In early 2020 the heroic teamwork of doctors and nurses in Daegu and South Koreans’ collective willingness to take proper precautions induced the foreign press to hail Moon Jae-in as a master of pandemic control. The international hype helped his party win a parliamentary majority with which it has since passed a few un-hyped laws restricting freedom of expression. Until recently South Korea was even praised for its devotion to COVID testing, on which front it actually ranked lower (taking population size into account) than about a hundred other countries. Many of these will get vaccine before we in South Korea do.
At this late point in Moon’s term, it’s safe to conclude that he’s not fixated on expanding human rights, improving health care, putting an end to official corruption and neglect of duty, reducing the gap between rich and poor, making housing more affordable, or doing anything else voters were led to expect from him during his 2017 campaign. Surprised? I’m not. When a movement calling for social justice elects a man who then claims in his speeches — in the face of all evidence and collective memory — that it was really a movement for warmer ties with the neighboring dictatorship, we can have no illusions about his top priority. Am I saying he has subordinated domestic policy to it? Yes.
All along Moon has acted in accordance with the teachings of his ideological mentors, the most influential of whom is Paek Nak-ch’ŏng. Now 82, Paek got his doctorate at Harvard with a thesis on D.H. Lawrence before becoming a Seoul National University professor and — more famously — the editor of a nationalist-left journal that many in today’s ruling elite read in their formative years. As it happens I was chosen for a Korean Studies position in 2005 by his older brother Paek Nak-hwan, who then headed Inje University’s board of directors while overseeing the Paek Hospital empire, which thanks to his rapport with Kim Jong Il — or so he told me, pointing at a large corroborative photograph on his office wall — got the contract to handle medical care at the Kaesong Industrial Zone. He passed away in 2018, but the younger, Lawrentian Paek remains in the core of the ruling camp. Just last summer he was chief celebrant at the Seoul mayor’s funeral.
Paek’s book Making the 2013 System (2013-nyŏn cheje mandŭlgi) came out to great fanfare in early 2012 before being chewed over in approving conferences and articles throughout the year. The author presented it as a guide for the (then still undetermined) nationalist-left candidate he hoped would win the presidential election in December 2012.
There was a lot of that hope going around then. It strengthened in the last hours of the vote count, as I remember from walking by jubilant squatter-demonstrators that chilly Seoul evening on my way to a TV studio. Moon’s defeat has since been set down to the indiscretion with which he pledged to bring about a North-South Korean league or confederation within his five-year term. The practicability of that goal had been asserted by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng.
Before I summarize the brief paperback here, let me disclaim any belief that it’s being thumped like a Bible in the halls of power. Its value is as a concise expression of a consensus articulated by dozens of other prominent people, to no significant camp-internal resistance. While it cannot fully explain anything, it can help us understand a lot, to mention here only the ruling party’s grim insistence on its need to remain in power for 20 straight years.
My summary of Making the 2013 System (Changbi, Seoul, 2012), in italics:
Although divided, the peninsula can be regarded as one Division System from which both Koreas’ economic, political and human rights woes derive. A peace treaty, the normalization of Washington-Pyongyang relations and large-scale economic aid to the North are much to be desired, yet they will not stop the Kim Jong Un regime from perceiving South Korea’s very existence as a threat in itself. If progress is to be made toward unification, the next president cannot content himself with picking up where the last progressive one left off in 2008. In computer terms, it’s time for Accommodationism 2.0. Only the formation of a North-South league or confederation — a step no conservative ROK government will be able to undo — can reassure the North enough for it to embark on denuclearization.
This proposal is neither radical nor new. The pledge to work together toward realizing it was the core of the 2000 North-South summit agreement so heartily welcomed in both halves of the peninsula. The measures agreed upon at the 2007 summit – routine further summits and meetings of top officials, economic cooperation, etc — were envisioned as first steps in the realization of that pledge. Had Lee Myung Bak not come to power in 2008 they would have all come to pass.
Because neither a unified currency nor free travel ex North Korea is feasible, the foreseen league or confederation must be looser than the European Union. The most suitable English translation: “Association of Korean States.” The next president should not announce it first, then make it live up to its name. Instead he should realize it discreetly, with a steady expansion of economic cooperation, cultural exchanges and trust-building measures, until the new order has become irrevocable. Only then should it be announced to South Koreans and the world as a fait accompli. This can all be done by the end of the president’s term in 2018.
But no inter-Korean progress can be made without first bringing about sweeping, fundamental change in South Korea. The political and judicial system must be thoroughly reformed; all NGOs must become, first and foremost, unification NGOs; and social welfare and equality must be drastically enhanced so that average people feel they can finally afford to support the unification drive. How can the South expect the North to reform, if it does not lead the way with reform itself?
Most of the book was compiled from speeches Paek Nak-ch’ŏng gave in 2011, which was the last year of Kim Jong Il’s life, and the year after two North Korean attacks killed a total of 50 South Koreans. (Paek refuses to identify the DPRK as perpetrator of the first attack and assigns blame for the second to the South’s provocative military exercises.) There is thus no reason to assume that the very common ideas informing it gave way in 2017 to a more reserved approach.
On the contrary: As I noted here years ago, Paek was quoted in Tongil News in June 2018 as saying:
The stage of a North-South league, in which North and South maintain their own constitutions, governments and militaries while forming a league of the two states, can be said to be already underway.
Far from distancing himself from this talk, President Moon took his mentor with him to Pyongyang for the September 2018 summit, granting him pride of place in an official photograph.
Another photograph shows Paek at the head-table at the Okryugwan banquet with Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un.
That same September (as I noted here at the time) a headline in the Moon-loyal Hankyoreh read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun.”
Despite the demolition of the liaison office in 2020 the Moon camp still likens the desired form of partnership to the European Union, something Paek refrained from doing in 2012, and asks schoolteachers to promote it accordingly, as I mentioned in my last post. The vague term “peace system” tends to do service for league or confederation (yŏnhap), but the Ministry of Unification still uses the latter word on its website.
Why do so many Moon-friendly Korea watchers try to deny the ruling camp’s amply documented interest in this matter? Why do they chalk it up to an “absurd fantasy” or “conspiracy theory” of government critics? Let me be clear here: They don’t accuse people like me of getting the relevant discourse wrong, or of taking it too literally. They convey the impression that no such discourse exists. If these were English-only pundits, the ones the press turns to when it wants its own opinions fed back to it, we could assume honest ignorance were at work. But some Korean-reading foreigners are in the front ranks of the deniers. I realize it’s often the people overflowing in North Korea trivia who evince the shakiest grasp of South Korean politics and history. But this isn’t the whole explanation either.
So let me make two related points. First, South Korean officials want Uncle Sam kept in a state of katchi kapshida innocence for as long as possible. Second, it’s becoming hard to tell the mainstream of the academico-journalist Korea commentariat apart from what must now be called the North-South Korea lobby. Look at the panels of recent conferences and webinars in the US and you’ll see what I mean. Look also at South Korean academics’ appeals to Pyongyang watchers to practice self-censorship for the sake of peace — appeals that have not stopped them from being treated abroad as reliable authorities.
I say lobby not in the sense of a monolithic team of hired shills, but in the sense in which John Mearsheimer talks of the Israel lobby: a community of people who, despite mutual disagreements, pursue a shared interest in moving US foreign policy in a direction favorable to a certain government or (in this case) governments. Note also that mild or parenthetical criticism of the rooted-for leader(s) is compatible with lobbying — indeed, is often a deliberate tactic to enhance its effectiveness.
What puzzles me is why these people didn’t acknowledge the confederation drive straight off while emphasizing the tameness of the published concept. Summits, ministerial talks, mutual parliamentary delegations? By those standards much of the world is in a confederation.
Not that I’d have let that line go unchallenged either. If Paek and friends really foresaw only get-togethers and economic deals, they wouldn’t regard confederation as a bridge of no return. Nor would they expect a petty ceremonial eventfulness to re-assure Kim Jong Un more than a peace treaty and US embassy put together. Still less would they expect it to nullify the threat to the DPRK hitherto posed by, as Paek puts it, the very existence of South Korea. Nor would they insist on keeping the extent of the partnership secret until the public can no longer back out. (I call it a Palmolive strategy, Madge with an iron grip: Confederation? You’re soaking in it.)
What should worry Washington is that the thing envisioned amounts to an alliance between our ally and our adversary. Paek said in 2018 that confederation would mean “the firmest possible military guarantee” to the North of its security from US attack. (Cho Sŏng-ryŏl of the Institute for National Security Strategy talks in similar vein here.) The OPCON ramifications alone merit more attention than any of the above has hitherto received inside the Beltway.
It follows that we would do well to find out just how far things have progressed behind the scenes or, as Koreans say, “under the water.” In my view Kim Jong Un can have little real interest in a public “Association of Korean States” (which would clash with the personality cult for starters), but he can exploit South Koreans’ interest to extract one concession after another. Something like that may have unfolded last year in the hours (yes, hours) between Kim Yo-jong’s tirade about leaflet balloons and the Minjoo Party’s pledge to pass an anti-leaflet law — which now informally bears her name.
Sporadic nationalist-left calls for recognizing the DPRK as a state should be seen in this same light. Not for nothing does Pak Jie-won, who did time for his role in illicitly transferring money to North Korea, and now heads the intelligence agency — perhaps a sic! is needed here — say that his dream is to become the South’s first ambassador to Pyongyang. This talk shouldn’t be taken for a coming-to-terms with the permanence of division; the very opposite is the case.
I’m not sure our commentariat grasps this part either. Last month Andrei Lankov brought his reflexive centrism to bear on proposals to recognize the DPRK, saying such a move would be a “step in the direction of sanity and stability” but too small a step to improve things much. He also referred readers to a precedent: “East and West Germany did officially recognize each other as sovereign states in 1972.”
Not quite. An agreement was reached according to which they would develop “normal neighborly relations” as equals, but Bonn never recognized the other Germany by völkerrechtlich or international-law standards. One might well argue that de facto recognition came in 1987, when Erich Honecker was received with great ceremony by Helmut Kohl, but he never got his wish of seeing an FRG embassy in East Berlin. It was after the Wall fell, interestingly enough, that the West German left called for immediate recognition of the GDR. To what avowed end? Confederation.
UPDATE: 21 January 2021:
