1
At the family reunions in Kumgangsan a few days ago a North Korean official approached South Korean journalists with worried questions about President Moon’s approval ratings. Why were they falling? Did the trend seem likely to continue, or would the family reunions reverse it? What was the best way to get those numbers up again?
Clearly the Moon camp shares the fellow’s concern; a cabinet shuffle looms, and criticism of conservative Youtubers has taken on ominous shrillness.
Not that the president has shown much interest so far in securing a consensus for his policies. Consensus is a liberal democratic ideal. The Blue House’s loyalty is to the popular will or minsim, the whole point of which term is to assert that only one viewpoint matters.
Hannah Arendt has a relevant section in On Revolution (1962). An excerpt:
The word ‘will’ … essentially excludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them. The will, if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible….There is no possible mediation between wills as there is between opinions. (On Revolution, p. 76.)
Saying wills seems a bit odd, popular wills even odder; you can’t pluralize the term in any language without pulling the reader up short. The popular will is monolithic. Anyone who differs with it is by definition an enemy of the people – in South Korea, “a force of accumulated ills” (chŏkp’ye seryŏk) – and to be ignored if not purged or imprisoned.
The popular will is not necessarily the majority view. South Korean historians lament the frequency with which the majority has been duped into opposing the minsim. To hear them tell it, every historical election of a conservative president resulted from red-peril-mongering.
Conversely, even 10% of the population can define the popular will so long as it consists of “awakened people,” as the left was saying here long before Americans hit on the clunky adjective “woke.” But the minsim isn’t PC in our sense. It can and does show anti-homosexual and anti-immigrant tendencies; it can laugh at a picture of a female politician in a gynecologist’s chair.
What it can’t do without ceasing to be the true popular will is disparage the DPRK. No sympathy for the regime in Pyongyang? No minsim.
2
Why then, if the next elections aren’t until 2020, are the Moon camp and the North Koreans so worried about the decline in his popularity? Because what he and Kim are planning for the nearer future is big enough to require the appearance of mainstream support, or at least the absence of mainstream opposition.
It’s precisely because the confederation plan exerts no broad appeal that the right-wing opposition has kept harping on it. This is also why the Moon administration has talked of a “peace system” instead, and apparently instructed the media to do likewise. (I don’t mean to equate the terms; “peace system” = confederation + a peace-minded US and China.)
Contributing to South Koreans’ placidity has been their assumption that if the Moon administration were taking the ROK in the wrong direction, particularly in regard to security, America would have raised the alarm. The White House’s strenuous assertions of the health of the alliance have thus done more than anything to convince people here that Moon is a centrist.
Meanwhile the US government sees South Korean middle-class tolerance of the “candlelight revolution” and draws the same conclusion.
If either horse balks the other will too, as Moon is aware.
Apparently he wanted to move the next North-South summit forward to August, while his approval ratings still bespeak a mandate. (If the current trend continues, they will sink below 40% in two weeks or so; one poll already has him at 44.4%.) I don’t know why Kim didn’t comply. Perhaps he gambled that Moon would agree to go to Pyongyang in early September, even if this meant appearing to pay tribute to the DPRK on the eve of its 70th birthday bash.
But it may already be too late. The conservative opposition has certainly toned down its criticism of Moon’s North Korea policy, hoping to make hay out of the bad economic news instead. But that news is bound to make South Koreans view the next summit more critically than they viewed the last two.
So far confederation has mainly been discussed in the Moon camp’s inner-track discourse and in the gatherings of “civic groups,” while the Hankyoreh and the broadcast media have howled down right-wing talk of it as fake news.
This is in line with the remarkable discretion Moon Jae-in has sustained since the start of his election campaign. Never does he speak more guardedly than when around foreigners critical of the North. Shortly after he took office I asked two Americans who had talked with him on separate occasions what impression they had got: “well-rehearsed,” said one, “well-drilled” the other. Had he given vent to the sort of anti-American, pro-North remarks Roh Moo Hyun went in for (though Roh was conservative in comparison), his policies would have encountered more resistance.
His base knows how he really feels. During the presidential election campaign in 2012 the novelist Kong Chi-yŏng, a prominent supporter, tweeted cheerfully that the Yankee-go-home candidate Lee Jung-Hee sounded “like Moon’s inner voice.” The conservatives pounced, and she had to do a quick Prufrock: It wasn’t what she’d meant at all. Since then the Moon camp has shown remarkable discipline. Professor Moon Chung-in is an exception of sorts, since it’s his job to send up trial balloons.
3
At a luncheon in the Blue House a few weeks ago, President Moon called on representatives of the opposition to cooperate in ratifying the Panmunjom Declaration of April 27, saying, “I think it might also help me push for a meeting between the North and South Korean legislatures.”
Why he assumed the conservatives at the table would share his interest in such an event I have no idea. The legitimacy it would confer on the North’s rubber-stamp assembly, and thus on the dictatorship as a whole, would take the pro-Northing of the South to a whole new level. (I’ve stopped saying finlandization, which in its original form was a strategy for keeping an overbearing neighbor at arms’ length.) But for that very reason the Blue House sees a meeting of assemblies as a necessary milestone on the way to confederation.
Moon also wants a few representatives of the opposition to accompany him to Pyongyang next month — another sign that something is in the offing for which he needs bipartisan support.
In grass roots news, a small but publicity-minded group calling itself in English the People’s Congress for Peace Federation (p’yŏnghwa yŏnbang simin hoeŭi) held a founding ceremony on August 25 in a detached building of Seoul City Hall. Pace the group’s English name I will continue translating the key word as confederation, so as to distinguish the planned North-South system from the separate drive to quasi-federate the ROK in its own right. A spokesman for the group says:
League-confederation is the method of unification agreed to by … President Kim Dae Jung and Chairman Kim Jong Il…. We must put aside anxiety about unification and first bring about ‘confederation’ as a low level of unification.
Naturally the group is beside itself at how well things have been going this year. The following is from a statement issued on August 15.
Heaven is helping us now. It has set up liberal, magnanimous Kim Jong Un in the North, and warm, prudent Moon Jae-in in the South, and got both to head in the same direction, complementing each other, while in the US it has brought to power Trump, a man of the minority [this word in English] who does not resemble mainstream forces in regard to the peninsula. It’s as if Heaven were opening the way for our nation.
Isn’t it though? I could instance more examples of the nationalist left’s astonishing good fortune. The conservative ruling party helped impeach Park Geun-hye in 2016, then tried to get the presidency back by running one of the least electable people in its ranks. The Liberty Korea Party’s current chairman is a former big shot from the Roh Moo Hyun government — a former colleague of Moon Jae-in.
Then there’s the uncanny unanimity with which the West’s Pyongyang watchers still hold to the notion of a failed-communist North, that fallacy which has done more than anything to obscure the nature of the inter-Korean relationship. And can the fortuitousness of the time and venue of the 2018 Winter Olympics be plausibly regarded as anything but predestined? It’s no wonder admirers of magnanimous Kim and prudent Moon are in a Gott mit uns frame of mind.
The following is from Kang Chŏng-gu’s article on confederation, which appeared in Tongil News on August 16.
Now that a post-Cold War era of peace has dawned, the biggest obstacles [to unification] are disappearing. Now is the time to give concrete thought to the method by which it should be carried out. [The answer is] a confederation in the style of China and Hong Kong….
On the Korean peninsula there would be one state, the central state of the confederation. In the southern region would be the south’s self-administrating regional government, and the northern side would have the north’s self-administrating regional government. The southern side would maintain capitalism, the northern side, reformed socialism of the Chinese sort. If there is someone the northern and southern sides could easily agree on, like the late Reverend Moon Ik-hwan for example, he could become the leader of the confederated state. Otherwise the leaders of the two states would take turns of two-years’ duration as leader of the confederation.
We see here how unhelpful the Chinese “model” becomes as soon as anyone gets down to brass tacks. Its only real function is to reassure people. Everyone is to believe that the inter-Korean relationship would be just as placid and mutually hands-off for years on end.
I would take this show of naivety at face value if it were coming from some think tank in Washington. But Kang knows the North’s ideology very well. He knows its main mission has always been unification under its own terms. He has also expressed sympathy with that mission in language frank enough to get him into legal difficulty (and that was in the Sunshine era).
So does he really believe Kim has dropped the motto of “Final Victory,” and replaced it with “Whenever You Guys Are Ready”? Does he expect the personality cult to let a South Korean president throne over it for years at a time, however nominally? Even a pro-American one?
He goes on:
The capital of the confederated state would be neither Seoul nor Pyongyang but Kaesong. The government of the confederation would handle things that North and South can advance together, such as Olympic Games and the Kaesong Industrial Zone. But other things would be entrusted to the relevant regional government. Doing things in this way, the proportion of things that north and south would manage together in the government of the confederation would gradually be increased…so that within 20 years full integration would be possible.
Recommendations of Kaesong as confederation capital are common here, despite the psychological and symbolic edge it would give the North, to say nothing of the potential for intimidation of South Korean officials. The record of detentions, expulsions and border rebuffs of ROK citizens working at the Kaesong Industrial Zone speaks for itself.
Why not Panmunjom? Well, for the same reason that Moon would rather see a third summit take place in Pyongyang than insist on holding even one in Seoul as per the joint declaration of 2000. The South must cut no pie straight down the middle. The only way to build trust is to give the North the better deal on everything. (The Korean word for appeasement carries none of the negative associations the English one does.)
North Korea would have to be downright averse to “final victory” not to walk all over such a partner from the get-go. But the word partner is perhaps too suggestive of separateness, or too unsuggestive of the sort of community Kang et al have in mind.
The southern side’s ahistoric results-orientedness, as in “the South’s present is now good and superior to the North’s, so its past was good too,” is a distortion of history that prettifies and justifies the past. The North’s spontaneous decisionism, which holds that “because the North’s beginning was good, the present is good too, and because the South’s origin and past was bad, it is bad now too,” is also mistaken…. The South and North must map out the future of the peninsula – the South while reflecting on and repenting for its past errors, and regarding the North’s past with respect and pride [!]; and the North, while priding itself on its past, should come to terms with the problems of the present, learning from and emulating the South where necessary.
This is the Kang whose occasional lectures and articles I have been reading for decades. He still believes — as most people on the nationalist left do — that the North’s formative years were better, prouder, less tainted and regrettable than the South’s. This matters so much because one’s political ideology is inextricable from one’s view of history.
It can be inferred from the above that in a confederation the South must accept the ultra-nationalist Kim Il Sung cult, whereas the North must acknowledge only the South’s superior prosperity and technology — and one of the main goals of confederation is to eliminate that gap as rapidly as possible. (It will be as much a matter of pulling the South down as the North up.)
Of course Kang’s view of confederation needn’t be congruent with Moon and Kim’s. My hunch is that everything would start off with just a North-South council, sans any single head of state. A confederation may go quietly into de facto operation before formally and publicly coming into being. Some say this has already happened, or will happen when the liaison office opens: a North-South council in embryo. But no doubt we will find out soon enough what Kim and Moon have in mind.
4
To assume that the two Korean administrations do not already see each other as confederates, and behave accordingly, albeit discreetly, is like assuming that a man and woman planning a marriage are not yet having sex. When we ask for Moon’s help in getting the other half of the peninsula to denuclearize, we are in effect asking this fervent nationalist to help remove the future guarantor of a unified Korea’s security and autonomy. Why should he comply? The only remaining point of the US-ROK alliance is to ease the transition to a confederation — which would obviate that alliance altogether.
The recent news of South Korean violations of sanctions (and of a presidential award just given to the main importer of North Korean coal) is merely illustrative. It’s trivial in comparison to the basic truth staring us in the face: No true liberal-democratic ally of the United States would think of leaguing up with an anti-American dictatorship, let alone one still in the thrall of a personality cult. I’m not sure whether the Trump administration is unaware of this or merely pretending to be.
At any rate a peculiar pattern has repeated itself every few weeks or so since Moon took office. It goes like this. First the Blue House is caught in some statement or act of disloyalty to the spirit of the alliance — like appointing an unrepentant former enforcer of North Korean copyrights to the second most powerful post in the government. (I don’t mean the prime minister.) South Korean conservatives then shout in chorus, “The Americans won’t stand for this!” Whereupon the White House rushes to say, in effect, “Oh yes we will!” It seems to revel in making pro-American, security-minded South Koreans look foolish.
The closest thing to criticism of the Blue House our government has issued in recent months has been the statement that inter-Korean relations mustn’t get ahead of denuclearization. Clearly the relations are not in themselves problematic from America’s perspective. This in turn implies approval of the many steps Moon has already undertaken to undermine the ROK’s claim to exclusive legitimacy and its commitment to liberal democratic values.
(By the way, the once-marginal myth that the republic came into existence in Shanghai in 1919 as a nationalist state has become orthodox with remarkable speed; a construction company is already invoking it in
It’s therefore easy to imagine Trump or Pompeo expressing support for whatever “peace system” Moon and Kim happen to agree on, so long as progress toward denuclearization is made first. Any significant step in that direction — which we can expect the upcoming Pyongyang summit to announce with great fanfare — would then compel the US to sign off on confederation, thus encouraging the South Korean public to do likewise. Before we know it, the ROK could be locked in an embrace it might eventually need American help to get out of.
