Analysis of reunification policy in the Kim Dae-jung (and Roh Moo-hyun) administration: Part Two

In Part One, I gave a brief overview of the Sunshine policy and talked about Kim Dae-jung's time table for unification.

The main part of the article covers four modern examples of national unification. In today's post, I will discuss unification experiences in two countries: Vietnam and Germany.

Some examples:

Vietnam: Reunification by conquest

The most common tool for unification throughout history has been conquest:

Unification, like other policies engaged in by nation-states, has often been accomplished by force or the threat of force. This applies equally to Vietnam, the United States during its civil war and Bismarkian Germany in the late nineteenth century. In each of those instances the use of force to achieve national policy was generally accepted by historians even if opposed by contemporary competitors.

Obviously, that strategy was tried by both Koreas in during the 1950-53 Korean war. The great powers acted to make sure that their allies did not fall (the USA for South Korea; Russia and China for North Korea). Some historians, such as Bruce Cummings, bemoan the fact that those great powers prevented conquest (by the North Koreans):

"The true tragedy (in the Korean war) was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace. Today the tensions and the problems remain" (Cumings, 298).

North Korea maintained a massive military force since the 1960 coup in South Korea in order to be ready for any opportunity to unite the Koreas. However, the South Korean alliance with the United States and North Korea's economic decline have made that a non-option.

Germany: Reunification by absorption

In the 1990s, many Koreans saw the German experience as the best model for Korean unification:

The German model has a great appeal to many South Koreans mainly due to its 'happy end;' the peaceful absorption of communist east Germany by its more populous and prosperous counterpart. Indeed, there are some similarities between the two situations. Both were divided into capitalist and communist spheres by the victorious allies following World War Two and remained antagonists for several decades.

However there are many difference between the situations in Korea and Germany.

Kim Dae-jung also misread some aspects of the German experience to fit his expectations:

The German experience does provide some useful guidance for Korea. However, the current South Korean government is basing its comparison to President Kim's unification policy on two erroneous assumptions. First, that West Germany's policy of Ostpolitik (Eastern engagement policy) towards the East German government paved the way to a reunification agreement. Second, that the two Germanies negotiated an unification agreement as equals.

There is a bunch more. If you are interested, click on the "Continue reading" link below.

Ah, you are here. Read on friend...

A. Vietnam: Reunification by conquest

In 1975, two years after American forces withdrew from the Republic of Vietnam, 18 divisions poured in from North Vietnam. After some initial resistance, the South Vietnamese forces broke. On April 30, a North Vietnamese tank (not peasant guerrillas) broke through the gate at the presidential palace in Saigon. That ended the Vietnam War and the division of that country which began when Southern officials, with the backing of the American government, refused to allow elections for a single unified government in the 1950s.

Through military victory, the North Vietnamese were able to completely dominate the Southerners and imposed their system of government on them. Tens of thousands of south Vietnamese were placed in reeducation camps, although they were largely spared the massacres that both sides in the Korean conflict imposed on each other.

Unification, like other policies engaged in by nation-states, has often been accomplished by force or the threat of force. This applies equally to Vietnam, the United States during its civil war and Bismarkian Germany in the late nineteenth century. In each of those instances the use of force to achieve national policy was generally accepted by historians even if opposed by contemporary competitors. In Korea, the use of force to achieve unification has been justified at different times by both governments and outside observers:

The true tragedy (in the Korean war) was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace. Today the tensions and the problems remain (Cumings, 298).

Unification by force was tried by both sides during the 1950-53 war. The Northern summer offensive of 1950 pushed Southern troops and their allies, primarily American, to a small area surrounding Pusan. After the defeat of the Northern invasion, the South made its attempt at unification by force. On September 28 Southern forces pushed into Northern territory, to be followed almost two weeks later by their allies (Hastings, 120-122). This attack was in turn repulsed by the intervention of Chinese forces in support of their socialist allies and the war settled into a bloody stalemate.

After three years of fighting the commanders of the United Nations and North Korean armies signed an armistice. While the South Koreans agreed to honor the armistice they refused to sign it (Goulden, 644-645). South Korean President Syngman Rhee reserved the right to restart the war as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It never did and, after he rigged elections in 1960, Rhee was forced to abdicate. The North, which was still rebuilding at that time, was not prepared to take advantage of the weakness in the South.

Since the early 1960s, while the South has largely abandoned hopes of unifying Korea by force, the North has maintained a wartime economic mode so that it would be prepared in case the South faltered again (Eberstalt, 31). That maintaining of that wartime economy has contributed greatly to North Korean economic decline. Despite infrastructure degradation, industrial inefficiencies, and even famine the North has maintained a military budget out of proportion to its economic ability (see the table below). Ironically, Because of its poor economic performance, resulting in negative growth for much of the past decade, the North spends less in real terms on its military than the south or any of the other regional actors.

(Sorry, I can't paste the table that was here. Basicly it shows that North Korea is spending 30% of its GDP on defense but that its actual defense spending is about half of South Korea's. You can check the data for yourself in the CIA World Factbook.)

In the current international environment, achieving Korea unification by direct force is unlikely. Other regional actors, especially China and the United States, will not stand by while their respective allies fall to the other side. This was true fifty years ago and remains true today. On the other hand, neither Korean government can count on its allies to support it in an unprovoked attack. Thus, if either Korea chose to attack the other it would most likely face the other and its allies alone. This reality has preserved a tenuous peace in Korea for 50 years and will likely continue to do so as long as the current alignment of forces in northeast Asia holds.

B. Germany: Reunification by absorption

For several reasons, German reunification has overshadowed all others in the minds of Koreans and other actors involved in the peninsula as a model for Korean unification. Much ink has been spilled analysing the circumstances and lessons of German unification and applying it to Korea.

The German model has a great appeal to many South Koreans mainly due to its 'happy end;' the peaceful absorption of communist east Germany by its more populous and prosperous counterpart. Indeed, there are some similarities between the two situations. Both were divided into capitalist and communist spheres by the victorious allies following World War Two and remained antagonists for several decades.

However, there are enough differences to give pause to those who would use the German model as a template for Korean unification:
-Unlike the Germans, the Koreans fought a bloody civil war. There are well-documented lists of atrocities committed by both sides (Cumings, 272-275). This has created greater feelings of fear and ill-will than ever existed between the Germans.
-Those feelings have been periodically reinforced in the south by northern actions since the war, including the 1968 attempted assassination of Park Chung-hee by north Korean commandos, the 1983 bombing in Rangoon, Burma which killed several members of the south Korean cabinet and almost killed President Chun Doo-hwan, the 1987 bombing of KAL flight 858 and the 1996 submarine infiltration incident (Downs, 121, 162, 207, 264).
-The difference between the economies of North and South Korea are much greater than those between East and West Germany. There is a much wider per capita income gap between the Koreas than existed between the Germanies. That difference is exasperated by the fact that South Korea has only twice the population of North Korea, while West Germany had four times the population of East Germany, and is thus less able to prop-up the North's moribund economy (Schmidt, 6). This could led to massive migration once the demarcation line between the Koreas ceases to function as an international border.
-While the two Germanies were garrisoned by massive foreign armies, north Korea has been virtually free of foreign soldiers since the end of the war and there is only a comparatively small presence of Americans in the south (37,000 out of approximately 750,000 personal). The division of Korea has largely been enforced by Koreas (Breen, 245).

Despite These major differences, many Korean leaders look to Germany as the exemplar of unification. At the head of this pack is Kim Dae-jung. In a March 9, 2000 speech in Berlin, Kim declared himself to be an avid student of the lessons of the German experience:

...we are very eager to learn from your experiences. German unification and the relations between East and West Germany in the intervening years should provide very valuable precepts in carrying out my country's north Korea policies (Kim, 2-3).

The German experience does provide some useful guidance for Korea. However, the current South Korean government is basing its comparison to President Kim's unification policy on two erroneous assumptions. First, that West Germany's policy of Ostpolitik (Eastern engagement policy) towards the East German government paved the way to a reunification agreement. Second, that the two Germanies negotiated an unification agreement as equals.

Under the Roh Tae-woo and Kim Yeong-sam administrations, South Korea had engaged in Nordpolitik (Northern policy) which sought to engage the North as well as other communist nations, especially the Soviet Union and China. That policy was designed not to negotiate with the north as equals, but to ultimately undermine the Kim Il-sung/Kim Jong-il regime and absorb the north. To that end, the ROK government sought to create economic and social exchanges that would expose northerners to the comparative prosperity of the South while holding off on negotiations on political union. At the same time the South Korean government sought to undermine the North's position with its allies by opening diplomatic and economic channels with China and Russia.

Upon taking office, Kim Dae-jung, sought to differentiate between his Sunshine policy and nordpolitik. He declared that he did not seek to undermine and absorb the North. However, that is exactly how the west German Chancellor Helmut Kohl achieved German unification. In his March 9 Berlin speech, Kim implies that German unification took place after Ostpolitik created a sense of trust and a lessoning of tensions between the two German governments. In fact, Germany unification only took place after the East German government was ejected by massive public demonstrations; part of a large anti-communist movement which was then spreading across eastern Europe. In march, 1990 Kohl's Christian Democratic Union party won the first and only free election in the history of east German.

Withen four months, East Germany's new leader Lothar de Maiziere (essentially a junior member of Kohl's own party) opened reunification talks with Kohl's government. When de Maiziere sought to create a jointly written constitution for the united Germany, the west German negotiator stated flatly:

This is the accession of the GDR (German Democratic Republic, East Germany) to the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany) and not the reverse. We have a good Basic Law that is proven. We want to do everything for you. We do not want to trample coldly on your wishes and interest. But this is not the unification of two equal states. (Hart-Landsberg, Chapter 8)

Despite President Kim's rhetoric, German unification is not an example of inter-German moderation and a negotiated settlement. West Germany's Ostpolitik created a working relationship with an East German government which it subsequently undermined and helped to bury. One lesson that can be applied to the Korean situation is German pragmatism. When faced with overwhelming opposition to reunification from the Soviet Union, the Germans sought to allay their fears through engagement. With the collapse of the communist bloc in the late 1980s, Helmut Kohl took advantage of what he believed to be a temporary weakness in East Germany to help undermine that government and gain the acceptance of other European governments to German unification.

Similarly, with many of the regional powers uncertain as to the desirability of a unified Korea, the South Korean government must have a policy of being ready to take advantage of any opportunity to achieve reunification as that opportunity may be fleeting. The dogged adherence to any formula, even Kim's Sunshine policy could cost Korea an opportunity for reunification that might not be available again for decades.