Last autumn I did an interview in my office with a regional Swiss (German) TV station. Having parked too far down Mount Ŏmgwang, the crew had to lug its gear the rest of the way. Seoulite journos who make this mistake need a good sprawl on the couch before they can talk in full sentences, but my Helvetians probably sang all the way up. The first thing they asked as they strode into the lobby was: “Why don’t more Koreans live on top of mountains?”
Anyway, this is what I said (at the 10 minute mark) as part of my response to a question on Methodik.
Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality. For me, in other words, the peninsula isn’t a silver ball in a giant, geopolitical pinball machine, the trajectory of which can only be understood in terms of cause and effect. It’s more like a tree which, although influenced by external conditions, and tossed this way and that, still has an organic, inner directedness. Meaning that when you take an old homogeneous nation and cut it in two, as we did in the last century, you can take it for granted that that which belongs together, will grow together again.
In that sense Willy Brandt said something very profound when he made his famous remark [in 1989, that “what belongs together, is growing together”]; he practically expressed a natural law. For every biologist, every gardener — every surgeon even – knows what inosculation means, namely, the growing into each other of closely-related and adjacent organisms. Both Koreas will grow into each other, I’m sure of it, and provided war with the USA doesn’t come first, North Korea will –unfortunately — lead this inosculation process.
It was in the same long-term frame of mind that I followed the Hanoi summit. The US-ROK alliance’s position on North Korea has been inexorably softening, with only minor and temporary reversals, for over half a century now, while North Korea, arming steadily, has always held fast to its commitment to “final victory,” to unification under its own flag. One need only take a few steps back from the daily news to see where this is headed.
Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.
In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.
But the Koreas do not necessarily have to work together economically to come ever closer together. This was made clear not just by South Korean media’s fawning coverage of Kim during the Hanoi summit, but also by President Moon’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the independence demonstrations of 1 March 1919. The key part:
The Japanese imperialists labeled independence armies as bandits and independence activists as thought offenders … The word “Reds” originated from them….. Hostility between the left and the right and ideological stigmas were tools used by Japanese imperialists to drive a wedge between us. Even after liberation, they served as tools to impede efforts to remove the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators. They were also used to brand the public as enemies when it came to massacres of civilians, spurious accusations of spying for North Korea and the student pro-democracy movement….. Still now in our society, the word “Reds” is being used as a tool to vilify and attack political rivals, and a different kind of “Red Scare” is running rampant. These are typical vestiges left by pro-Japanese collaborators, which we should eliminate as soon as possible. The 38th parallel drawn through our minds will disappear all together once the ideological hostility that caused internal rifts are removed.
The view of history informing these words is the mouldy “revisionist” one which the declassification of Soviet archives rendered obsolete a quarter-century ago. We always knew anyway that there was no shortage of former collaborators in the North. The personality cult has long praised the Great Leader for giving them a second chance. In my own research I have shown that former pro-Japanese intellectuals of some notoriety made it with Kim’s blessing to the top of the cultural apparatus, where they exerted a formative influence on the North.
Considering the Soviet complaint that there were almost no workers and no peasants at all in the Korean communist party in North and South in late 1945 (see Tertitskiy’s superb new book), and considering South Korean leftist testimony that in the weeks after the emperor’s surrender the yangban leaned far-left, while entire settlements of the working and peasant classes moved spontaneously to the right (Yun Hakjun, 1994), we can assume that the portion of landed people who had enjoyed Japanese college educations and cushy white-collar jobs under colonial rule was higher on the left. More leftists had done prison time, certainly, but almost all had “converted” by the late 1930s and begun working with the Japanese. The nationalists had a better record of standing firm.
More to the point, we now know that much of the bloody unrest in the South in the late 1940s, which involved orchestrated attacks on policemen and their families – attacks of a cruelty and brutality that even Cumings has felt compelled to comment upon — was indeed planned, funded and guided from above the 38th parallel, as Rhee and the US military claimed at the time. That was no “red scare” but a correct assessment of the reality. We know from Kim Il Sung’s archived account that he was funding the ROK’s “reformist” parties in 1960, and inviting key members to Pyongyang; on that point too the right-wing suspicions of the time proved correct. That many leading members of the ostensibly pro-democracy student movement of the 1980s and 1990s understood that lofty keyword in either the Marxist-Leninist or the North Korean sense is clear enough from their own strident testimony.
Nor can there be any doubt — to mention what the right is currently most worried about — that Moon and his camp are by their own explicit, public account committed to bringing about North-South confederation in the short term. I notice when reading the full spectrum of political commentary that it’s perfectly acceptable to talk approvingly of this matter. Only when the news is imparted in tones of alarm does it suddenly become “fake.”
Now, I have long argued on this blog that the Moon administration is ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. I have predicted that the two Koreas will whip up anti-Japanese sentiment to rally public support around their “new peninsula system,” “peace system,” “peaceful unification plan” — the reassuring euphemisms for confederation are endless. I have been called McCarthyist for this, as if anyone ever saw less trace of communism on the peninsula than I do.
But the March 1 speech proves my point. In it Moon attributes anti-North, anti-left sentiment wholly to the lingering influence of Japanese propaganda. He forbears to mention that what really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. (Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.)
As far as Moon is apparently concerned, the main division on the peninsula today is between the great community of nation-loving North and South Koreans who do not use pejoratives like “commies,” and the minority of South Korean colony-nostalgists who do. Yes, Moon astutely pretended to criticize only language and not the users of it, but the notion that today’s conservatives are descendants of collaborators — that they have bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms — has been central to leftist myth here for decades. (Jeong Dong-yeong of the pseudo-opposition Peace Party invoked it a few weeks ago; Moon’s speech is uncannily similar to the points Jeong made.) Unlike the trivial differences inside the pan-Korean, trans-DMZ community of good democrats — so trivial that the 38th parallel has no real intellectual or ideological importance — the scare-mongering speech of the South Korean rightists cannot be lived with. It must be eliminated, purged.
I needn’t add that these are the staunchest supporters of the US-ROK alliance whom Moon wants to see muzzled.
Funnily enough, his line of logic could be used a fortiori to stigmatize criticism of the USA. After all, it was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war.
The more recent canards according to which US soldiers got out of their armored vehicle to laugh at the schoolgirls they’d run over, that Uncle Sam was out to poison South Korean children with beef unfit for US consumption – this nonsense wouldn’t have gone down such a storm had there not been a colonial tradition behind it, one that informed many an anti-American novel and movie under that former collaborator Park Chung Hee.
But enough of history; as I’ve said before, it’s what’s done with it to contemporary ends that matters. Plenty will be done in the months ahead, to harmonizing North-South effects that the Western commentariat will cheer, and polarizing ROK-internal effects it will continue dozing through. It’s not America’s place to meddle, but we should be aware of what our supposedly liberal-democratic ally is up to.
UPDATE (5 April 2019)
Above I wrote: “If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption.” Sure enough:
[Moon] laid out his approach in a speech he gave in Berlin in July 2017: first build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula by improving North Korea’s relationship with South Korea and the United States and then pursue step-by-step denuclearization as trust is cultivated among the parties. Joint inter-Korean economic projects are a key mechanism for the parties to build trust, along with cultural exchanges and regular meetings of separated families.
The inter-Korean projects include the Kaesong Industrial Complex, tourism at Mount Kumgang, and an inter-Korean railway. As the two Koreas form an economic relationship, the repeated interactions arising from such a relationship would gradually lead to a measure of trust between the two countries. […..] Inter-Korean economic projects represent a compromise that both the United States and North Korea can accept [….] The United States need not lift sanctions wholesale to have the inter-Korean projects progress. It merely needs to grant sanctions exemptions to those projects, allowing the sanctions to take effect once again if North Korea does not follow through with its promised denuclearization steps. (S. Nathan Park in Foreign Policy, 4 April 2019)
Imagining what will have to happen before the Western commentariat begins taking Korean nationalism seriously is an instructive exercise. I thought the two leaders’ trip to Mount Paektu on September 20 might do the trick. But foreigners are still talking only of Moon’s peace-minded pragmatism and Kim’s desire for security guarantees and investment.
Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.
In North Korean studies the fallacy of a failed communist state renders this tendency more extreme. Attention focuses squarely on economic matters, as it doesn’t in discussion of the Iranian nuclear crisis. Despite the Koreas’ long competition for nationalist legitimacy (which the South abandoned in May 2017) the relative power of the two states is grasped in numbers of missiles, tanks, soldiers. As a result the South, or at least the ROK-US alliance, is assumed to enjoy a solid advantage over the North.
If you discuss not quantifiable power but unquantifiable authority and legitimacy, and assert that inter-Korean relations are informed not just by economic and security concerns but also by ideological affinity, and you back everything up with texts from both political cultures, you will be accused of taking a “literary” approach, or having no methodology at all. Rather than try to refute you, people will accuse you of “cherry-picking” texts, as a Redditer accused me the other day of doing.
Odd how these people never pick any countervailing cherries, let alone the bushel of them needed to prove I’m deviously seeking out the anomalous ones. Has the Moon administration ever expressed opposition to confederation?
I am also taken to task on Reddit for my “outdated” views on South Korea. This has become shorthand for “denying that the nationalist left is maturer and wiser, thus a better ally of the US, than it was in the naive Sunshine Policy era.” Call into doubt Moon’s commitment to denuclearization, and you’re behind the times.
My views were thus called outdated last January by one of two people who asserted months later that Moon Jae-in was more security-conservative than Kim Dae-Jung. I predicted a while back that this wishful myth would not survive the summer (which ended last Friday), but I’ve overestimated the commentariat before. In any case, nothing is more old-fashioned than all this complacency about the alliance.
Anger at my imputation of a league drive to the Blue House implies a moralizing rejection of league itself. Many Americans seem to consider the North too awful, too irredeemably a giant gulag, for the South ever to think of joining hands with it. Clearly they have an even lower opinion of the North than I do. By liberal-democratic standards too there are worse places. If I had to send my hypothetical teenage daughter to live somewhere else for a year as an average citizen, and had to rank all the countries in the world according to my preference, North Korea would not be in the bottom thirty.
More to the point: Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there any more than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.
Some observers regard the word nationalism (now a pejorative in the West) as inappropriate for what they see as a natural, healthy yearning to make the peninsula whole again. But a distinction must be made between:
a) feelings of ethnic community, pride in a shared cultural tradition, and a sense of special humanitarian duty to one’s own people, all of which West Germans felt in 1989-90 despite being generally anti-nationalist, and
b) an ideological commitment to raising the stature of one’s race on the world stage.
What holds South Korean nationalists together is b) and not a). This can be seen by their inordinate horror of the financial and social disruptions of unification, which in the past has actuated deliberate exaggeration of the likely costs, and which still induces many Moon-supporters to propose maintaining a one-nation, two-state system indefinitely. We see it also in the general indifference to human rights abuses in the North, and in the great pleasure and pride the ROK’s envoys showed last week at being in the dictator’s presence.
To be fair to my critics on Reddit and Twitter, I can see how my comparison of the two Koreas to a betrothed couple might have seemed “hyperbolic.” But it was Moon Jae-in himself last week who recalled, in all seriousness, how he and Kim Jong Un had held hands in April “like warm-hearted lovers” (tajŏng-han yŏn’in ch’ŏrŏm).
2
In North Korea, government-directed campaigns tend to manifest themselves first in inner-track propaganda before moving with time into news outlets prominent enough for foreigners to be monitoring.
It’s getting like that here too. After several months of bubbling under the mainstream media, while the Blue House talked airily of a “peace system,” support for league-confederation is now expressed straightforwardly in the Hankyoreh newspaper, known to the West as a “liberal daily.”
The topic’s full-blown emergence in outer-track discourse began in late August. In Pressian, for example, Professor Yi Chae-bong of Wonkwang University could be found saying:
It is when discussing North Korea’s proposal for unification through confederation in the course of giving testimony at court that I get a little tense, while at the same time feeling the greatest sense of pleasure and reward. In South Korea someone who supports the proposal can easily end up excoriated as a “grade A, North-following leftist” or be punished for “treasonous behavior,” but in front of judges and prosecutors I unashamedly support and propagandize for unification by confederation.
He says he keeps up the propaganda work wherever he goes, so obviously it’s not easy to get in trouble for it after all. These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail. But for over 20 years now the fun of moving up in the world while striking rebellious poses has been the great perk of being on the nationalist left.
August 31 saw Chŏng Se-hyŏn, a known mentor to the president, telling the Maeil Kyŏngje that only by raising a North-South economic community to the level of a league can the peninsula hold its own in negotiation with the US and China. The attitude to the alliance implicit in this matter-of-fact talk bears reflecting upon.
The ball really got rolling with the publication of the Fall 2018 issue of Ch’angjak-kwa pip’yong (The Quarterly Changbi, it calls itself in English), which contained a lead-off article on North-South league by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng, the editor emeritus.
A mentor to Moon Jae-in and an icon on the nationalist left, Paek was among the movers and shakers who joined the president on his trip to Pyongyang. At the start of his much-promoted, much-praised essay, which bears the title “What kind of North-South League is to be made?”, he says what I get called “conspiratorial” for saying:
The immediate goal of the Korean peninsula is “a low-level North-South league.”
A quick review of the terminology: Plain confederation was what the North called for in 1960, when it lifted the idea from Walter Ulbricht’s proposal for a German-German Konföderation. In the 1980s the South, eager to palliate Kim Il Sung, began proposing a league, a word which in Korean sounds much looser. The North then tried to reassure South Koreans it wanted a low-level confederation. And now the Moon camp speaks of a low-level league, thus implying something more reassuring still.
I will recur to Paek’s article below, but for the most part it repeats assertions of his that I have discussed in earlier posts.
League-confederation hype increased in September as the opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office drew closer. A headline in the Hankyoreh on September 12 read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article two days later reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun, albeit on a beginning level.” On September 13 Pressian held a conference at which various professors called for a league.
On September 14 the Kaesong office opened. Ch’oi Kyŏnghwan, an assemblyman from the Democratic Peace Party, greeted the event with a press statement picked up by numerous outlets:
The opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office is historically significant in that it opens the way to a North-South league, the first stage of unification.
As seems to be standard in talk of this matter, Ch’oi hearkened back to Kim Dae Jung:
The peaceful-unification plan of President Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy foresaw North-South league as a first stage, North-South confederation as a second, and complete unification as a third.
For all intents and purposes the Democratic Peace Party is the Jeolla party, but Ch’oi’s reference to the region’s most famous son is meant to reassure the entire public that nothing radical is being planned. Ch’oi also said that the North-South league (nambuk yŏnhap) must pave the way for a Korea league (k’oria yŏnhap) — whatever he means by that exactly.
The many articles published this month attest to a good deal of confusion about what North-South league entails, and what must precede or follow it. Is it more or less the same thing as confederation, as Moon Jae-in said in 2017? Or is it a stage on the way there? Is it in de facto operation already? In other words, is the Kaesong office the first stage in the systematization of the league (as Paek and the Hankyoreh assert), or the starting point on the road to it (as the Kyunghyang Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21 put it)? And is league the first stage of unification, or just a step in that direction? How fast is the end goal to be achieved?
I can find no serious debate on any of these points. Perhaps this is the great strength of the nationalist left. Those who approve of current developments generally get along fine, regardless of how differently they interpret them. Moon can thus float above the supportive discussion without having to pin himself down to any plan in particular.
3
Focusing on denuclearization as always, the Western commentariat generally downplayed the importance of the third Pyongyang summit.
Washington is thinking, “Let them have their get-togethers; we’re going to maintain sanctions until the North has to yield.” Seoul and Pyongyang are thinking, “Let them maintain their sanctions; we’re going to keep coming closer together until America has to yield.”
Near the top of the summit declaration was the statement that the two leaders had “reconfirmed the principles of ethnic autonomy and self-determination.” Most of the other points can also be interpreted in the context of league-building or league-preparing. But all these things had almost certainly been agreed to in advance.
The main point of holding the summit and the attendant photo ops was to habituate the South Korean public to the notion of the North as a normal, legitimate state, one fit to be trusted and leagued up with. The right wing here was therefore wrong to gloat over the lack of public interest in the event. Normalcy is supposed to be boring.
There was method even in Moon’s fulsome expressions of gratitude for the welcome he had received. He was in effect playing along with Kim Jong Un’s pretense that the citizens of Pyongyang had come out in droves on a weekday because they wanted to.
Were the South Korean president the liberal our journalists think he is, he would have insisted in advance that he not get the welcome accorded to Kim Dae Jung in 2000, who had realized at once who the crowds were really cheering for, and who later publicized the Dear Leader’s admission that they hadn’t lined the roads on their own initiative.
Instead Moon professed to be thrilled that this time, people were waving even from apartment windows. Is this because he is more naive and vain? Not at all. Unlike DJ he has a league to help build, and a dictatorship to help legitimize.
He must now ensure a respectful reception for his counterpart in December. This next milestone in the process may serve as a pretext for “regulating” conservative Youtubers, something the Moon-loyal media have been agitating for with increasing stridence.
September has also seen a concerted effort to downplay the Kim regime’s resemblance to a monarchy or a chaebol clan, which is the one aspect of the North that rubs even sympathetic people here the wrong way. Appearing on TBS Radio soon after his return from Pyongyang, Pak Chi-wŏn of the Democratic Peace Party said in regard to Kim Jong Un’s sister:
It’s because she’s of the Paektu bloodline that she hasn’t achieved the prominence merited by her ability …. It’s completely different from Park Geun-hye, who achieved much more prominence than her ability warranted.
So although Park came to power in a free and democratic election with a majority of votes, the ROK’s system is more rigged and nepotistic than the North’s, where blood-ties to the leader are more of a hindrance than a help. Pak’s interviewer Kim Ŏ-jun, a prominent Moon-loyal journalist, chimed in with:
[Kim Yo-jong] is highly regarded in North Korea too. Not because she’s his sister, but because of her ability.
I especially like that “too.” We can expect much more in this vein as Kim Jong Un’s visit draws near.
4
Let me return, by way of a conclusion, to Paek Nak-ch’ŏng’s essay. In it he reiterates a point he has already made a few times this year: A league must precede denuclearization, since it’s the only true guarantee against the “great threat” now posed by the “very existence of South Korea.” I must repeat my clarification that neither the ROK-US alliance nor the ROK’s arsenal is meant. He means the political threat to the Kim regime posed by the subversive contiguity of an independent co-ethnic state, one that periodically elects North-critical presidents.
Paek says that in a league the Koreas will “arrive at a situation in which large-scale change becomes inevitable in South Korean society as well.”
Both sides will see big change all right, but on very different fronts. If the whole point of a league is to make the Kim dictatorship feel perfectly secure, the North will see little more than economic and technological change, a rise in its material standard of living. The large-scale change Paek envisions for the South, though he is discreet enough not to come right out and say so, can only be of the threat-nullifying, political-cultural sort.
Impossible to believe? I wish it was. While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier.
We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on.
UPDATE (5 October 2018)
I must confess to liking Park Won-sun, the mayor of Seoul, who has done much to relieve the plight of stray dogs and cats over the past several years, thereby setting an example for Busan and other cities. When you take the animals’ side in the war being waged against them, as I do, you gain a certain emotional distance from inter-human affairs, which can be an asset when researching a foreign country.
But readers who think I underestimate the South Korean nationalist left’s interest in human rights and overestimate its admiration for the North’s political culture should find the mayor’s remarks in the English Chosun eye-opening. Having just returned from the North, he said:
“I thought that we must preserve Pyongyang. It took almost 10,000 people just a few seconds to flip from one scene to the next. This is something you can see only in North Korea.”
When one reporter pointed out that some people feel uncomfortable watching the eerily synchronized display of conformity, Park said, “That’s because it’s their first time. We should be able to resolve [differences] if we see each other more often.”
So resolving differences means that South Koreans must get used to the aspects of the North they now find problematic, like its exploitation of children to political and economic ends.
To repeat a point I’ve made often in the past: The North’s mass games and tile displays are not communist exercises in the grinding-down of individuality, as the West misperceives them, but ultra-nationalist celebrations of ethnic homogeneity and unity. This doesn’t make the Moon camp’s sincere enthusiasm for these spectacles — or their regret that they are not replicable in the South — any easier to reconcile with liberal-democratic principles.
In other league-building news, South Korea’s prime minister is strengthening my hunch that Kim Jong Un’s visit will be preceded by a crackdown on strong criticism of the Moon administration (and of its North Korea policy in particular).
Western Pyongyang watchers tend to outsource judgment to institutions, as the Tyranny scandal has shown; we mustn’t presume to judge the clear evidence ourselves, but must leave that task to Columbia University and Cornell University Press while we go on citing pages riddled with indisputably fake sources. The same mindset dictates that the opinions of people not degreed, titled, or affiliated to any swanky institution are beneath notice. (I was just sneered at on Twitter for having responded in the above blog post to criticism from anonymous Redditers.)
When the time comes, therefore, Moon’s foreign supporters will likely shrug off measures against mere Youtubers as a needed check on all the kooks shouting “Fire!” in the peninsular movie theater. In fact the most popular commentators were, until very recently, respected contributors to TV panel discussions and the op-ed pages of the Donga or Joongang. They are not extremists. Jeong Gyu-je and Hwang Jang-su have been subjected to foul-mouthed insults from the actual far right for their criticisms of Park Geun-hye and other conservative politicians.
I reject the conventional notion that all this crackdown talk marks at worst a return to, or a lack of progress from, the last administration’s alleged intolerance of dissident speech. At the very least those were more pluralist times than these. Has everyone forgotten that in 2014 Park Geun-hye appointed to her Unification Preparatory Council none other than Moon Chung-in? Has everyone forgotten how her Unification Ministry used to invite some of her harshest critics to an annual conference of Pyongyang watchers?
In fact we are seeing here something new: the first stage of the “large-scale change” in South Korean society that the nationalist left, by its own admission, considers necessary for the coming “peace system.”
UPDATE (28 October 2018): The Foreign Press Finally Takes Notice
Kudos to John Power and the South China Morning Postfor what is by far the best and most important English-language article on Korea to have come out since Moon Jae-in took power in May 2017. I’m not going to pretend to wonder why it had to be written by someone outside the foreign press corps in Seoul. The Blue House’s astute bridling of that lot would make a great story in itself – but who would dare write it?
I only wish Power hadn’t described North Korea as a communist country. This fallacy is bound to obscure the inherent precariousness of the very un-China-like set-up which — to hear some on the nationalist left tell it — is already in the first stage of de facto operation.
It shouldn’t be long now before the rest of the Western press kicks in with flippant “A League of Their Own” headlines, and cocksure optimism from the same experts who refused for so long to believe that any of this was being seriously considered.
I expect to hear everything spun as our loyal ally’s bold but pragmatic effort at subversively engaging the North, and boosting the South’s own economy in the process.
But what we’re talking about here is a confederation between a proud, resolute, ultra-nationalist state and an admiring, avowedly pacifist, moderate-nationalist one. No great gift of intuition is needed to predict that Kim Jong Un, not Moon Jae-in, will be the gardener guiding and shaping the inosculation of the two states.
In the meantime even those in Washington who refuse to accept the ideological realities must ponder the grotesqueness of our having an ally that is now, or very soon will be, quite literally in league with our adversary.
And a nuclearized adversary at that. The Moon camp has made abundantly clear — even if the Blue House hasn’t — that league or confederation must come before the denuclearization of the North, for only such a union would give Pyongyang the security it craves.
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 advertising.)
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.
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.
Moon Jae-in and Prof. Paek Nak-ch’ŏng in 2012. Newsis, 16 May 2012.
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.
Pyongyang watchers have always found reasons not to discuss ideology. According to the first consensus, North Korea was just a mindless satellite of the USSR. The second consensus was that it had a unique doctrine of solipsistic communism no foreigner could hope to penetrate. The current consensus: The North is a “reactive” state where ideology no longer matters.
Although observers still talk of a Juche / communist / Stalinist state, they always mean a failed one, with only enough ideology remaining to hold the economy back.
Thus has the regime’s nationalist commitment to unification been ignored or even denied. Conferences on North Korea took place, have taken place this month – are probably taking place as I write this — without anyone mentioning its ideology. You know you’re at a North Korea conference when you can’t tell the political scientists from the I.R. people.
Meanwhile Korean nationalism has not only energized the North’s march to nuclear armament, but also exerted a growing appeal on people in the South — the ideological discourse of which republic has received even less attention than the North’s. The average American knows only that in the 1980s liberal democracy replaced authoritarianism here.
Academics are not influential enough to deserve all the blame for this. The press talks to us, sure, but the press will talk to anyone. The government is much less keen on hearing our point of view. I bet it’s especially wary of consulting scholars when they say a regime’s ideology is beyond our knowing, or that fabricating sources is nothing to criticize a colleague for, but fields less obviously dysfunctional than “North Korean Studies” get passed over too.
Generally our bureaucrats reach their own conclusions among themselves, and then seek just enough external expertise to cover their rear ends. This was done most notoriously during the Vietnam War. In War and Politics (1973) Bernard Brodie writes:
If there is one practically unvarying principle about the use within the government of outside experts as consultants, it is that they must be known to be friendly to the policy on which they are being consulted. They may be critical of details … but not of the fundamentals. (p.214.)
We may scoff at this, but it’s human nature, and academics are no less prone to it.
In any case, the same tendencies that have made Koreanists shirk discussion of the North’s ideology seem to have induced our government to do likewise. An intelligence community with a serious interest in the subject would not have contented itself with any of the three consensuses summarized above. (The CIA’s research helped shape them all anyway.)
I was mindful enough of Brodie’s words not to get carried away last year when the Washington Post reported that US officials were reading The Cleanest Race. I assumed that the government had come around to a similar view of the North for which it sought external confirmation. I was also encouraged by a few official references to the unification drive.
But when the NSC’s H.R. McMaster spoke of this in December 2017 he described it in terms of an urge to unite the peninsula “under the red banner.” If there had been any change in perception, it was a reversion to the notion of a virulent-communist adversary.
This spring, however, the State Department took center stage again, and with it the more conventional misperception of the North. When Pompeo showed Kim Yong Chol the Manhattan skyline he did so with an air of Cold War oneupmanship, like Henry Cabot Lodge taking Khrushchev around town.
According to a senior State Department official, Pompeo was motioning to “a brighter future” that could be possible for North Korea, in exchange for it ending its nuclear program. (ABC News, 31 May 2018.)
To judge from the North Korean’s high spirits after the meeting, he knew just what fallacy our people were laboring under, and how to turn it to advantage.
No less telling were the photos of Sung Kim’s meetings with Pyongyang’s “diplomatic warriors.” Choe Son Hui looked more relaxed and cheerful than ever. She too must have known what was in the offing: the myth of a failed-red North was about to give the real, ascendant North more time and stature with which to attain its nationalist objectives.
Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.
As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar American combination of credulity and condescension.
All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones.
As for that much-ridiculed video Trump had made for the occasion, what was it, if not a dramatic rendition of the failed-communist model? The moment I realized what I was watching, I waited for that satellite photograph, the nocturnal one we never hear the end of. Sure enough, it appeared at about the 2-minute mark. For how can a country without lights not be failed, broken, looking for a face-saving way out? And America can help.
[How typical that the one source of information on North Korea that requires no reading or background knowledge should be invoked more often by Americans than any other. I get reminded of it when I talk of a unification drive: “How could such a backward country possibly,” etc, etc. But would a satellite shot of divided Vietnam in 1974 have looked all that different?]
Even those who mocked Trump for setting the mission of denuclearization back a step or two said they were glad the summit had taken place. Why? Because talk is always better than war, even if our adversary derives far more benefit than we do. Without debating the merits of appeasement per se (and there were merits even in Chamberlain’s kind), let’s at least acknowledge that such an approach is appeasement.
Pompeo says we can expect major progress toward denuclearization “in, what was it, two and a half years.” That he had to jog his own memory shows how little thought he has given to what Kim and Moon plan to accomplish in that time frame. If we don’t see what we want by the winter of 2020-21, our options will be far more limited than they are now.
For years the American press gave us sporadic reports on how blasé South Koreans were about the threat from the North, and how indifferent they had become to the welfare or human rights of the people up there.
Yet early this year the commentariat suddenly had to explain the dramatic change in North-South relations without resorting to meta-ideological discussion, which it hates above all things.
At first we heard from our leading newspapers how the South Korean public had been turned upside-down by the immense charm and fashion sense of Kim Yo-jong, of all people. This talk was so obviously trivial and false as to incur a backlash.
Since then the press has pushed the line that Moon’s outreach to the North reflects South Koreans’ yearning to be free from the sleep-robbing fear of nuclear war, free also from fear of a US strike on their brethren above the DMZ. (No one acknowledges the contradiction to the line we used to get.)
In accordance with this new consensus, the lumpencommentariat dismisses all talk of ideological affinity between the Blue House and the Kim regime as “McCarthyist” ravings or “fucking John Birch shit,” to mention a few epithets on Twitter directed at my ally-as-intermediary piece.
Much as I want to put this blogging stuff behind me, the upcoming summit compels me to draw attention, if only for the record, to how the nationalist left’s own discourse backs me up.
A few months ago I predicted the ruling Minjoo Party would begin agitating for a league or confederation before the June 13 elections. I said that in doing so it would focus on the economic benefits.
Last week I received the various parties’ campaign materials in a big envelope. (As a permanent resident I am eligible to vote in local elections.) Sure enough, the Minjoo pamphlet has a slogan in big brushstroke font at the top of one page: “Peace Equals Economy!” Underneath, next to a photo of President Moon, is the somewhat coded but still urgent pledge to “construct a permanent peace system this year.”
Of course his base knows what this means. To quote an approving headline in the nationalist-left Hankyoreh on April 29:
The plan for unification via a North-South league is hidden in the Panmunjom Declaration.
Indeed it is, and in plain sight. But the Hankyoreh was quick to drop this talk, being mindful of the need to get the Americans to Singapore in as blissful a state of ignorance as possible. This is why street demonstrations for the “peace system” have so far been rather small and sedate affairs (though with a higher proportion of young participants than conservative rallies).
A less prominent, therefore less constrained source of Moon camp discourse is Tongil [Unification] News. In a recent article Paek Nak-ch’eong, an SNU professor emeritus of some influence, is quoted as saying that the leaguing-up or confederating process has in effect already begun.
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.
Such remarks are becoming common. On May 29, just after the second Kim-Moon summit, the head of a research institute had his presentation summarized as follows:
The ‘Panmunjom Declaration’ has effectively opened the door to the stage of a North-South league. In less than a month, North-South summits have become routine and regular, and if a formal structure for North-South cabinet meetings is created, and meetings on the parliamentary level take place this year, a ‘North-South league’ will be complete.
South Korea is an unpredictable place, but at present I see no pressing reason why things couldn’t unfold in the way described. After all, the main reason the ruling party has been touting its plan for a “peace system” in the run-up to local elections — in contrast to the shrewd downplaying of North-South issues during Moon’s presidential campaign — is in order to claim a mandate on June 13 to gallop towards it.
(Yes, gallop. After Kim Jong Un said that North-South relations must progress as fast as a “10,000 league horse,” the ROK Unification Minister allegedly said in the earshot of reporters: “We need to make a faster horse.”)
The conference that produced the last indented statement above was hosted by Tongilmaji, a civic group run by the ruling party’s own Yi Hae-ch’an. (Many groups that seem more radical than the government itself would be considered astroturf organizations by American standards.) The published proceedings offer valuable insight into the mindset of the sort of people the Moon administration likes to see on its advisory “TF” or task forces.
In the front matter is a warm letter from the “Committee of National [minjok] Conciliation” in Pyongyang, complete with North Korean orthography and Juche calendar date, and talk of a shared “patriotic movement” (aeguk undong). To North Koreans the obvious implication is that the South Korean friends share their love of the DPRK.
Whether the folk at Tongilmaji realize this, I am not sure; they may well think reference is to the North-South league (one country or kuk, two systems) which in their minds is already a done deal.
Either way, the events of the past few months have had quite a disinhibiting effect. Not since the Chang Myun era (1960-61) has the National Security Law been so loosely enforced. One encounters increasingly casual invocation of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un as an authority on whatever is being discussed. For example: We Koreans are too easily fooled by others, so we must read Kim Il Sung’s memoirs With the Century, and learn how he always kept his guard up. (The irony! But I know a few foreign Koreanists who swallow the “memoirs” too.)
While there is great affection for “Inny,” as the South Korean president is sometimes called, there is more solemn respect for the three Kims. This is only natural, for by nationalist standards they are far superior.
Still, it’s obvious that the left is consciously holding back until after the Singapore summit. As Ko Sŭng-u of the Citizens’ League for Democratic Media put it in a recent talk:
Some people are saying that to make sure the US-North Korea summit goes ahead, it is better not to mention the problem of the withdrawal of US troops.
I get the logic. If Trump realizes how quickly low-level confederation will come about, and what is bound to ensue, he might be less impressed by what Kim Jong Un refrains from demanding. And less inclined to reward this forbearance.
But take it from me, Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats.
Ko himself doesn’t need my encouragement. He comes right out and says that the construction of a “permanent peace system” must lead to the abolition of the Mutual Defense Treaty in its current form. Which is of course true. (Ko believes it already violates the ROK constitution.)
To return to the Tongilmaji gathering: A paper by Yi Hyŏk-hŭi, chairman of the group’s steering committee, confirms my hunch — as expressed in the ally-as-intermediary posting — that political power is now being exercised not by an administration in the full sense, but by a clique answering to a popular movement.
In the current situation the executor known as ‘government’ does not appear very different from the public [min’gan]. It is known that for reasons related to security, urgency and importance a very small group inside the Blue House is making policy decisions, and shaping the current state of affairs. When you get right down to it, the worrying reality is not so much the ‘bypassing of the public’ but the ‘bypassing of government.’
Sounds a bit like the Trump administration, doesn’t it? But Yi isn’t worried for the reasons you or I would be.
While the president is racing along, the offices directly and indirectly responsible for implementing policy are not doing their work. Worse, they are causing ‘mishaps’….. Inside ‘government’ there appear to be no bureaucrats who understand the Moon government’s philosophy. A second fundamental reason appears to be the lack of a purge of accumulated ills [cheokpye]. Expecting bureaucrats who worked in the Unification Ministry and other offices under the Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-hye governments to correctly understand the current situation and correctly do their work is in itself nonsensical.
So many North-critical people to purge, so little time. After local elections generate the appearance of a mandate, this endeavor will pick up pace in a big way.
As it must. April 2020 is not far off.
Let me explain: Judging from cyclical trends in ROK political history, and the international track record of economic policies like Moon’s, there is a strong likelihood of the conservatives taking back the National Assembly in the 2020 legislative elections, whereupon they would move to nullify North-South agreements, and restore whatever US troops and weaponry might have been sent home by that time.
The many apologetic Pyongyang watchers who attributed the twin military attacks of 2010 to Lee Myung Bak’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy will have to agree with me that the dictatorship would not take a much greater reversal of its fortunes lying down.
No doubt the same people who jeered at me last winter for thinking confederation possible will now find me crazy for suggesting that the South Koreans might get cold feet at the altar of this eminently sensible “peace system.”
But the scenario in question certainly looms large in the Moon camp’s own thinking. This is why it wants the legislature to compel future compliance with all summit agreements — regardless of whether the North violates them, it seems. It has also, as I have said before, expressed a commitment to keeping the right out of power for the next twenty years.
Unfortunately the US government shows no awareness of how dangerous the “peace process” is likely to be. Trump has given his blessing to inter-Korean dialogue of which he clearly understands nothing, and praised Kim Jong Un as an “honorable” person, while making clear that US troops will remain here for as long as they’re wanted. In this manner he has encouraged the South Korean people to sign off on risks they may well balk at later. Our troops could end up paying the price.
It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments. –- David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” 1741
[In Suez in 1956 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961] the chief Western errors were failures of theoretical and ideological omission….What is the political nature of our opponent? That question was either not raised or inadequately answered. Ideologically, both cases involved failures to assess the long-range and more basic forces at work. — Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics, 1964
Whenever I’m told that a certain combination of sticks and carrots can induce North Korea to give up nuclear arms, as I’m hearing now, I always respond by asking: “Let’s presume that does happen. And then what? How does the regime go on justifying its existence?”
In my decades of raising this question in discussions, op-ed pieces, blog postings and interviews, no more than one person every two or three years has attempted an answer.
Each of those rare times I have encountered combinations of the following wrong assumptions:
that North Korea is a communist or Stalinist state, and can therefore legitimize itself all the more effectively by raising the masses’ standard of living and improving the welfare system;
that the national mission is self-reliance, and therefore compatible with the exchange of nuclear might for energy autonomy and other prizes;
that North Korea is already a post-ideological, “reactive” state that reconstitutes its politics according to stimuli from without;
that the object of a personality cult is so godlike he can change the national mission at will;
that by compelling America to abandon its hostility, the regime will score a propaganda victory it can milk indefinitely;
that North Korea can maintain mass support even as the poorer of two economy-first Koreas;
that unlike the East Germans in 1989-90, North Koreans will be content enough with annual rises in their living standard not to want the greater, faster improvement that would come with absorption into the richer co-ethnic state;
that dictatorships can rule by coercion alone, and thus do not need legitimacy.
These errors (on all of which I have expended plenty of ink) reflect not just an ignorance of North Korea, and of dictatorial governance in general. They also show a lack of political common sense: a failure to grasp that every country has an inner political life, which reflects its citizens’ need for transcendent significance — for something beyond mere incomes and calories.
When Western “experts” invoke Kim Jong Un’s alleged fear of ending up like Gaddafi, they do not mean, “He’s afraid that if he compromises with the unifying enemy in the hope that economic growth will keep everyone happy, and embarks on reforms no dictator can carry through on, he will lose so much support at home, and then regional stature, that the US will feel emboldened to finish him off.”
No, they mean only, “Kim is afraid that if he disarms, the US will attack.”
Political science, by which I mean nothing more abstruse or academic than consideration of a foreign country as a country in its own right, seems to have been almost completely supplanted by a preoccupation with international relations. What is thought irrelevant to that side of things (often wrongly) is considered beneath notice. This can be seen by the reflexiveness with which journalists now contact I.R. professors or nuclear specialists for comment on North Korea’s motivations, party conferences, personality cult, etc — and the perfect confidence with which that comment is supplied.
This is not to say that discussion of the current crisis does justice to international relations as a discipline. Usually it is conducted in a very simplistic, moralizing, America-centric fashion, with no apparent sense of history. Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority to Donald Trump. For all his unsuitedness to be president, the fellow is no more ignorant of North Korea’s political nature than most of his critics are.
We often hear that, without nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un couldn’t stay in power.Sorry, but haven’t they been in power before they had nuclear weapons?I mean, his father, his grandfather.
The sources of power in North Korea, the sources of legitimacy, are not nuclear weapons.They’re much deeper and broader.And, if you go to North Korea, you get a good picture of that, by talking to people.
Certainly, the weapons are important in terms of dealing with external security threats.But you saw recently how they sort of make a U-turn.Right?After years of extolling these technological advances, they said “Okay, we’ve accomplished what we needed to.Now we’re going in a different direction.”That’s the kind of system it is.
In the first paragraph the speaker appears to concede that nuclear weapons were never necessary for the North’s mere self-defense against a hostile nuclear power.
At the same time he overlooks a problem at the crux of this crisis. The surrender of something attained heroically and at great cost — something to which the well-being of entire generations has been sacrificed — is far more dangerous to a government than not having it to begin with.
The second paragraph is a feigned missing-of-the-point, followed by some classic Mileage Club bluffing. No one ever said the regime’s legitimacy reposes in the nukes themselves. It rests on a commitment to the unyielding defense and unification of the Korean nation. Such a regime cannot give up arms with a “been there, done that,” and turn to more benign pursuits. That’s decidedly not the kind of system this is.
Mix America-centricity with wishful thinking, and you get the belief that the regime in Pyongyang speaks more honestly to Washingtonians than to its own people. One of Wit’s recent articles is called: “What the North Koreans told me about their plans.” If the headliners at the Atlantic came up with that, it was a good nut-shelling of its whole claim to significance. We know on which syllable the emphasis falls.
But the excerpt above implies that the seasoned visitor to Pyongyang can gain initiation, just “by talking to people,” even into the central mystery of the nuclear crisis: How can the North hope to maintain mass support as the other, much poorer, economy-first Korea?
It’s a shame Wit won’t spill the beans. Are we perhaps to expect — emblazoned on wall-posters, held up on mass-game tiles — a political transposition of “underdog advertising,” à la Avis?
Until someone can provide a plausible answer to such questions, by which I mean an answer that does not impute stupidity to the regime, or an urge to commit political suicide, I have to assume Pyongyang’s “diplomatic warriors” are negotiating in the same bad faith as always.
[Abandoning my readers to the Western commentariat is like leaving a child standing on the edge of a well, to borrow a vivid Korean phrase, but I no longer have the time or inclination to blog regularly. My sabbatical is over, I have a book to work on, and those who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the peninsula probably never will. Having sent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters.
And no interest in helping readers exercise judgment, draw reasoned conclusions. The other day I came across such an obvious explanation for our media’s penchant for mutually nullifying soundbites that I feel embarrassed for having complained about it on this blog. Because the maximum number of consumers must be strung along from story to story, Christoph Böhr writes, “the only important thing is to leave everything undecided and noncommittal to the end…. This ritualized mediality is quite the opposite of deliberation.” (“Die deliberative Gesellschaft,” in Warum noch Philosophie?, ed. van Ackeren et al, Berlin, 2011, p.217.) This also explains why journalists print comments they know are nonsense, like the one about how we can’t hope to grasp Kim Jong Un’s intentions if we don’t know what he had for breakfast. But a nuclear crisis is serious. We need to deliberate.]
Americans should think twice before cheering on their South Korean ally in its chosen role as intermediary between Pyongyang and Washington. Whenever an ally is allowed to attempt such a function, the adversary is bound to benefit most.
Needless to say, an ally that acted as a truly impartial go-between would be a contradiction in terms. The Americans expect Seoul to play good cop to their bad cop. They assume the commonality of language, ethnicity and culture will help the South build trust with the North, so it can put the alliance’s demands over more persuasively. They also reckon the North Koreans will find it easier to yield to soft-spoken fellow Koreans than to the foreigners with whom they have been exchanging threats and insults for decades.
But to play such a role the South must overcome an exceptionally high barrier of mistrust. It gets no brownie points for Koreanness alone. On the contrary; from the North’s standpoint it’s precisely that co-ethnicity which makes the puppet state’s long collusion with the Yankees so heinous. Making any major concession to it in talks would mean a greater loss of face than doing so in direct negotiations with the US, which — as the North sees things — is at least its equal, a fellow nuclear power.
The only meaningful commonality between North Korea and the South Korean nationalist left is ideological in nature. The left virtually sprang out of the North’s loins in the latter 1940s. Both parties agree that Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla hero, and that Syngman Rhee cemented national division, thereby bringing on the tragedy of the Korean War. The left’s demonstrations and uprisings have all been glamorized in the North’s history books, as have many of its icons. When Moon Jae-in quoted Shin Young-bok to Kim Yo-jong and Kim Young-nam last month, and got both to pose with him in front of Shin’s calligraphy, it was in awareness that the North cherishes the long-imprisoned leftist’s memory too.
It is therefore misleading of the New York Times to say that the Moon Jae-in administration is “hungry for a diplomatic rapprochement” with Pyongyang. There is no bad blood or grudge between the two parties that must now be laboriously reconciled. Besides, they have the exact same short term goal of bringing off a North-South summit that is PR-effective enough to get a) the international community to relax sanctions, and b) the South Korean public to sign off on confederation. Their longer term goals are different. The North wants unification under its own flag, while South Korean progressives want the two states to coalesce over decades of mutually beneficial economic cooperation.
I see quite a few foreign Pyongyang watchers now quietly acknowledging Kim’s unification drive and Moon’s commitment to confederation. They’re even trying to assume the air of people who never doubted these things, in the hope that everyone has already forgotten their writings to the contrary. But to maintain their pose of worldly unflappability they now assert that the North could never get its way, Moon Jae-in being very clever and security-minded and in perfect control of the situation.
They need to start by reading Pareto; elites routinely do things that in retrospect look politically suicidal. (Just look at South Korea in 2016/2017, when advocates of a parliamentary system handed off power to the only sizeable political force that didn’t want it.) They also need to realize that confederation would entail some sort of council consisting of North Korean cadres voting en bloc and an equal number of South Koreans who, having been selected along democratic principles, would be certain to contain at least one pro-North delegate. The council might not give confederated Korea a President Kim Jong Un (which Takesada Hideshi considers a distinct possibility), but unless it is purely for show, it will effectively advance the North’s interests.
For that matter, the shift to a parliamentary system now advocated by the conservative opposition may turn out to be an even greater threat to the republic, as Byun Hee-jae never tires of pointing out. One need only imagine a pro-North splinter party playing the sort of role in a coalition that the DUP now plays in the British government.
Back to the issue at hand. Between radicals and moderates, trust tends to go in one direction only. The moderate regards the radical as highly principled, while the radical sees the moderate as opportunistic and weak-willed. Inter-Korean trust-building is thus largely a unilateral affair of the progressives trying to prove that they are at least ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. This entails making much of their admiration of the North’s autonomy, and professing to maintain the US-ROK alliance more for economic reasons than anything else.
Understandably enough the dictatorship expects this talk to be backed up with action. It was not mere greed that made Kim Jong Il insist on an enormous illicit transfer of public funds from Seoul before agreeing to host the 2000 summit. It was among other things a test of how far his counterpart was prepared to go in deceiving Washington.
I hope I don’t sound indignant. Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee were in their own way just as duplicitous, and few countries in modern times have betrayed as many state and non-state allies as America has.
The simple truth of the matter is that no Blue House can win Pyongyang’s trust without distancing itself from the US ally to a significant degree. At the very least it must present itself as neutral in the nuclear stand-off, but even that probably isn’t enough. As Chamfort said, “Anyone placed at exactly the same distance between yourself and your enemy will always appear closer to your enemy.” The South Koreans can play go-between only if they restrict themselves to mediating with Washington on the North’s behalf.
The Americans listened benignly to Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine Policy rhetoric in the belief that he intended only to play good cop, which was how he always sold it to the world. (The Aesop fable from which it derived its name is the world’s oldest story of a good cop/bad cop strategy.) They were disappointed to learn after the Pyongyang summit that he had neither mentioned human rights to Kim Jong Il nor pressed him on nuclear matters. It took the South Korean president a few more years to acknowledge that the North had a nuclear program at all.
All the same, Washington appeared blind to the implications of the two Kims’ public pledge to work towards some form of an inter-state community, so as to solve the problem of unification “among our own people” and “autonomously.” In North Korea and on the South Korean left, the word autonomous means in such contexts: without Yankee meddling.
Kim Dae Jung’s more blunt-spoken successor Roh Moo Hyun left no doubt, however, that he was more interested in pleading Pyongyang’s case with Washington than vice versa. The Kim regime, he kept saying, was pursuing a nuclear program only in order to feel safe – he found this reasonable (illi ga itta) — and would abandon it “if economic support and the security of its system can be guaranteed.”
All this made Roh very handy to Kim Jong Il, who due to the collapse of the information cordon surrounding his state could no longer play the hawk at home and the dove in export propaganda. This way he could stay in Iron General mode while another power assured the world of his insecurity. And what more authoritative, trustworthy source could one ask for than the South Koreans? Whether Kim Dae Jung, Roh Moo Hyun or Moon Jae-in, the message to Washington has always been: “Trust us; we know these guys much better than you do.”
Nowhere in the transcripts of the 2007 summit does Roh express disapproval of the North’s nuclear program. On the contrary, he tells Kim he has been acting as the North’s “spokesman and advocate” at international summits. He also says that “the biggest problem is the US,” and that he would publicly oppose its position if not for the South’s economic interests and his desire to keep the Americans in the 6 Party talks. He also reports on the promising rise in anti-Americanism in the South, calling this “a change in the environment that makes it possible for our (Korean) nation to solve problems autonomously.” (The text is contained in, among other places, Yi Hae-sŏng and Yi Chun-gu’s recent book Pukhan ŭi pyŏnhoin No Mu-hyŏn, Seoul, 2017).
(Note: judging from how Roh’s people later falsely assured the public and the US ambassador that the maritime border in the Yellow Sea had not been discussed at the summit, they seem to have intended to keep the transcripts secret – and would likely have done so had the right not returned to power a few months later.)
Keep in mind here that while Roh Moo Hyun was to the left of Kim Dae Jung, which isn’t saying much, he was a moderate in comparison to the people around him, who included Moon Jae-in and many others in the current administration. The common claim that Roh personally exploited the US armored vehicle accident in 2002 to win the election is a rightist canard. It was the conservative presidential candidate who demanded George W. Bush personally apologize — and Roh who later sent South Korean troops to Afghanistan and promoted the KORUS FTA. A tax lawyer by training, with no roots in campus protests, he was at the very least more pro-American, more committed to liberal democracy and free markets, and more critical of the North than Moon Jae-in is.
True, he also gave billions in aid to the Kim Jong Il regime, but the 2007 summit transcripts indicate that close economic cooperation with the North was about all he wanted, even if he was ready to nullify part of the NLL to get it. Had he wanted confederation with the North he would have pushed for it when his popularity was at its height.
Moon Jae-in, on the other hand, is now prepared to abide by sanctions far stricter than those in force in Roh’s day, because he has a much larger goal in view than the re-opening of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, and knows he must project a certain image to Washington and his own public to reach it.
Few South Koreans in political circles would take issue with this characterization behind closed doors, though more might make a pretense of doing so in foreign earshot. The ideological difference between the aging Roh loyalists and the younger Moon followers now shunting them aside is even harder to overlook than the difference between the two presidents themselves. Everyone here with a serious interest in inter-Korean affairs now senses, with excitement or dread, that something very big is being prepared with Pyongyang.
There is also a sense that anyone who gets in the way of it will be in trouble. The main broadcasters are now firmly under the Moon camp’s influence, the unions having succeeded in hounding conservatives off the boards of directors. Nightly political discussion is conducted accordingly. Talk show producers sound out potential panelists and reject anyone who seems too critical of the Blue House, particularly in regard to North Korea. The other day a veteran of an earlier progressive administration complained to me that the government has begun making scolding phone calls to academics who contribute unfriendly soundbites to the Chosun and Donga (which are pulling punches anyway). It’s not exactly the knock on the door at 4 a.m., but the widespread perception is that anyone can suddenly find himself the object of prosecutorial scrutiny. This, and not the lack of decent candidates, is why the conservative parties can’t find people to run for office.
I am not unaware of a certain froideur myself. In my experience South Koreans are wonderfully tolerant of a foreigner with differing views when the discussion is in Korean, and no foreigners of importance are around. They lose their tempers when they see someone exporting information which — however widely discussed in the Korean press — is thought best kept “in country.”
[This goes for the right as well as the left. Tell an American in the company of South Korean conservatives how their camp boasts of a tradition not of pro-Americanism (ch’inmijuŭi) but of “use-America-ism” (yongmijuŭi) and you’ll see what I mean.]
For now only Americans seem naive enough to think that President Moon represents a new tendency in South Korean leftism toward more security-mindedness, more wariness of the North. Even if left unchecked this fallacy will not survive the summer, but that may be about all the time needed. Moon himself has said that the next few months will decide the fate of the peninsula.
Let’s not forget that one of the president’s first decisions was to appoint as his chief of staff Im Jong-seok, who not only led a radical pro-North organization in his student years, for which he did time after years of evading arrest, but was also given power of attorney by the Kim Jong Il regime in 2005 to enforce the North’s copyrights in the South. For several years he served quite literally as Pyongyang’s agent, in the commercial or non-espionage sense of the word, collecting royalties from broadcasters and educational institutions that made use of North Korean images, art, film and music. Before anyone suggests he might have reformed in the brief interim before his appointment: If there’s anyone the North Koreans loathe, it’s a backslider, a renegade. The fact that they are still happy to deal with Im speaks for itself.
Now, a president can fill almost any post with a view to settling a political debt, satisfying a domestic constituency, or projecting inclusiveness, but his right-hand man has to be the person on his staff he trusts most. (This is especially true in South Korea, where every outgoing president faces the threat of retaliatory prosecution.) One can therefore consider Im a wonderful fellow, and think his ties to the North valuable enough to qualify him for some position, yet still find him an astonishing choice for chief of staff. Apart from the presidency itself, there’s no other position, not even defense minister, in which an adversarial government would prefer to have an old friend of over 25 years’ standing.
Most of the Western commentariat overlooked all this, but we can be certain that the US government knew all about Im Jong-seok, and that Seoul and Pyongyang knew it knew. The appointment therefore makes no sense except as a signal to the North, one far more impressive than Kim Dae Jung’s coerced transfer of funds. “Look how far I’m willing to go here,” Moon was in effect saying, “I’m putting special trust in the very same person in whom you place special trust, the last man the Americans want to see in such a vital post.”
The foreign observer might well find it improbable that Moon would knowingly rankle the Americans in such a manner. But central to nationalist left orthodoxy has long been the belief that the US will cling desperately to the alliance until the South sends it packing. A recent and very typical expression of this:
America cannot overturn [the status quo] without abandoning the many benefits it now enjoys: the sale of weapons to South Korea and Japan, holding China down at the peninsula, hindering Russia’s new East Asia policy…. For geopolitical and geoeconomical reasons, America cannot abandon South Korea. South Korea has to exploit this to the full.” Prof. Jeon Hyeon-jun, quoted in the Joongang Ilbo, Jan 30 2018.
Hence also the confident hope of many that under the right sort of pressure, Washington will reduce USFK from bodyguard to chaperone: a force just high-tech and well-armed enough to reassure foreign investors, reward the US military-industrial complex, and discourage the North from doing anything crazy, but too small and averse to military exercises to frighten the neighbors. (Which may well be what is foreseen for the very first stage of a confederation, as a transition to US troop pullout.)
The same belief has informed the Moon camp’s readiness to offend the US government, though it’s careful not to impress this readiness on the dozing Western commentariat. This feat is only possible because our government — as the South Koreans know only too well — has a horror of publicly admitting to disunity in its alliances.
Last year the Moon camp publicly stated that it would not allow the North to be attacked; that the US should acknowledge it as a nuclear power, and abandon its “hostile policies”; that a freeze-freeze deal (the proposal for which originated in Pyongyang) is a wonderful idea; that a co-ethnic confederation with economic cooperation would provide a good framework to get the North in a denuclearizing mood; and that conservatives — read supporters of a strong alliance with the US — must be kept out of power for at least the next 20 years.
These points (which go far beyond anything said by Roh or DJ) have been made either by President Moon himself, by ministers and officials inside his administration, by the ruling party, or by Moon Chung-in, the president’s “special envoy for peace and unification,” who though not formally on the government payroll is known to be the silse or “real power” in the president’s camp along with Im Jong-seok.
[Digression: I should explain why I’m increasingly inclined to say “camp” instead of “administration.”
First, the president likes to present himself more as the head of a grass-roots revolution than as someone who got only 41% of the vote after the state impeached his predecessor. Thus does he lay moral claim also to the roughly 27% of the vote received by candidates of the other left-leaning parties. This is the only way he can claim to have more of a mandate than Park Geun-hye got (51%). In fairness to Moon I must add that opinion polls, whether reliable or not, indicate that he does indeed enjoy the approval of many people who voted for other candidates last year.
Second, the boundary between Moon’s loyal followers in the Minjoo and people in parties and civic groups further to the left seems fluid, more so perhaps than the line inside the ruling party between Moon’s faction and more moderate leftists. (By the way, “civic group” is South Korean media-speak for “left-wing group”; a conservative group is a “conservative group.”)
Third, much input into policy-making seems to be coming straight to the president from so-called mentors outside the government proper, as opposed to being solicited by relevant bureaucrats and percolating upward. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially considering how much vital information bureaucrats keep from American presidents even – or especially — in wartime. Still, it shows how little real indignation lay behind the condemnation of Park Geun-hye for allegedly relying on advice from a “civilian” without a security clearance. After all, the potential for influence-peddling and bribery does not disappear just because such a person has appropriate credentials.
To make things even more opaque, the Moon administration’s own organigrams seem at odds with the actual hierarchy and delegation of duties. During the Olympics we saw the chief of staff and the head of the intelligence agency play incongruously prominent roles in inter-Korean talks while the Unification Minister faded into the background. The North Korean delegates, their own formal titles belied by how the nominal head of state deferred to the nominal propaganda chief, must have felt right at home.
Fourth, Moon likes potentially controversial decisions to be preceded by proposals from non-governmental advisory committees or “task forces” chaired by people from the nationalist left. This allows him not only to present his administration as the humble executor of the candlelight will, but also to distance himself from proposals – like the one to delete the word free from the constitution – that result in too great an outcry. Habituation is hoped for too; ideas sound less radical after they’ve been bandied about a bit.]
It’s not impossible that Moon Jae-in and his associates could have chosen this of all times — when even many Americans are saying the North’s arsenal can be lived with! — to make denuclearization their number one priority. But it’s far more likely that they see the need to project to Washington and the South Korean public a firm commitment to the alliance in the short term. This is necessary if the Moon camp is to put over confederation when the formation of this North-South body — or some big step in that direction, like a formal conclusion of hostilities — is publicly agreed upon at the upcoming Kim-Moon summit. (Since both sides have far too much to lose to risk a repetition of the disastrous 2007 summit, it is likely that the main points have already been settled.) In the run up to the June elections, confederation will be sold mainly on economic grounds, perhaps also with talk of reducing terms of military service, and with nightly candlelight demonstrations of a pacifist-nationalist nature, but none of that will do much good if people are worrying about a US troop pullout. There is thus a good chance of the North-South summit resulting in some utterly non-binding indication that Kim Jong Un has reconciled himself to a permanent US troop presence.
It appears that the South is advising the North on how best to handle the US, and perhaps even rewording the North’s statements accordingly; conservatives here were quick to note how closely the uncharacteristic wording of Kim Jong Un’s statements as summarized by the South Korean envoys — in regard to military exercises, for example — resembled statements already made by Moon Chung-in.
The content of President Moon’s letter to Kim Jong Un was likely to have been a minor variant on what Roh (according to transcripts) said orally to Kim Jong Il in 2007:
If Chairman Kim would only open the door to the improvement of ties between the North and the US, I will keep pushing America to put on speed in taking appropriate corresponding measures to improve relations.
Whether that was said or not, it’s certainly what the South has done. Its services may even have extended (as in 2007) to misleading the US. I am thinking of how Jeong Eui-yong vouched excitedly for Kim Jong Un’s sincerity while conveying the latter’s alleged intent to denuclearize the peninsula. No South Korean government genuinely supportive of America’s main goal would have responded in such a manner to the reiteration of a stock North Korean line.
Recently the Chosun conducted a relevant interview with Kim Seong-min, the son of the North Korean poet Kim Seong-suk. Kim Seong-min defected to the South in the mid-1990s.
The interviewer asks:
Q: Some people are wondering if President Trump didn’t misunderstand the phrase “denuclearization of the peninsula,” which was conveyed to him by the South Korean delegation, as “the denuclearization of the North.” Why do you think Kim Jong Un spoke of “the denuclearization of the peninsula”?
A: That’s a swindle of the world that has been carried on from Kim Il Sung through Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un. He says the denuclearization of the peninsula is his predecessors’ legacy. North Korean people take this to mean that the US troops occupying the South must get rid of their own nuclear weapons at the same time. That’s what I thought too, when I was a captain in the North Korean army. Because of the US nuclear threat we have to develop nuclear weapons too, and if the US gets rid of them, we will get rid of ours. Time has passed but it’s how North Korean people still think. This is why Kim Jong Un can come right out and talk about denuclearizing the peninsula. What I’m saying is that the South Korean delegation should have asked for the denuclearization of the North….
Q: Did the South Korean delegation not know that?
A: As people [representatives] from the South, how could they not know it? Especially since it was the head of national intelligence and the Blue House’s national security chief. It was wrong of them to pass on those words while feigning unawareness. The more regrettable thing is that honest South Korean people also do not know the correct meaning of “denuclearization of the peninsula” and take it at face value. How scary this is. The Blue House and the president are going along with Kim Jong Un’s scary trick, so South Koreans are acting like peace has come….it’s sad that a considerable number of South Koreans seem to be falling for this.
The problem is that the North Koreans must assume that the US government knows what they mean by “denuclearization of the peninsula.” It has been hearing it for decades after all.
In all likelihood Pyongyang also assumes that if the Americans know the truth, yet still keep vowing that there is “no daylight” between Washington and Seoul, they must indeed be on more or less the same page, namely, looking for some face-saving way to let the North simply freeze its nukes.
Perhaps the South has persuaded the North that regardless of whether Trump yields during the summit, or angers the Chinese and Russians by not yielding, sanctions will end up relaxed to some significant degree. This may indeed be true. But Trump could well be viewing the summit as the North’s last chance to avert an American attack. The South also needs to keep in mind how dangerous it would be for inter-Korean relations to improve dramatically while the nuclear crisis goes unresolved; the chummier Moon and Kim get, the less Trump is likely to worry that the North might respond to a strike by bombarding Seoul.
If I may return to the language of law enforcement: As things stand now, the alliance is in effect engaging in the entrapment of the North, in the sense that one ally (whether consciously or not) is encouraging it to persist in stalling behavior which could result in terrible punishment from the other. It’s as if one policeman is in front of the house, giving the suspect a last chance to drop his gun, while another is telling the poor fellow through a side window, “Don’t worry, I won’t let him hurt you.” Can we blame Kim Jong Un for trusting the Blue House, when the White House professes to be in agreement with it?
UPDATE (25 April 2018)
Joshua Stanton has written an excellent blog post on the direction things are taking in South Korea. I see I’m not the only one exasperated by the US government’s reluctance to make its position clear.
But not to worry, Moon’s government says—Pyongyang has agreed to allow some U.S. troops to remain in Korea under this vision…. Those who’ve served within the range of North Korean artillery can clearly see why. The presence of 28,500 American hostages gives Pyongyang a coercive power over the United States that a full withdrawal would deny it. It also gives South Koreans a false sense of security as their government advances plans that might otherwise alarm them…. But these are not functions that serve U.S. national interests. We should declare our unwillingness to perform them, and it’s only fair to do so before South Koreans go to the polls [on June 13].
During the election campaign in spring 2017 the main presidential candidates agreed on the need to curtail the “royal presidency.” All made the same pledge: If elected they would work towards seeing some form of revised constitution through the National Assembly, so that South Koreans could vote on it during the local elections in June 2018.
Here’s what the constitution (1987) says about amendments:
Article 128
(1) A proposal to amend the Constitution shall be introduced either by a majority of the total members of the National Assembly or by the President.
(2) Amendments to the Constitution for the extension of the term of office of the President or for a change allowing for the reelection of the President shall not be effective for the President in office at the time of the proposal for such amendments to the Constitution.
Article 129
Proposed amendments to the Constitution shall be put before the public by the President for twenty days or more.
Article 130
(1) The National Assembly shall decide upon the proposed amendments within sixty days of the public announcement, and passage by the National Assembly shall require the concurrent vote of two thirds or more of the total members of the National Assembly.
(2) The proposed amendments to the Constitution shall be submitted to a national referendum not later than thirty days after passage by the National Assembly, and shall be determined by more than one half of all votes cast by more than one half of voters eligible to vote in elections for members of the National Assembly.
(3) When the proposed amendments to the Constitution receive the concurrence prescribed in paragraph (2), the amendments to the Constitution shall be finalized, and the President shall promulgate it without delay.
In early 2017 a year seemed enough time to wrap up the relevant public discussion and see a draft through the National Assembly to a referendum, in accordance with the stipulations above. But no sooner had Moon been elected than the opposition began telling him not to rush things. In fact it fears the symbiotic effects of holding the referendum and local elections on the same day, June 13; the more important the day’s voting appears, the more young people will turn out. It also wants to postpone the public discussion until Moon’s approval ratings go in the direction all his predecessors’ have.
The opposition has thus ignored requests to present its own proposed amendments to the National Assembly, which may leave Moon with no choice but to introduce his own proposal (as Article 128 allows him to). The conservative press has criticized the opposition for giving the impression of blocking all constitutional reform.
As for the Minjoo, its interest in weakening the Blue House has declined markedly since its own man moved in. Its proposal to have the constitution stipulate American-type term limits (4+4) may enjoy strong public support, but it wouldn’t necessarily make the presidency less “royal.” Moon’s term would not be affected anyway; see the second clause of Article 128.
The ruling party’s push for constitutional revision now presents itself mainly as an effort to decentralize the republic, so as to give the provinces and special cities more power over their own affairs. By calling for decentralization Moon conveys at least the superficial impression of a readiness to curtail his own powers, but his main interest in this change is in facilitating North-South confederation, which could be put over more easily as a coming together of provinces than of states.
Ever since the Pyongyang summit of 2000 the left has sporadically called for a “unification-preparatory” (t’ongil taebi) constitution, and extolled the benefits of greater provincial autonomy in this context. Last year saw an increase in press editorials and public discussions conveying the same message.
For example, at a conference in Daegu in July 2017 one presenter spoke on how constitutional revision could expedite unification.
The greatest ill in South Korean society is the extreme concentration of power…[It] must be spread out among provinces and special cities at the level of a federation if North Korean authorities and intellectuals are to be given the latitude to be able to think about unification. The most realistic proposal for unification is for North and South to create a unified state out of multiple regional governments with a high degree of autonomy.
Naturally the ruling party doesn’t try to sell decentralization to the general public in those terms, but the above is not a fringe opinion in intellectual circles. Our journalists pay too much attention to South Korean polls indicating widespread aversion to unification, or even to aiding the North; they seem to think Moon has to heed them. Does our own government heed the polls on gun control? More attention should be paid to the perhaps disproportionate influence wielded inside the candlelight camp by people who want unification sooner rather than later.
Across the country, town-hall meetings are now taking place to drum up support for the “decentralizing” reform, mainly with arguments of an economic nature. The goal at the moment is to get 10 million citizens to sign a petition urging the National Assembly to vote for it. That may seem a lot, but in one month alone last fall, 10 million signatures were rounded up in favor of enshrining “agricultural values.”
At this point I should warn against assuming that the forces for constitutional reform are neatly divided between a) left-wing supporters of “unification-preparatory” amendments and b) right-wing supporters of assembly-empowering amendments. The situation is more complex.
Many lawmakers and commentators on the left have long supported the shift to a parliamentary system, which — as Yi Hae-ch’an made clear in 2006 when he was premier — is compatible with a “unification-preparatory” constitution. They may intend to push for a second, more substantial constitutional revision at the time of parliamentary elections in spring 2020, in the hope that power can then be more safely shared between Moon and a National Assembly under left control.
By the same token, many conservative advocates of a parliamentary system also support decentralization. The prospect of greater regional autonomy and thousands more civil-service jobs exerts such a strong appeal on the right-leaning southeast that it might overlook even the distinctly left-wing amendments the ruling party is now proposing.
A spokesperson made these public on February 1 at a gathering of Minjoo lawmakers, among whom they had already been discussed. Most conformed to proposals made a month earlier by a (left-stacked) citizens’ advisory committee.
What made headlines on both occasions was the one regarding Article 4.
The original version:
The Republic of Korea shall seek national unification, and shall formulate and carry out a peaceful unification policy based on the free and democratic basic order.
Just as the advisory committee had recommended, the Minjoo spokesperson announced a proposal to amend this to:
The Republic of Korea shall seek national unification, and shall formulate and carry out a peaceful unification policy based on the democratic basic order.
Article 1 has always defined South Korea simply as a “democratic republic,” so the deletion of the word free/liberal (chayu) from Article 4 would not be as dramatic an assault on the nature of the state as all that. Besides, in South Korea as in many other countries the term free/liberal democracy has more distinctly right-leaning or capitalist connotations than it does in the US.
Still, the proposed deletion changes the whole meaning of Article 4. The original version appears to call on the South to seek the extension of its own “free and democratic” order over the whole peninsula. In contrast, the amended version can be read simply as a call to pursue peaceful unification with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the word democracy on its own being open to the loosest interpretations.
Announcing the proposed amendment at 6:45 pm on February 1, the Minjoo’s spokesperson explained that the goal was to broaden the sense of democracy. Having complained for weeks about the advisory committee’s proposed deletion of the same word, the right rushed to make its indignation public.
Almost four hours later, at 10:30 pm, the Minjoo Party released a statement saying that “because there are many articles” the spokesperson had erred. The draft for a new constitution would retain the current wording for Article 4.
More interesting than the excuse for that volte-face was the would-be reassuring information that of 120 Minjoo lawmakers polled, about 70 had expressed opposition to the deletion of “free.” Meaning about 50 had been fine with it.
On the other hand, the ruling party held firm to its proposal to change the preamble. The current version starts off as follows.
We, the people of Korea, proud of a resplendent history and traditions dating from time immemorial, upholding the cause of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea born of the March First Independence Movement of 1919 and the democratic ideals of the April Revolution of 1960….
The Minjoo proposes extending that last bit to include the Busan-Masan uprising against Park Chung Hee’s rule in 1979, the Gwangju uprising of 1980 and the candlelight movement of 2016-2017.
The challenge for me here is to help other Americans understand the discussion without digressing into history. Let’s imagine that the preamble to our constitution explicitly committed the USA to the ideals of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Few of us would find that hugely problematic, the civil rights movement having long since ceased to be identified with any one political camp.
Enshrining the protests against the Vietnam War would be another matter. Even the many Americans (probably a majority) who now agree the war was wrong would not want the constitution taking a side in what is still a lively debate between legitimate political camps.
This is how South Korean conservatives feel about the proposed change to the preamble, and all the more so because the left-wing jealously guards the Gwangju uprising as its very own tragic-heroic hour. (Even center-right politicians have been made to feel unwelcome at the annual ceremonies.) The candlelight protests too – which an important legal document would surely have to admit were LED-light protests – are already remembered as an anti-right movement. The conservative journalists and lawmakers who did so much to oust Park have been written out of the official history.
Other proposed amendments commit the state to do more for equality, workers’ rights, social welfare, etc; the right opposes these as well, claiming that a socialist state is being planned, although they don’t seem to me all that radical, or necessarily relevant to inter-Korean relations.
Also controversial is the proposal to change the word citizen to person throughout the text. Considering how quickly Moon cracked down on illegal immigrants, there’s probably more to it than the party’s professed commitment to a more inclusive society. Critics trace it back to the protest movement’s hostility to the state. They also note that the constitution put out by the self-described “people-centric” regime in Pyongyang also refers to saram and not kungmin.
In short, many conservatives see the ruling party’s proposed amendments as an effort not to make the presidency less “royal,” but rather to identify the constitution with the left, de-legitimize conservatism, and lay the groundwork for North-South confederation. Their fears are easier to understand in view of calls by prominent Minjoo Party members to “wipe out” the conservatives, or at least to ensure that the left stays in power for 20 more years.
Considering that the main opposition party alone has more than enough seats to block any constitutional revision, it’s remarkable how little effort the ruling party is making to win it over. At the very least one would expect less polarizing rhetoric and more emphasis on the benefits of decentralization for all South Koreans.
Instead Kim Min-seok, the chairman of a Minjoo think tank, told a gathering of journalists on February 18 that the constitution must be changed so as to align it with the values represented by “legitimate forces” such as Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun. This as opposed to the line and values of “Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, Roh Tae-woo, Park Geun-hye and … Lee Myung Bak,” who together represent “anti-democracy, treason, collaboration with Japan, [North-South] division and the Cold War.”
In other words, the only legitimate South Korean president not distinctly on the left of the spectrum was Kim Young Sam. Note also the familiar insinuation that only progressives carry on the tradition of the anti-colonial struggle. Make that: only progressives and the regime in Pyongyang.
The contrast to divided Germany is thought-provoking. For all the differences between the two West German camps, the social democrats generally felt ideologically closer to the Christian democrats than to East Germany. South Korea’s nationalist left has always felt more ideological affinity with ultra-nationalist North Korea than with the “traitorous” right.
The implications for the US-ROK alliance become more obvious and troubling when one keeps in mind that conservatism now boils down here to pro-American security-mindedness.
The in-your-face nature of some of the left’s proposed amendments has had the effect of not only uniting conservatives behind the drive for a parliamentary system, but also inducing them to speed things up. Influential commentators and “non-Lee”/pro-Park lawmakers who had hitherto opposed it are now going with the flow. Their reasoning is that the left’s proposal cannot be effectively countered so long as the right is squabbling over its own vision for change.
There has been much speculation as to whether Moon really wants to get the constitution changed on June 13 or merely to trap conservatives into playing the villains. It’s very hard to tell, especially now that the Minjoo has just announced proposals for giving the National Assembly more say over things like cabinet appointments and the budget. Perhaps it will keep adding proposals in piecemeal fashion to the president’s draft until it feels confident of getting 2/3 of the assembly behind it. The draft is expected to come out in full in mid-March.
If a compromise cannot be reached and the draft is rejected in the National Assembly, a public backlash against the conservative opposition may well ensue, carrying the ruling party to a solid victory in the mid-June local elections. Moon could then present this as a mandate for all his policies.
The danger for him, however, is that supporters of a parliamentary system, perhaps including some Minjoo lawmakers, would continue to push for it regardless. If 2/3 of the National Assembly were to vote later on for the relevant amendments, Moon would become a lame duck at once. Were a majority of citizens to vote for them in the ensuing referendum, the new constitution would go into immediate effect. Some experts go so far as to say the current president would then lose all right to rule, on the grounds that he was elected in 2017 to lead a different system. (With the same logic one could argue that the members of the current, “weak” National Assembly should run again for election before exercising different functions.) At the very least there would be a new and more powerful premier.
Such a turn of events seems unlikely now, but should Moon’s approval rating drop below 50%, there’s no telling what might happen.
Kim Jong Un knows all this as well as Moon does, which is another reason why inter-Korean talks have gone so smoothly. (An Asahi report seems to confirm my earlier assumption that the Olympic activities were agreed upon last year.) Kim Jong Il’s ostentatiously cold reception of Roh Moo Hyun in October 2007 in Pyongyang indicated that he expected the South Korean left to win the ensuing election anyway. Kim Jong Un, whose rule is under greater pressure from sanctions, seems unlikely to make that sort of mistake. Whatever Pyongyang can get from Seoul, it will try to get as fast as sanctions, the alliance, and Moon’s approval ratings permit.
[The rapid pace at which the two governments on the peninsula are now pursuing rapprochement has much to do with the looming struggle in the South over constitutional reform, an issue to which the foreign press has so far paid little attention. In this part I will introduce the right’s push for a parliamentary system and the role it played in the impeachment of Park Geun-hye. In the next part I will explain the left’s push for a “unification-preparatory” constitution.]
When the former US senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel talked to my class in Busan several years ago, he praised South Korea’s constitution for allowing more room for direct democracy than the American one. My students nodded benignly enough, but were unmoved. People here feel no great love for their constitution, which was promulgated in 1948 and revised in 1987, under Chun Doo Hwan’s rule. Not that average people can put their finger on what they don’t like about the actual text. At most you tend to hear calls for an American-style system of two four-year terms for presidents, instead of limiting them to one five-year stretch.
In the political elite, on the other hand, there has long been support for changing the presidential system to a parliamentary one, in which most executive power resides in a premier chosen by the National Assembly, while a president elected by direct popular vote handles foreign policy and exercises a symbolic unifying function. This change is necessary, advocates say, in order to end the chronic abuse of power attendant upon the “royal presidency.”
Perhaps some lawmakers really do want the constitution revised for that noble reason. Although there is less disgusting outward pomp to the office here than in the USA, the South Korean president has some powers broader than our own — in regard to the budget, cabinet appointments, pardons and so on. Still, it must be kept in mind that the majority of advocates of the parliamentary system are now on the right side of the aisle, and revere the memory of the very “royal” Park Chung Hee.
The cynic in the street is probably right in assuming that the idea of such a set-up appeals to many in the National Assembly because it would mean a widening of the trough, or at least of opportunities to play premier or minister for several months. Despite the unpopularity of the current system, most South Koreans would rather have to keep a close eye on one president than on hundreds of lawmakers. Older folk also remember the dismal experiment with the parliamentary system in 1960-1961. Opinion polls have thus shown consistent opposition to the restoration of it. This was Kim Dae Jung’s reason (or excuse) for not fulfilling his campaign pledge to make the presidency less “royal” if elected.
Not until Park Geun-hye’s presidency (2013-2017) did the issue make a strong comeback. Conservatives in the National Assembly were then roughly divisible into a faction loyal to Park and one loyal to her predecessor Lee Myung Bak. Naturally his followers had learned to like the presidential system during his occupancy of the Blue House (2008-2013), only to find it inherently despotic again the moment Park took over. What really worried them was the likelihood that she would take revenge for the “nomination massacres” that had occurred during Lee’s rule, when he had excluded many of her followers from candidacies in parliamentary elections.
Sure enough, there ensued the “nomination massacre” of spring 2016, in which even some of the most popular pro-Lee or “non-Park” politicians were bypassed for nominations in favor of the president’s people. From then on calls for a parliamentary system grew in intensity until the Lee-conservative press broke the story of the Choi Soon-sil scandal in the autumn of 2016.
It was just what many pols had been waiting for: a chance to get the public so angry about the status quo that it would finally sign off on a whole new system of government. Conservatives were confident they could remove Park with left-wing help without losing the presidency altogether. They would simply make the returning hero Ban Ki-moon their candidate while pushing hard for constitutional revision, then trounce Moon in the election. What could go wrong?
The bipartisan nature of the push to impeach Park was what led most South Koreans and foreign journalists to assume that either a) the political scene was finally cleaning up its act or b) she had abused power to a particularly heinous extent.
The evidence has turned out to be thinner than was initially believed. The tablet PC on which Choi allegedly edited Park’s Dresden speech had so obviously been tampered with that the court did not consider it in Choi’s trial. It is still unclear how Park’s pressuring of businesses to contribute to this or that national team or foundation differed to a criminal degree from established presidential practices. We have to wait and see, but the recent decision to charge her even with meddling in her own party’s nominations suggests a desperation to find things that will stick. While she may well have deserved impeachment by absolute standards, she was probably less deserving of it than a few of her predecessors.
Someday the role sexism played in the grass-roots fury will be acknowledged. Average people intuited from the start that Park had not been out to enrich herself. What bothered them more than the allegations of corruption was the thought of her being incompetent enough to rely for political and foreign-policy advice on another woman, and a mere housewife at that. This is reflected in many of the jeering songs, pictures and performances that were thought hilariously funny during the candlelight protests. (A “satirical” painting of Park with legs splayed in a gynecological chair had come out in 2012.) As Americans will realize very soon, these aren’t liberals in our sense of the word.
But however the South Korean public was strung along is beside the point. It was conservatives who provided the votes needed to oust Park (and then some), thereby demonstrating, ironically enough, how far from royal the presidency really is. I’m guessing this was the first time in history that the right carried out the wishes of the North’s Rodong Sinmun, which was already demanding and predicting Park’s impeachment in the spring of 2016.
Naturally Park followers and security-minded right-wingers now feel animosity for the “traitors” whom they see as having handed the republic to the left on a platter. What went wrong? The constitutional court upheld Park’s impeachment after a much shorter review than expected, leaving no time for a discussion of constitutional reform; Ban Ki-moon withdrew from contention, for reasons I needn’t go into; the main conservative party nominated a man repellent to most people under 60; and Moon sailed to victory in May 2017 if not to a majority of votes.
The once bipartisan pretense that removing Park was a non-ideological response to her abuses of power is now upheld only by the right-wing impeachers and the foreign press. Upon his election Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the Choi-like pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”
The left has since boldly reinvented the 2016 candlelight protests as a revolutionary outpouring of mass support for its whole ideological package. Accordingly the trendy pejorative “accumulated ill” (chŏkp’ye), which in 2016 referred to a manifestation of deep-seated corruption, cronyism, etc, is now used in formulations such as: “The closure of the Kaesong Industrial Zone was an accumulated ill.”
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