Ask Korea watchers why the peninsula’s road to unification has been so much longer than Germany’s, and you’re likely to get the answer: “The Germans never fought a war with each other; the Koreans did.” The implication is that much more trust-building is needed here. Why the bulk of it must be done by the side that got attacked is never explained.
But if the Germans never fought each other, neither did a generation of Wessi college students ever consider Erich Honecker the sun of the nation. Nor was there anything in the Federal Republic to compare with the bizarre surge of South Korean good will toward the North — popular and governmental good will — that came in 1988, only months after Kim Il Sung had a Korean Airlines plane blown up in mid-air.
It’s because so few people give the war a thought that the North’s arsenal is widely seen as America’s problem alone. The ROK government’s special envoy spoke for many in 2017 when he said Washington should learn to accept it. A year later President Moon gave a speech in Pyongyang in which he praised Kim Jong Un and his subjects for the “astonishing development” they had achieved with “indomitable courage” in “difficult times,” thereby “guarding the [Korean] nation’s self-respect.” If that isn’t an encouragement to stand firm, what is?
Occasionally one encounters the view that Kim’s weaponry is not just a non-problem but a positive good, one that may ease the coming together of the two Koreas by forcing the US to assume a lower profile. I took this for quite a radical position until the Korea Herald, of all outlets, quoted a fellow at a law firm in Seoul as saying matter-of-factly:
“We launched a separate team specializing in inter-Korean economic cooperation and North Korea nearly a decade ago, once the North had begun to show noteworthy progress in its nuclear program — we knew it was going to bring some kind of change,” Kwon said. (Korea Herald, 2 August 2018.)
Needless to say, America talks of economic cooperation only as a prize for denuclearization. (A bathetic temptation scene was enacted in Singapore when Trump, playing Satan to Kim’s Jesus, showed him the wonders of the kingdom on a laptop.) The nationalist left, meanwhile, wants even billion-dollar projects to start first, so Kim realizes he has nothing to fear. This is where provinces and cities are told to come in. A few years ago a senior researcher at a South Korean think-tank put the reasoning in a nutshell:
“Sanctions on North Korea will not be lifted unless North Korea abandons its status as a nuclear power. Therefore government-led North-South exchange is bound to be limited. Therefore we must explore exchange and cooperation at the regional government level.”
There’s been a sharp increase in such talk this winter. Now that the first part of the island-linking West Sea Peace Highway has been completed, there are bold calls to extend it to North Korea. In similar vein, a Jeolla outlet reported on plans to connect the planned North-South railroad to Saemangeum New Port. Just last week Gyeonggi Province officials were controversially forced to attend an online “talk concert” on the need to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Zone. In the Olympic city of Pyeongchang, a conference took place at which experts discussed a “livestock belt” spanning both the DPRK and ROK parts of divided Gangwon Province.
The dominant tone at these events is one of impatience to see the two central governments get back into that Panmunjom spirit. Yet as the annual Unification White Papers make clear, these displays of regional autonomy-mindedness are funded by the ROK government itself. Most receive a central seal of approval in some other form too; the premier put in an appearance at the Pyeongchang “peace forum,” and President Moon sent a congratulatory message. Bills to give provinces and cities greater autonomy to bypass Seoul in inter-Korean dealings are being pushed at the very top of the ruling party.
No one really believes that the current sanctions regime makes an exemption for “non-central” economic cooperation. Nor do these conferences and forums encourage activity in the here and now; the projects talked up at them are on too grand a scale for anyone to think they could be realized under current circumstances. I suspect that if sanctions are violated it will continue to be through transactions (like Namdong Power’s imports of North Korean coal) that are low-profile, small-scale or complex enough for the Americans to look the other way should they choose, and for the Blue House to have a measure of deniability should they object. Even minor deals that bring the occasional DPRK-made product to South Korean consumers will keep going quietly through Chinese middlemen.
So what are we to make of this orchestrated rash of forums and news stories? It appears to be serving a threefold propaganda function of 1) persuading the provinces that while they may be hurting now, they will do better in the long term under North-friendly, i.e. Minjoo leadership, 2) generating support for decentralization, thus for constitutional revision, and 3) “expanding the consensus for a peace system,” to use the official euphemism.
In practice, that last one boils down to persuading everyone that Kim Jong Un is a partner to prosper with even if he keeps his nukes, as most South Koreans polled expect him to do anyway. Increases in the percentage of the population with a favorable view of the North and decreases in the number who think it a place “to be on guard against” are therefore held up by the Ministry of Unification as the fruit of its education effort. (See for example Chapter 6 of the 2019 Unification White Paper.) That’s inter-Korean cooperation right there, considering that the North’s southward propaganda aims for the very same effect.
Such educating agents abound in Moon’s ROK, from subsidized movies and TV series with handsome North Korean heroes to last month’s respectful coverage of the Workers’ Party congress. (That event, with its “demotion” of Kim Yo-jong, was in itself an effort to disguise the most absolute monarchy in history as a staid one-party state following formal procedures.) But at the center of peace rhetoric is always the economy, for Moon knows he must assuage fears of a return to the unilateral “ladling out” (pŏjugi) of aid to the North.
I don’t mean that inter-regional cooperation is a mere glittering generality. It’s yearned for in all earnestness by provinces and capital city alike. My hunch is that the Moon government sees it as a way out of the Fraternization Trap, if I may give that name to the security dilemma I explained in a post (and Asia Times article) last summer. For if the two Koreas come closer on the provincial or municipal level, as opposed to through high-profile inter-state cooperation (as was embodied in the ill-fated liaison office), the DPRK can more easily maintain the plausibility of its threat to respond to any American attack by destroying Seoul — a threat that for decades has been vital to protecting its own security.
Such considerations, I believe, also color the plan to engineer confederation as an incremental union of provinces rather than as a sudden marriage of two states. And that plan is a big reason for the ruling party’s eagerness to decentralize the ROK, something likely to get more attention after the April mayoral elections.
Despite some hardline noises from the new US administration, many here are confident it will reach a small deal with Pyongyang that will loosen sanctions enough for “peace system” construction. John Bolton’s revelations about the State Department’s eagerness for “action-for-action” have not been lost on anyone. The hope is that more displays of impatience for inter-Korean cooperation, combined with vigorous lobbying in Washington — including the attritive tactic of repeatedly petitioning the White House and Senate to exempt Kaesong in particular — can help speed up things. Meanwhile South Korean conservatives are so sure Biden will stand firm that they mock Moon for clinging to a doomed cause. Perhaps the one ideological camp gives the American ally too little credit, and the other too much, but my money’s on the nationalist left being proven right. I have a feeling Kim’s is too.
UPDATE: 16 February 2021:
Hardly had I posted the above than a reader alerted me to the governor of Gangwon Province’s public proposal (made yesterday) to send vaccines to North Korea from a factory in the city of Chuncheon.
“If we send vaccines from South Korea (which are made using Russian technology) – and if Russia is a mediator in the process – this could help improve inter-Korean relations,” he said.
