By Heo Mane
The six-party talks still remain a zero sum game. The talks have not moved an inch, despite that the five parties ― South Korea, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia have poured their energy into the talks in the endeavors to hammer out a negotiated solution to the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
The six parties have so far conducted six rounds of the talks starting on Aug. 27 through Sept. 30, 2007. From the beginning of the talks, the six parties’ representatives agreed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which the South and North Korean governments had agreed to in the 1991 inter-Korean high level talks.
In the following of the talks, they also agreed to realize denuclearization, abandon all nuclear weapons development programs, and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In the talks, the U.S. declared a security guarantee to North Korea and a future normalization between the two countries.
In addition, they agreed to undertake to promote economic cooperation through strengthening bilateral and multilateral economic cooperation. South Korea reaffirmed its proposal concerning the provisions of 2 million kilowatts of electricity if North Korea abandoned its nuclear arms development program.
They committed themselves to observing the “words for words, and action for action” principle, stressing mutually coordinated measures. In the fifth round, they stressed the Joint Statement issued in the previous one.
In the second and third phases of the fifth, Kim Kye-gwan of North Korea and Christoper Hill of the U.S. made positive remarks about the progress of in-between-rounds one-to-one talks in Berlin from Jan. 16 to 18, 2007. The U.S. thus made the bold concessions to Pyongyang, such as a removal of North Korea form the terror support list and a lifting of a ban on laundered money.
China suggested a breakthrough for the talks; it designed a plan aiming at suspending, shutting down, and sealing all nuclear reactors in Yongbyon, within two months for energy supplies and economic aid by the other five parties to North Korea. These measures were considered to be a sure way to the denuclearization of the peninsula.
All the ideas proposed during the processes of the talks have come to a failure. This failure is ascribed chiefly to the U.S. claims to a first abandonment of North Korea’s nuclear reactors, in a verifiable and irreversible manner and a subsequent offer of economic development aid.
In the stark realities of negotiations, both parties are seen to have lacked flexible and reciprocal strategies to successfully deal with the matter. What do these on-and-off talks then means? And why have the talks not borne fruit, despite that the abundant ideas and tactics were announced and exchanged at the negotiating tables?
The Pyongyang regime is not likely to abandon its nuclear weapons development ambitions in return for a simple economic aid. It should be noted that the nuclear weapons research started in the late 1950s, in tandem with the introduction of U.S. nuclear tactical weapons in the South.
Pyongyang’s approach has been quite contrary to the approaches of Seoul and Washington. Viewed from this spectrum, the Kim Jong-il regime will never trade the nuclear weapons program with any type of economic aid.
At this juncture, we need another party to be committed to the unfruitful talks this far. It is the European Union. The EU will be a strong and reliable partner to the nuclear talks. It is the first supranational entity capable of influencing the global security and economic affairs.
Moreover, the implementation of a Korea-EU free trade agreement (FTA) on July 1 this year is most likely to increase Korea’s trade with the EU, upgrading the Asian economy’s industrial and trade competitive power. In the end, the free trade will contribute to modernizing the management of Korean enterprises as a whole.
After all, such a wider range of economic cooperation will arouse security concerns between the two partners at a higher level of policymakers. Free trade cannot continue if it is not protected by security policy in South Korea facing conventional and nuclear threats from Pyongyang.
Policymakers of the 27-member EU recognized the need to extend “community method” into foreign and security policy for more flexible, effective, and global policy implementations at the EU level.
The EU is committed to the missions of peacekeeping and peacemaking beyond the European region. South Korea as a first counterpart to the EU in Northeast Asia fully deserves the EU’s security cooperation, if not the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP).
In the Six+EU talks, their new chief negotiators would better take a different approach to the issue. They need to declare that security guarantee would be provided to Pyongyang by the governments of the original five parties and the EU, and through normalization of diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang on the hand and Tokyo and Pyongyang on the other.
In addition, inter-Korean relations would follow suit. In a nutshell, combining the EU entity with the six parties with these new approaches will yield a high persuasive force on the nuclear issue. Certainly, it is a new look into it with the EU’s presence in the talks.
Heo Mane is president of the Korea-EU Forum. He can be reached at mane398@naver.com.