1
Imagining what will have to happen before the Western commentariat begins taking Korean nationalism seriously is an instructive exercise. I thought the two leaders’ trip to Mount Paektu on September 20 might do the trick. But foreigners are still talking only of Moon’s peace-minded pragmatism and Kim’s desire for security guarantees and investment.
Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.
In North Korean studies the fallacy of a failed communist state renders this tendency more extreme. Attention focuses squarely on economic matters, as it doesn’t in discussion of the Iranian nuclear crisis. Despite the Koreas’ long competition for nationalist legitimacy (which the South abandoned in May 2017) the relative power of the two states is grasped in numbers of missiles, tanks, soldiers. As a result the South, or at least the ROK-US alliance, is assumed to enjoy a solid advantage over the North.
If you discuss not quantifiable power but unquantifiable authority and legitimacy, and assert that inter-Korean relations are informed not just by economic and security concerns but also by ideological affinity, and you back everything up with texts from both political cultures, you will be accused of taking a “literary” approach, or having no methodology at all. Rather than try to refute you, people will accuse you of “cherry-picking” texts, as a Redditer accused me the other day of doing.
Odd how these people never pick any countervailing cherries, let alone the bushel of them needed to prove I’m deviously seeking out the anomalous ones. Has the Moon administration ever expressed opposition to confederation?
I am also taken to task on Reddit for my “outdated” views on South Korea. This has become shorthand for “denying that the nationalist left is maturer and wiser, thus a better ally of the US, than it was in the naive Sunshine Policy era.” Call into doubt Moon’s commitment to denuclearization, and you’re behind the times.
My views were thus called outdated last January by one of two people who asserted months later that Moon Jae-in was more security-conservative than Kim Dae-Jung. I predicted a while back that this wishful myth would not survive the summer (which ended last Friday), but I’ve overestimated the commentariat before. In any case, nothing is more old-fashioned than all this complacency about the alliance.
Anger at my imputation of a league drive to the Blue House implies a moralizing rejection of league itself. Many Americans seem to consider the North too awful, too irredeemably a giant gulag, for the South ever to think of joining hands with it. Clearly they have an even lower opinion of the North than I do. By liberal-democratic standards too there are worse places. If I had to send my hypothetical teenage daughter to live somewhere else for a year as an average citizen, and had to rank all the countries in the world according to my preference, North Korea would not be in the bottom thirty.
More to the point: Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there any more than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.
Some observers regard the word nationalism (now a pejorative in the West) as inappropriate for what they see as a natural, healthy yearning to make the peninsula whole again. But a distinction must be made between:
a) feelings of ethnic community, pride in a shared cultural tradition, and a sense of special humanitarian duty to one’s own people, all of which West Germans felt in 1989-90 despite being generally anti-nationalist, and
b) an ideological commitment to raising the stature of one’s race on the world stage.
What holds South Korean nationalists together is b) and not a). This can be seen by their inordinate horror of the financial and social disruptions of unification, which in the past has actuated deliberate exaggeration of the likely costs, and which still induces many Moon-supporters to propose maintaining a one-nation, two-state system indefinitely. We see it also in the general indifference to human rights abuses in the North, and in the great pleasure and pride the ROK’s envoys showed last week at being in the dictator’s presence.
To be fair to my critics on Reddit and Twitter, I can see how my comparison of the two Koreas to a betrothed couple might have seemed “hyperbolic.” But it was Moon Jae-in himself last week who recalled, in all seriousness, how he and Kim Jong Un had held hands in April “like warm-hearted lovers” (tajŏng-han yŏn’in ch’ŏrŏm).
2
In North Korea, government-directed campaigns tend to manifest themselves first in inner-track propaganda before moving with time into news outlets prominent enough for foreigners to be monitoring.
It’s getting like that here too. After several months of bubbling under the mainstream media, while the Blue House talked airily of a “peace system,” support for league-confederation is now expressed straightforwardly in the Hankyoreh newspaper, known to the West as a “liberal daily.”
The topic’s full-blown emergence in outer-track discourse began in late August. In Pressian, for example, Professor Yi Chae-bong of Wonkwang University could be found saying:
It is when discussing North Korea’s proposal for unification through confederation in the course of giving testimony at court that I get a little tense, while at the same time feeling the greatest sense of pleasure and reward. In South Korea someone who supports the proposal can easily end up excoriated as a “grade A, North-following leftist” or be punished for “treasonous behavior,” but in front of judges and prosecutors I unashamedly support and propagandize for unification by confederation.
He says he keeps up the propaganda work wherever he goes, so obviously it’s not easy to get in trouble for it after all. These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail. But for over 20 years now the fun of moving up in the world while striking rebellious poses has been the great perk of being on the nationalist left.
August 31 saw Chŏng Se-hyŏn, a known mentor to the president, telling the Maeil Kyŏngje that only by raising a North-South economic community to the level of a league can the peninsula hold its own in negotiation with the US and China. The attitude to the alliance implicit in this matter-of-fact talk bears reflecting upon.
The ball really got rolling with the publication of the Fall 2018 issue of Ch’angjak-kwa pip’yong (The Quarterly Changbi, it calls itself in English), which contained a lead-off article on North-South league by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng, the editor emeritus.
A mentor to Moon Jae-in and an icon on the nationalist left, Paek was among the movers and shakers who joined the president on his trip to Pyongyang. At the start of his much-promoted, much-praised essay, which bears the title “What kind of North-South League is to be made?”, he says what I get called “conspiratorial” for saying:
The immediate goal of the Korean peninsula is “a low-level North-South league.”
A quick review of the terminology: Plain confederation was what the North called for in 1960, when it lifted the idea from Walter Ulbricht’s proposal for a German-German Konföderation. In the 1980s the South, eager to palliate Kim Il Sung, began proposing a league, a word which in Korean sounds much looser. The North then tried to reassure South Koreans it wanted a low-level confederation. And now the Moon camp speaks of a low-level league, thus implying something more reassuring still.
I will recur to Paek’s article below, but for the most part it repeats assertions of his that I have discussed in earlier posts.
League-confederation hype increased in September as the opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office drew closer. A headline in the Hankyoreh on September 12 read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article two days later reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun, albeit on a beginning level.” On September 13 Pressian held a conference at which various professors called for a league.
On September 14 the Kaesong office opened. Ch’oi Kyŏnghwan, an assemblyman from the Democratic Peace Party, greeted the event with a press statement picked up by numerous outlets:
The opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office is historically significant in that it opens the way to a North-South league, the first stage of unification.
As seems to be standard in talk of this matter, Ch’oi hearkened back to Kim Dae Jung:
The peaceful-unification plan of President Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy foresaw North-South league as a first stage, North-South confederation as a second, and complete unification as a third.
For all intents and purposes the Democratic Peace Party is the Jeolla party, but Ch’oi’s reference to the region’s most famous son is meant to reassure the entire public that nothing radical is being planned. Ch’oi also said that the North-South league (nambuk yŏnhap) must pave the way for a Korea league (k’oria yŏnhap) — whatever he means by that exactly.
The many articles published this month attest to a good deal of confusion about what North-South league entails, and what must precede or follow it. Is it more or less the same thing as confederation, as Moon Jae-in said in 2017? Or is it a stage on the way there? Is it in de facto operation already? In other words, is the Kaesong office the first stage in the systematization of the league (as Paek and the Hankyoreh assert), or the starting point on the road to it (as the Kyunghyang Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21 put it)? And is league the first stage of unification, or just a step in that direction? How fast is the end goal to be achieved?
I can find no serious debate on any of these points. Perhaps this is the great strength of the nationalist left. Those who approve of current developments generally get along fine, regardless of how differently they interpret them. Moon can thus float above the supportive discussion without having to pin himself down to any plan in particular.
3
Focusing on denuclearization as always, the Western commentariat generally downplayed the importance of the third Pyongyang summit.
Washington is thinking, “Let them have their get-togethers; we’re going to maintain sanctions until the North has to yield.” Seoul and Pyongyang are thinking, “Let them maintain their sanctions; we’re going to keep coming closer together until America has to yield.”
Near the top of the summit declaration was the statement that the two leaders had “reconfirmed the principles of ethnic autonomy and self-determination.” Most of the other points can also be interpreted in the context of league-building or league-preparing. But all these things had almost certainly been agreed to in advance.
The main point of holding the summit and the attendant photo ops was to habituate the South Korean public to the notion of the North as a normal, legitimate state, one fit to be trusted and leagued up with. The right wing here was therefore wrong to gloat over the lack of public interest in the event. Normalcy is supposed to be boring.
There was method even in Moon’s fulsome expressions of gratitude for the welcome he had received. He was in effect playing along with Kim Jong Un’s pretense that the citizens of Pyongyang had come out in droves on a weekday because they wanted to.
Were the South Korean president the liberal our journalists think he is, he would have insisted in advance that he not get the welcome accorded to Kim Dae Jung in 2000, who had realized at once who the crowds were really cheering for, and who later publicized the Dear Leader’s admission that they hadn’t lined the roads on their own initiative.
Instead Moon professed to be thrilled that this time, people were waving even from apartment windows. Is this because he is more naive and vain? Not at all. Unlike DJ he has a league to help build, and a dictatorship to help legitimize.
He must now ensure a respectful reception for his counterpart in December. This next milestone in the process may serve as a pretext for “regulating” conservative Youtubers, something the Moon-loyal media have been agitating for with increasing stridence.
September has also seen a concerted effort to downplay the Kim regime’s resemblance to a monarchy or a chaebol clan, which is the one aspect of the North that rubs even sympathetic people here the wrong way. Appearing on TBS Radio soon after his return from Pyongyang, Pak Chi-wŏn of the Democratic Peace Party said in regard to Kim Jong Un’s sister:
It’s because she’s of the Paektu bloodline that she hasn’t achieved the prominence merited by her ability …. It’s completely different from Park Geun-hye, who achieved much more prominence than her ability warranted.
So although Park came to power in a free and democratic election with a majority of votes, the ROK’s system is more rigged and nepotistic than the North’s, where blood-ties to the leader are more of a hindrance than a help. Pak’s interviewer Kim Ŏ-jun, a prominent Moon-loyal journalist, chimed in with:
[Kim Yo-jong] is highly regarded in North Korea too. Not because she’s his sister, but because of her ability.
I especially like that “too.” We can expect much more in this vein as Kim Jong Un’s visit draws near.
4
Let me return, by way of a conclusion, to Paek Nak-ch’ŏng’s essay. In it he reiterates a point he has already made a few times this year: A league must precede denuclearization, since it’s the only true guarantee against the “great threat” now posed by the “very existence of South Korea.” I must repeat my clarification that neither the ROK-US alliance nor the ROK’s arsenal is meant. He means the political threat to the Kim regime posed by the subversive contiguity of an independent co-ethnic state, one that periodically elects North-critical presidents.
Paek says that in a league the Koreas will “arrive at a situation in which large-scale change becomes inevitable in South Korean society as well.”
Both sides will see big change all right, but on very different fronts. If the whole point of a league is to make the Kim dictatorship feel perfectly secure, the North will see little more than economic and technological change, a rise in its material standard of living. The large-scale change Paek envisions for the South, though he is discreet enough not to come right out and say so, can only be of the threat-nullifying, political-cultural sort.
Impossible to believe? I wish it was. While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier.
We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on.
UPDATE (5 October 2018)
I must confess to liking Park Won-sun, the mayor of Seoul, who has done much to relieve the plight of stray dogs and cats over the past several years, thereby setting an example for Busan and other cities. When you take the animals’ side in the war being waged against them, as I do, you gain a certain emotional distance from inter-human affairs, which can be an asset when researching a foreign country.
But readers who think I underestimate the South Korean nationalist left’s interest in human rights and overestimate its admiration for the North’s political culture should find the mayor’s remarks in the English Chosun eye-opening. Having just returned from the North, he said:
“I thought that we must preserve Pyongyang. It took almost 10,000 people just a few seconds to flip from one scene to the next. This is something you can see only in North Korea.”
When one reporter pointed out that some people feel uncomfortable watching the eerily synchronized display of conformity, Park said, “That’s because it’s their first time. We should be able to resolve [differences] if we see each other more often.”
So resolving differences means that South Koreans must get used to the aspects of the North they now find problematic, like its exploitation of children to political and economic ends.
To repeat a point I’ve made often in the past: The North’s mass games and tile displays are not communist exercises in the grinding-down of individuality, as the West misperceives them, but ultra-nationalist celebrations of ethnic homogeneity and unity. This doesn’t make the Moon camp’s sincere enthusiasm for these spectacles — or their regret that they are not replicable in the South — any easier to reconcile with liberal-democratic principles.
In other league-building news, South Korea’s prime minister is strengthening my hunch that Kim Jong Un’s visit will be preceded by a crackdown on strong criticism of the Moon administration (and of its North Korea policy in particular).
Western Pyongyang watchers tend to outsource judgment to institutions, as the Tyranny scandal has shown; we mustn’t presume to judge the clear evidence ourselves, but must leave that task to Columbia University and Cornell University Press while we go on citing pages riddled with indisputably fake sources. The same mindset dictates that the opinions of people not degreed, titled, or affiliated to any swanky institution are beneath notice. (I was just sneered at on Twitter for having responded in the above blog post to criticism from anonymous Redditers.)
When the time comes, therefore, Moon’s foreign supporters will likely shrug off measures against mere Youtubers as a needed check on all the kooks shouting “Fire!” in the peninsular movie theater. In fact the most popular commentators were, until very recently, respected contributors to TV panel discussions and the op-ed pages of the Donga or Joongang. They are not extremists. Jeong Gyu-je and Hwang Jang-su have been subjected to foul-mouthed insults from the actual far right for their criticisms of Park Geun-hye and other conservative politicians.
I reject the conventional notion that all this crackdown talk marks at worst a return to, or a lack of progress from, the last administration’s alleged intolerance of dissident speech. At the very least those were more pluralist times than these. Has everyone forgotten that in 2014 Park Geun-hye appointed to her Unification Preparatory Council none other than Moon Chung-in? Has everyone forgotten how her Unification Ministry used to invite some of her harshest critics to an annual conference of Pyongyang watchers?
In fact we are seeing here something new: the first stage of the “large-scale change” in South Korean society that the nationalist left, by its own admission, considers necessary for the coming “peace system.”
UPDATE (28 October 2018): The Foreign Press Finally Takes Notice
Kudos to John Power and the South China Morning Post for what is by far the best and most important English-language article on Korea to have come out since Moon Jae-in took power in May 2017. I’m not going to pretend to wonder why it had to be written by someone outside the foreign press corps in Seoul. The Blue House’s astute bridling of that lot would make a great story in itself – but who would dare write it?
I only wish Power hadn’t described North Korea as a communist country. This fallacy is bound to obscure the inherent precariousness of the very un-China-like set-up which — to hear some on the nationalist left tell it — is already in the first stage of de facto operation.
It shouldn’t be long now before the rest of the Western press kicks in with flippant “A League of Their Own” headlines, and cocksure optimism from the same experts who refused for so long to believe that any of this was being seriously considered.
I expect to hear everything spun as our loyal ally’s bold but pragmatic effort at subversively engaging the North, and boosting the South’s own economy in the process.
But what we’re talking about here is a confederation between a proud, resolute, ultra-nationalist state and an admiring, avowedly pacifist, moderate-nationalist one. No great gift of intuition is needed to predict that Kim Jong Un, not Moon Jae-in, will be the gardener guiding and shaping the inosculation of the two states.
In the meantime even those in Washington who refuse to accept the ideological realities must ponder the grotesqueness of our having an ally that is now, or very soon will be, quite literally in league with our adversary.
And a nuclearized adversary at that. The Moon camp has made abundantly clear — even if the Blue House hasn’t — that league or confederation must come before the denuclearization of the North, for only such a union would give Pyongyang the security it craves.
