal. I don’t believe there is a ‘golden parachute’ option for the regime leadership, although I’m sure some fellow dictators might be willing to take them in. The North’s pattern is pretty clear. They escalate hostility, sometimes even to the point of launching small-scale attacks, and then extort some kind of concessions in return for de-escalation. Trump just gave them a pretty huge PR win recently. If they are de-escalating it’s because they see it as necessary in the short term. When they need aid or PR or whatever they will just resume escalation and nuclear tests.
Anyway… Assuming we could wave a magic wand and see North Korea give up overnight, the South would face the huge challenge of having to incorporate the North’s population, many of whom don’t understand even the basics of living in a modern society. North Korea’s people are not as isolated or ignorant as many assume, but they are still far behind the power curve and would be a massive liability.
Others have mentioned this already, but what I don’t see much mention of is China. The conventional wisdom is that China does not want a nuclear war on its border, but neither does it want the regime to collapse. North Korea borders a region China considers to be it’s restive heartland. A regime collapse - even a peacefully managed one - would provoke a refugee crisis they don’t want to deal with, in a region they consider stable and secure. What’s worse is that they don’t want a wealthy, democratic, US-aligned country on their border. I’ll admit that this is a bit of a mystery to me, as I think the odds of a US-China war are nonexistent and the benefits of having a land route for trade to and from South Korea would be very pragmatic. But China’s problem is ideological, not practical. They aren’t afraid of being invaded, but they ARE afraid of being infected with things like ‘democracy’ and ‘ideas.’ I’ll admit that I start from the biased position of actually caring about freedom and autonomy, so my ability to understand China’s perspective is limited.
China knows it is trapped among bad options. If the regime fails (peacefully or otherwise) they consider it a ‘loss’ in their minds. If the regime starts a war, that’s even worse. The least-terrible option is to just maintain the status quo by expressing public displeasure with the regime but nonetheless giving them enough assistance and top cover so as to avoid any real consequences. If the regime did collapse for some reason I imagine China would use military forces to create some kind of buffer area under the pretenses of ‘humanitarian assistance’ or whatever.
First, nobody knows Kim’s real intentions or view of reality in any detail. Saying his ambition is absolutely limited to maintaining the status quo is a projection of people’s own ideas of what would make sense as they know the situation if they were him. They aren’t him, don’t necessarily see the situation as he does, and in some cases don’t seem to have an 100% accurate view of what can be known from an outside POV.
Second, the huge difficulty in any kind of gentle transition, because if it’s ‘gentle’ enough not to strictly deport any NK emigrants back there, it won’t avoid a big downside of a messy collapse: a big migration of people out of NK. This is perhaps slightly less problematic for China than a collapse because in a collapse as of now the NK/SK border would still be effectively sealed and the mass migration almost all to China. In a smooth 20 yr or whatever transition toward unification ‘when the NK population is really ready’ the NK/SK border might not be as effectively sealed and again the problem is the perhaps several million people who’d want to short circuit the smooth transition by leaving to find work in the ROK on Day 1 of whatever new NK policy did not prevent it. The ROK needs not only to arrange paying for this 20 yr transition but making it illegal to cross and having the political will to deport everyone who tries, probably eventually having to harm people. As of now it’s the opposite: everyone who makes it to SK from NK (though mainly via China up to now) gets to stay. Not a big problem because not many make it.
Until about 1980, South Korea and North Korea were comparable economies. Then capitalism defeated communism and communist sponsors like the USSR and China stopped subsidizing the North Korean economy. Its not like they don’t have factories or people who know how to work in them. The problem is the government. Noone would trust this regime to protect property rights so no one will invest in North Korea. The bureaucracy is also a nightmare when you don’t actually have rule of law.
So in order for reunification to occur, we need rule of law and strong property rights. There is no reason why north Korea cannot experience the same sort of growth that China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. have experienced.
More like the early-mid 70’s, SK was well ahead by 1980, though nothing like later on. And NK’s previously stagnant GDP per capita fell by around 1/2 in the 1990’s not necessarily much to do with the end of Communism in Europe but anyway. The PRC only passed NK in per capital GDP in the 1990’s.
Anyway it stands to reason that the North Koreans, being Koreans, could do the same thing South Korea did. It’s an even closer parallel than other generally Confucian societies. But, the same side of that coin is a major obstacle. An ROK-emulating DPRK govt would face a basic question why it should exist as a separate govt at all. And the liberalization would probably have to include freer movement, so why then wouldn’t North Koreans just move to South Korea, loads of them. The ROK didn’t have this problem, emulating Japan economically didn’t make Koreans ask why they shouldn’t just merge with Japan or move there themselves. Nor did China have this problem as much, Taiwan is too small.
Theoretically, emulating China would be the ideal path for the Kim dynasty, rapid economic growth but the existing ruling clique* keeps a monopoly on political power. The Kims haven’t been blind to what has happened in China and would surely like it to happen in NK. But even if the model is that much different, they face the same threat from liberalization by the very existence and example of South Korea. China’s (generally assumed) negative view of an ROK controlled entity on the border isn’t the same degree of a problem. Those are Koreans, the Chinese Communist Party bases its legitimacy on Chinese nationalism. What does an even somewhat liberalizing NK regime base its legitimacy on? This has been a big reason that economic reforms in NK have been so limited, on and off, stepping forward and back. It’s not pure stupidity or insanity, though you can’t eliminate either as also part of the answer.
*though in fairness the Chinese Communist Party is a somewhat more real organization in its own right than the Korean Labor Party which is just a front for the Kim family dynasty.
You don’t buy what? Among the experts who concur that this is North Korea’s goal are journalists like Suki Kim who had the rare opportunity to live and work in North Korea (under cover as an English teacher to the children of the ruling class) and to become immersed in its culture. Among the propaganda that the North Korean regime incessantly pounds into the people is the idea that there is only one Korea and that Kim Jong Un is the rightful leader of all of it, north and south. Whether the North can ever realistically achieve this is a different matter, but that this is the story line and Dear Leader’s vision is indisputable.
