Letting go of unification

By Kyung Moon Hwang

This will seem odd, but last Friday's extraordinary summit in Panmunjeom, which produced a formal “Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula,” showed that unification is actually not a goal, nor perhaps should it be. Unification, considered a moral imperative by Koreans on both sides for generations, remains a pipe dream.

We tend to forget that it has been 110 years since Koreans governed themselves as a unified country. This is longer than even the near-century of Mongol domination back in the 13th and 14th centuries. Hence the “norm” of an autonomous, unified Korea is hard to fathom, in spite of the sentiments accompanying all the political theater at the summit.

Rather, according to the formal proclamations from the Panmunjeom summit, the more urgent and meaningful goal would be to realize a peace regime on the peninsula by dropping the hostilities and raising North Korea's economic conditions. Meanwhile, the obligatory calls for unification would remain ceremonial and general, even abstract.

This downplaying of a political union also makes sense because of the elephant in the room: the North Korean regime. As long as North Korea stays in the Kim family's hands, it's best not to push for unification with any specificity.

One of the most interesting visuals from a day filled with both carefully choreographed and seemingly spontaneous gestures was the remarkable physical contrast between the two leaders. I don't mean here the obvious difference in age, which too was important, but their respective size. The two men were about the same height, but Kim Jong-un appeared twice as large. That led me to wonder whether I could ever recall spotting even an overweight person in the countless pictures of life in North Korea that we have seen.

Kim might be not only the most rotund person in North Korea, but perhaps the only one who can be. This in turn highlights the disturbing reality of North Korea's development under the Kim kingship: a system of extraordinary oppression and exploitation that benefits a small permanent elite minority at the expense of the vast majority of impoverished and tyrannized citizens.

Being a poor country is not necessarily shameful, but a society relentlessly abused into poverty by totalitarian rule represents the height of shame. Providing relief to the long-suffering North Korean people must therefore remain at the forefront of all concerns, even if this means accepting the continuity of North Korea's political system and thereby suspending any quest for unification.

Kim Jong-un, for all his youth, studiousness, and self-assurance on display at the summit, still has never shown that he can think beyond his personal interest, which he surely believes overlaps with that of his country. History has shown us that absolute rulers never voluntarily give up their power.

Even if Kim proves to be a Gorbachev-like figure, there are too many others in the North Korean ruling elite who depend on the structures of brutal exploitation for any meaningful change to arise peacefully. The parasitically privileged, starting with Kim himself, justifiably would have much to fear if they ever lost their iron grip on their subjects.

Rapid regime change in North Korea, then, can only be destructive, likely destabilizing and ruining much of the entire peninsula. South Koreans, especially the younger generations, have increasingly recognized these comprehensive costs of bringing about unification. And unification might not be a good thing for the North Koreans themselves, as it would probably result in enormous dislocation, instability, and economic exploitation, this time at the hands of South Koreans.

Kim and other North Korean leaders have surely thought about all this. They too know that reunification must result in terrible outcomes for themselves. And surely they also realize that any military venture to force a reunion through an invasion of the South, as Kim's grandfather did in 1950, would be suicidal.

And so the formal remarks by both leaders and their joint proclamation kept the unification talk at a safely idealistic distance. Their utterances readily hailed the unity of the “nation” and “people,” with Kim disturbingly adding that Koreans were all bound by a common “blood line” as well, a centerpiece of the rabid North Korean tribalism that has kept the Kims in power.

But this delusion is probably the one thing that Kim shares with most older South Koreans, whose views were expressed in the swift condemnation of the summit by the conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party. To them, even talking with, much less literally embracing, the grandson of the man who started the Korean War, is repulsive, but they and the North Korean leadership also remain bound by these romanticized imperatives of “blood” and nationhood.

Even with these reservations about the long-term prospects, however, there was much to praise about the summit. The two leaders seem to have established a genuine rapport, as seen in the half-hour chat on their own. Unlike both leaders' other summit meetings, this one did not require an interpreter, much less minders, something that Kim himself might actually have found liberating. If so, it was also a reminder that, while the surrounding international powers are important, this process must remain Korea-centered and Korean-driven.

As for the much-touted goal of “complete denuclearization,” for reasons stated above I doubt this will take place, as everyone recognizes that nuclear weapons are the best and perhaps only deterrent to a catastrophic U.S. military strike, a prospect heightened by the current unstable American president. But even if the summit paved the way toward only a nuclear freeze or reduction, this is still a better outcome than what the recent trends had indicated.

Perhaps more important is the commitment to disarm the DMZ and West Sea border area as well as the two sides' longstanding enmity. This ultimate goal of normalizing relations hopefully will be grounded in the signing of an inter-Korean peace treaty, maybe as early as the coming 65th anniversary of the Korean War armistice July 27.

This will also entail, however, the formal recognition by both governments of the other's legitimacy as a real state, with sovereignty over half of the peninsula. In other words, the price for that most important goal of assuring peace in Korea, along with hopefully an improvement in the lives of the North Korean people, is the relinquishment of Korean unification.

Kyung Moon Hwang (khwang3@gmail.com) is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea _ An Episodic Narrative” (second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).