[Below are the opening remarks to a speech on history I gave last Thursday at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Anam-dong. During the Q & A afterwards I was assured by a South Korean academic that most of his country-folk support North-South confederation. Keep this and the remarks below in mind the next time Andrei Lankov dismisses as “fantasy” the right-wing’s worries about a peace treaty — worries grounded in the fear that confederation will soon follow. Once so hard to imagine, some sort of meeting between the democratically elected National Assembly and the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly already seems likely. As readers of my blog may remember, this is the event many leftists have long envisioned as one of the final two or three steps to confederation.
So I’m curious: How much longer is the commentariat going to run from this topic? Or have I missed someone’s reasoned explanation as to how North-South confederation can co-exist with the US-ROK military alliance for more than a highly dangerous transition period? If it is “needless to say, a fantasy” to imagine US troops leaving, it’s one to which many on the left are also prone.
All this conflation of the intellectual and parliamentary right with geriatric flag-wavers is getting a little geriatric itself. American readers are being cheated out of an entire half of a dramatic debate, one with direct relevance to their own security as well as their assessment of Trump’s performance. It’s a rare foreigner who can claim to know the nationalist left better than the conservatives who went to university with it in the 1980’s, when many of them were in that camp themselves. None of this is to imply that our press does justice to the local left-wing discourse either.]
According to a poll published last month, 1 in 5 people here supports confederation with North Korea. If that seems negligible to you, note that only 1 in 4 South Koreans still identifies as conservative. You may wonder how so many people know enough about this plan to support it, considering how the Blue House keeps the discussion out of the headlines. The answer: a nationwide “consensus-building” campaign has been unfolding to this end since 2017. In schools around the country, children are routinely taught the advantages of the “peace system” on the way. At government-sponsored town-hall meetings, locals from across the spectrum are brought together with unification-minded “activists,” as they’re described in official texts.
And every few weeks another prominent member of the Moon camp lectures some civic group on how confederation is nothing to fear. The standard line is that the pro-American president Roh Tae Woo (1988-93) also wanted a North-South league, so it can’t be anything risky; conservatives are making a fuss about nothing. Never mentioned is the fact that Roh premised a league on the basis of shared liberal-democratic principles, which is to say that he never seriously thought it would happen.
Last week a former unification minister said cheerfully people should think of confederation as a marriage. Which has always been my analogy too. The danger is that when one spouse gets rough with the other, the neighbors tend to plug their ears. Now, it’s the Koreans’ peninsula, and having divided it we Americans can’t be telling them how to put it back together. But that goes also for Americans who like jeering at South Korean opponents of President Moon’s policies.
As an American what I worry most about is a transitional overlap between the alliance with the US and confederation. The Blue House wants that overlap so that South Koreans settle down into the new dispensation with a minimum of fuss. But if the electorate gets cold feet and votes for a conservative government in March 2022, which then seeks America’s help annulling the marriage, the North’s nuclear weapons will take on a whole new meaning. By that time at the latest Washington will realize why they were developed in the first place.
Meanwhile the White House seems intent on selling confederation to the South Korean mainstream, and not just by constantly asserting that Kim Jong Un can be trusted. Trump publicly praised the first Panmunjeom summit in April last year, thereby giving America’s blessing to the two Koreas’ renewal of their pledge to work toward confederation without foreign meddling.
As critical as our media usually are in regard to Trump’s diplomacy, they seem to have no problem with this part. I’ve seen only one serious article on Korean confederation in the world press, and it was in the South China Morning Post last year. The New York Times still shows zero interest, though its BTS coverage has been top-notch. And USA Today has taken to printing Korea journalism sponsored by the Atlantic Council, which is sponsored by the Korea Foundation, which in turn is sponsored by…. So you won’t get anything on confederation there either until the Blue House is good and ready. At which point our media will come out in support, and Pyongyang watchers will assure us that this is going to open up the North and hasten democratic reforms. Washington will get on board soon enough. Our State Department has a perennial weakness for “subversive engagement” strategies; that’s how we turned China into a superpower.
For a while there I thought NK News might twig to the confederation drive, but a few months ago it analyzed the last two years of inter-Korean relations without once referring to the only goal that each Moon-Kim summit has brought the peninsula closer to.
If you want to know the current level of expert discussion in Washington, here’s an exchange from a Senate hearing that took place on March 26. Victor Cha was there from the CSIS to assure a foreign affairs subcommittee that South Korea’s interest is in a mere “economic marriage,” the goal being to get the North to denuclearize.
South Korea is committed [….] to using economic incentives to bring North Korea to the table. I think the ultimate goal … is to try to create at least a one country, two systems approach for the time being. The current South Korean president hails from the progressive end of the political spectrum and there’s a long line of thinking …. that the goal is not unification but it is to try to create this one country two systems, where there’s an economic marriage between the two sides, but they would allow the North Koreans to maintain sort of a separate political entity at least for the foreseeable future.
(The South would “allow” the North Koreans: I especially like that part.) But in a flash of intuition Senator Todd Young (R) asks, “Sort of a confederacy?” Which is precisely what yeonbangje means.
Whereupon Cha repeats the word in reluctantly concessional tones while again framing the plan as a way to defuse the nuclear stand-off.
A confederacy of sorts that is sort of a non-conflictual political solution. There are lots of human rights issues that come up with something like that but I think that’s what they’re aiming towards.
In fact confederation is often called for on the left as a way to insulate the North from American pressures, military and economic. Some say this will lead to denuclearization, but the older tradition foresees confederated Korea taking the next step to unification as a nuclear power. When I said this to a US government official 2 years ago, he thought it an appropriate response to turn to his subordinates with a smile. American party politics are so transparent and predictable, and move in such a narrow ideological range, that the notion of a foreign political force espousing one platform for our consumption and pursuing a very different one in practice strikes Americans as ludicrous.
Did the Republican from Indiana ask any follow-up questions? No. Perhaps he suspected, as I did, that Victor Cha had already exhausted the CSIS’ store of knowledge on the subject. Even so: Can you imagine an expert at a Senate hearing in the 1980’s saying, “West Germany wants a sort of confederacy with East Germany,” and a Senator saying, “Fine, let’s move on to the next item”?
I shouldn’t have to say this, seeing as how the bloodiest war in American history was fought against a confederacy, but the word denotes an alliance. And whatever noises the two Koreas astutely make to the contrary, the alliance they are pursuing will, at some early stage, obviate the one the South is in now.
UPDATE: 9 December 2020
I don’t need to spell out the relevance to the above of this article, “Head of US think tank CSIS awarded S. Korea’s highest diplomatic medal.”
