1
A while ago a South Korean journalist called and asked if he could spin out my stalker-bodyguard story in one of his Youtube editorials. This got me thinking it could use an update.
As of last April, the stalker and stalkee are engaged. The former no longer seems so hostile to Sam, the bodyguard of his intended. The two even went to a restaurant for lunch.
“Let me have your guns,” Sam said on that cheerful occasion, “and I’ll help fix up your house.”
Although the stalker puts on an amenable front, he has less reason than ever to comply. He will need that arsenal to keep his intended from getting cold feet, and the bodyguard from intervening. He also knows that once the marriage has been consummated, if not sooner, Sam will be out of the picture.
Since the ceremony is to take place in the next few years, the stalker promises to relinquish his guns one by one within — the next few years. If Sam gets rid of his too.
“We understand each other,” says the bodyguard with a sigh of relief. “So take your time, there’s no great rush.”
You see, he’s only dimly aware of what his client and the stalker are planning. That it might have some bearing on the gun issue hasn’t sunk in yet. Nor has it occurred to the neighbors, who gossip only about the stalker-bodyguard relationship, as if Sam’s client were a mere go-between.
Not exactly Animal Farm is it, or The Pilgrim’s Progress? A good allegory makes internal sense whether you get the significatio or not, but my only plausible character is the stalker. The romance? Preposterous. Sam’s rapid cognitive decline goes unexplained. Most incredible of all is the neighbors’ indifference to the planned nuptials.
But look at what I have to work with. North Korea kept harassing the South, and one day they just clicked: Tell me that isn’t a stalker’s dream writ geopolitical. Tell me Trump is shrewder than Sam. If you think I underestimate American interest in what Pyongyang and Seoul are working on, go read the latest writing on the nuclear crisis.
I suspect that even analysts who’ve heard mention of North-South confederation try not to think of it, because they sense dimly what it will mean for the conventional wisdom, their wisdom.
There must be some people in our huge embassy here, I used to tell myself, who are not just devising new ways to make visitors feel unwelcome. Now I’ve begun doubting whether anyone is conveying home what needs to be conveyed. In DC not long ago I encountered a senior official who reacted skeptically to my mention of President Moon’s pledge to hitch up the two Koreas. “When?” he challenged, “When did Moon say that?” We goggled at each other for a moment. I think the incredulity was greater on my side.
2
Feel free to say league (yŏnhap) instead of confederation (yŏnbangje) if you want to believe the South’s term sounds more moderate. Just remember that Moon Jae-in himself sees “no real difference” between the two concepts. There’s certainly none from a security standpoint. No matter how loosely the Koreas are linked, the South will have to lower its guard in a big way. The presumably earlier event of a peace treaty or formal end to hostilities would itself eliminate the justification for a US troop presence, as prominent members of the Moon camp have admitted.
A few American pundits try to excuse their incuriosity about these matters by saying that league would at most be a fancy name for a heightened Sunshine Policy. Apart from an inability to read the relevant discussion in the relevant language, this betokens a failure to think things through. It’s like the refusal to consider how the North could survive for long as the poorer of two economy-first Koreas.
The reason intelligent yet unreflective people set the tone in this discussion is because that type dominates in the relevant walks of life. Reflection works against sociability, conformism and respect for received opinion, all of which qualities are prized as highly in journalism and government as in academia. Interrupting discussion of the week’s hard facts to question shared assumptions about North Korea is seen as trouble-making, polemicism. Anything beyond the next likely milestone in the nuclear crisis is imagined hazily if at all.
To keep the discussion flowing briskly, human nature is disregarded. Despite the contradictory message inherent in North Korea’s history, most Pyongyang watchers consider the regime to be so hungry for economic growth, progress and other goodies as to have no pride, no mission, and no commitment to victory, real victory. It’s all eros and no thymos. On this error rests our administration’s hope for denuclearization.
Well, on that and the belief — which Trump shares with our Track 2 set — that the presence of a sufficiently wonderful American works on North Koreans like a truth serum.
3
The progressives have prepared for confederation since the June 2000 summit if not earlier. A slow growth in South Korean interest in the concept can be traced back to August 1960, when Kim Il Sung first proposed it.
There’s no reason to assume that preparations have been made without the North’s input. The joint declaration of 2000 bound both parties to work together in this direction, though not necessarily in the public eye. Moon Jae-in probably had a solid plan by late 2012 when, confident of victory in that year’s presidential elections, he pledged to bring about North-South confederation during his term.
But he knew better than to shout his intentions from the rooftops a second time. On the campaign trail in 2017 he conveyed the impression of a man for whom inter-Korean issues were less important than job creation, chaebol reform and the war on corruption. He spoke more often of animal welfare — hollowly, it turns out — than of confederation, to which he renewed his commitment only in one terse response to a journalist’s question.
Then he was elected. Since day one his old pledge has clearly been the main thing on his mind. Why else would he have picked Im Jong-seok as his chief of staff, as no jobs-president would have done? Why else would he have launched so quickly into a reinvention of the very recent past? I don’t mean just his claim to have been swept into power by a street revolution; any of the main candidates would have struck that pose if elected. I mean the way the candlelight movement was assigned to the anti-Japanese and therefore nationalist tradition, and transformed into a fight against the “Cold War system” on the peninsula.
Prof. Ch’oi Chang-chip (Korea University) set an interviewer straight a few months ago:
The candlelight demonstrations resulted from the constitutional crisis created by Park Geun-hye, and contained no demands related to North-South relations. (Sisa In, 28 May 2018)
I have discussed other manifestations of a confederation drive in earlier posts: the obvious preference, when filling key positions, for people with records of pro-North radicalism; support for the purge of conservatives from the boards of major broadcasters; calls to keep the right out of power for 20 years; the cessation of the intelligence agency’s hunt for North Korean agents; the removal from school textbooks of references to recent North Korean attacks, and references to the ROK as a liberal democracy; the recommendation, withdrawn only after a public backlash, for removing the constitutional commitment to unification on a liberal democratic basis, and so on. None of this is explicable as a mere effort to take the Sunshine Policy up a few notches.
Nor, for that matter, is the new line that the Taehan minguk was not founded in August 1948, but instead came into existence when a provisional government was formed in Shanghai in 1919. I don’t need to remind anyone of the internationally accepted criteria for statehood. The Blue House seems more interested in downgrading the republic that fought the North than in making a serious case for the statehood of something else. The original modest budget for the 70th anniversary of the ROK’s founding has already been cut. The joint North-South commemoration of the March 1st uprising’s 100th anniversary next year is likely to make the festivities this August 15 look subdued in comparison.
Before I am accused of assigning impure motives to a heartwarming ethnic get-together, let me repeat that memory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was.
Note also that the 1919 uprising is memorialized in the North without a public holiday as an example of how badly things go when a nation lacks a parental leader. This doesn’t stop propaganda from claiming the protests originated under the influence of Kim Hyŏng-jik, the father of Kim Il Sung, who himself impressed everyone at the age of six by … but never mind. The Blue House is unlikely to quibble with this version of history on the day itself.
With these meshing tendencies and measures the ruling camp evidently hopes to bond with the Kim regime over a shared anti-Japanese tradition, to present today’s ROK and DPRK as branches of the same Shanghai tree, put nationalism above liberal-democratic principles, and minimize opposition to all these things. No less obvious is the larger goal.
4
The growls with which teething Koreanists drag my every heterodoxy into their masters’ line of vision, then shake it vigorously from side to side, are not always fully felt. But my RAS speech last winter, in which I argued the possibility of a non-violent course to the North’s kind of unification, genuinely annoyed many people, and not just grad students.
My perception of the ROK’s vulnerability was desperately out of date, pyschobabble of an appallingly wrong-headed sort. Did I not know that South Koreans had long since abandoned their Sunshine-era naivety? That they had become more security-minded, more averse to unification? Why, they looked on North Koreans as foreigners if they thought of them at all! Even the left here had become conservative on that front. Opinion polls this, opinion polls that.
We see now who had a much better feel for where the peninsula was headed. Better, but by no means flawless; the relevant trends have since progressed faster and encountered less resistance than even I expected. By May things had already gone well beyond the stage reached at the height of Sunshine Policy euphoria in 2000.
Just the other day the premier praised Kim Jong Un’s commitment to improving the welfare of his people, and a former health minister, addressing an audience of businessmen, said chaebol heirs should emulate the young leader’s bold reform spirit. More notably, the new chairman of the Liberty Korea Party, the only non-left force of any importance, has just said that while security is all well and good, “it’s isn’t right to be too critical of efforts to construct a peace system.”
Granted, that airy term now favored by the president and his top officials sounds no more like an actual structure with an organigram than the “Cold War system” it will supposedly replace. Then again, I’m sure the LKP chief knows exactly what it means; he played a huge role in the Roh Moo Hyun administration after all. (All the right dares hope for now, it seems, is a return to the relatively conservative policies of those years.)
Average people, however, are as oblivious to what the Blue House is planning as it wants them to be — for the time being.
The other night, on my way back from the beach, I asked my cheery taxi driver how he felt about nambuk yŏnhap. “Ah, you’re conservative,” he said sadly, and although the car didn’t come to a screeching halt the conversation did. Many on the left refuse to believe that such a thing is really in the works.
But when “special envoy” Moon Chung-in starts talking publicly of a North-South league, you can be sure the Blue House is closer to speaking out itself.
“We shouldn’t think of unification only in terms of merging sovereignty, but rather think of peaceful coexistence and unification as running parallel in a league of sovereign states,” he said, adding, “This was President Kim Dae Jung’s will too. A North-South league is ‘de facto unification.'”
The actual merger of sovereignty, he said, can only come after plenty of contact between North and South Koreans.
“A considerably long time will be needed for this,” he explained. “Therefore (unification) is … a problem that must be decided by the generations after ours.” …. “If a vote [on a unified Korean system] were to take place in the North now, it would go 100% in one direction, so would that be a real vote? It would mean conflict with South Korea. Realistically speaking, there is a need for democracy to establish itself in North Korea too, and for its people to get to the point where they can freely express their individual opinions, before there can be simultaneous elections in North and South.”
I’m not so sure about 100%, but let that go. 97% of Gwangju and 95% of S. Cheolla voted for Kim Dae Jung in 1997. And we all know the southwest is the model of true democratic spirit.
So why must a 100% North Korean vote (for a northern leader of the peninsula, say) be considered undemocratic? Because South Koreans won’t like it? At what point, one wonders, will northerners be thought ready for simultaneous elections? When opinion polls reflect southwestern levels of pluralism? One wouldn’t need to wait decades for that to happen. Or must the majority view go under 95%?
A more fundamental question: Would a joint North-South council really agree to postpone the vote for such a reason?
We all know the theory that fear of US attack is not only behind the North’s nuclear program but its political system too. From there it’s a small step to thinking that if we promise not to work for regime change, Kim Jong Un will let his people work for it instead.
But the Yonsei professor strikes me as too intelligent to believe this. His statements here remind me of how the folk at Koryo Tours urge us to subvert the regime’s xenophobic propaganda by taking pricey trips around the North. If they really thought tourism had such an effect, they would know well enough to keep quiet.
As would the Blue House’s special envoy, if he really expected a league to crack the unity which the North prizes above everything.
In both cases what the dictatorship wants is presented as something we should want more. Most calls for subversion enrage the North. Not these though. Never these.
5
Let’s leave the ruling camp’s outer-track discourse for now. The inner-track stuff is more interesting, because more obviously heartfelt.
Lately prominent members of the nationalist left, including known friends and mentors of the president, have been calling for faster progress to unification. To this end they support rapid formalization of the league or confederation which, like the right, they regard as being already under construction. (The agreed-upon “liaison office” in Kaesong seems likely to take on greater importance soon.)
There is also impatience to safeguard the North against the American threat. In the following a reporter summarizes statements made by the SNU professor I quoted in an earlier post.
Prof. Paek [Nak-ch’ŏng] emphasized that North-South league is precisely the way in which to advance peace and unification simultaneously, starting with denuclearization. Forming a league with South Korea, America’s ally, would make for the firmest possible military guarantee, which is needed if the North is to disarm. (Pressian, 15 July 2018)
The removal of all possibility of US attack is routinely described as a main advantage of confederation. (Cho Sŏng-ryŏl of the Institute for National Security Strategy [sic] speaks in similar vein here.) That such a framework would also preclude the enforcement of sanctions is, I think, to be taken as implied.
Supposedly the North would then denuclearize. This naivety too strikes me as disingenuous. I’m not convinced the nationalist left, having argued a different position for years, now badly wants the North to surrender its nukes. At a recent awards ceremony in Seoul City Hall, put on by a Moon-friendly “civic group,” two schoolgirls won a prize for their video on the benefits of unification. These included the whole peninsula’s entry into the nuclear club.
But this is the more interesting part of the article:
Also, a North-South league would be the best possible method of managing the “threat posed by the very existence of South Korea” which North Korea secretly fears.
I welcome Prof. Paek’s frank statement (assuming it’s accurately reproduced here) of a truth I keep trying to get across. The North knows it cannot enjoy true security so long as the South is enjoying itself next door, be it ever so harmless in military terms and even free of US troops.
Every Pyongyang watcher should reflect on the obvious implications. That goes for the professor himself, though he must already know that “management” of the threat would not satisfy the North for long.
South Koreans who think like Professor Paek are in a minority I would now assess at about 10-15% of the general population. But they appear to be the constituency President Moon has in mind when talking of the minsim (public mood) he represents.
Which is why my critics’ focus on opinion polls last winter led them astray. This was never about what the majority wants, but what it will let the minority get away with. Hence my eight years of stressing that the main threat to the South’s security is the general lack of public identification with the ROK and its values, as opposed to any widespread vulnerability to the personality cult.
The word minjung (the masses, the people) is also being used to refer to the committed few — like those in the tiny eponymous party — though in some contexts it seems to include the monolithic citizenry of the DPRK. The other day the Jaju Sibo published a poem entitled “Taking the Road to Autonomous Unification.” A particularly telling part:
“Because the Minjoo Party’s overwhelming victory in the last election / Thwarted the overwhelming victory of the minjung / We are even now / Walking a desert road.”
The poet concludes with the threat that the masses or inmin (a North-sounding word once taboo here) will reckon harshly with the human “trash” now impeding unification.
This anger could be taken as a sign that the president is charting a centrist course, were it not for the fact that he isn’t mentioned. He must still be well liked among forces more radical than the Minjoo, or he wouldn’t keep polling about 20% higher than it does.* Many representatives of supposedly more radical civic groups participate in the “task forces” consulted for policy advice, especially in regard to inter-Korean issues.
As a result, supporters of a much more gradual if North-friendly approach to unification, though still a majority, have begun expressing themselves in defensive tones. A recent headline in the Seoul Sinmun would have seemed very odd before Moon’s takeover: “We Must Abandon the Fixation on a ‘Hurry-Hurry Unification’.”
6
In the inner track, the North’s authorship and constant promotion of the confederation idea are often invoked as selling points and predictors of success. The logic: Because this is something Pyongyang has wanted all along, it will finally be able to relax, and we can all live in peace.
No one mentions Kim Il Sung’s statement to Zhivkov in 1973 about how the South would be “done for” if it went along with the plan. In line with that statement is Hwang Jang-yop’s summary of Kim’s thoughts on the subject.
When confederation is realized, and the ideologies of North and South are propagandized in the course of free intercourse between the two sides, the Republic [= DPRK] will not be affected in the slightest, because it is a unified state. But the South is an ideologically divided, liberal country, so if we extensively propagate Juche Thought and the superiority of our system we can win over at least half its citizens. As of now South Korea is twice our size in population terms. But once we win over half the South’s people in a confederation, we will be two parts to the South’s one. We would then win either a general election or a war. (어둠이 된 햇볕은 어둠을 밝힐 수 없다, 2001, p. 222.)
A league would destabilize the North to a greater extent than Kim seems to have thought likely, especially if it lasted long enough to cast internal doubt on the regime’s commitment to real unification. But he was right that the South would be far more vulnerable. If Kim Dae Jung were still president, I might feel differently; he seems to have foreseen a league coming about on some sort of liberal democratic basis, or not at all.
In contrast, this Blue House has carried out no endeavor with more apparent foreplanning, orchestration and single-mindedness than it has shown in dismantling the ROK’s claim to being a) a liberal democracy and therefore b) the only legitimate state on the peninsula.
Whatever “Cold War system” there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been.
I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens’ realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power.
This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis had never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.
Since Moon’s takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones.
I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on.
“Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung”: This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind.
Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye.
We must also consider the obvious ramifications of the Moon camp’s push to decentralize or quasi-federalize the ROK itself. Germany is often invoked as a model. The apparent hope is that this would happen before a North-South league.
Keep in mind that until the colonial period Korea had one of the world’s longest histories of centralized rule; that the ROK is about a quarter of Germany’s size; and that the likelihood of Kim Jong Un devolving any of his power to mayors and governors is zero.
Already the left-wing discourse is going on about how provinces here could make use of autonomy by embarking on their own exchanges, trades and sister-relationships with various regions in the North.
The security implications of such a development are sobering enough, but nothing compared to the thought of how a decentralized South could possibly hold its own in a league with a dictatorship.
“What belongs together, is growing together again,” Willy Brandt said in 1989. The formulation implies a more balanced and grass-rootsy process than actually ensued in Germany — or is likely to take place here. Koreans belong together and will someday grow back together. But if the South doesn’t take the upper hand in training and guiding that growth, the North will.
In closing let me repeat myself one more time, with apologies to those of my readers who have been paying attention since last year.
If South Koreans want a league with the North, we Americans can only wish them well. The problem is that the current military alliance may embolden them to take this step without proper thought — and then embolden them to nullify the framework as soon as they sour on it. How the North is likely to respond can be imagined, considering the two deadly acts of aggression that followed the South’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy in 2008.
But the US-ROK alliance was not established with a view to protecting moderate Korean nationalists from radical ones. The Trump administration should therefore make clear as quickly as possible that the alliance would have to end — completely — before even the loosest form of an inter-Korean league came into formal effect. Our diplomats must also grasp the central relevance of this issue to the nuclear talks now underway.
* Update: Sure enough, although the “far left” Justice Party is ostensibly in the opposition, 77% of those who support it say that President Moon is doing a good job, according to a survey made public on August 3.
