Should Ireland, not Germany, now be the model for Korean reunification?

 

At the beginning of this year, when Kim Jong-un announced he was abandoning reunification, South Koreans were flummoxed and did not know how to react.

But what Koreans agreed on, with hardly the need for debate, was that even if the North was walking away, the South still wants reunification.

That position continues to make sense half a year later, but only because Koreans are still trying to get their heads around whether Kim meant what he said.

If it becomes clear in time that the North Koreans really are giving up and forging a new and separate national identity, South Koreans will face a dilemma. How can South Korea, as a democratic state, force reunification on an unwilling partner? It can't.

South Korea would have to go dictatorial again before it can behave like Russia toward Ukraine and try to take over an unwilling United Nations member state.

What South Korea needs is a reset, a new model.

In the decades since the Korean War, South Koreans have had two models for reunification. For the first 40 years, if South Korea had the means, it would have probably invaded. People may dispute this claim, but I've seen Korean business leaders of the older generation directly recommend to very senior American political leaders that Americans bomb North Korea to solve the nuclear problem. As Korea was restrained by the Americans and by its own leaders' common sense, this was more sentiment than policy. Beyond that, reunification wasn't realistically imagined. It was talked about as a kind of fantasy. Every child from kindergarten onward wanted to grow up to achieve it.

After the Berlin Wall fell and the two Germanies united, this picture changed. In 1991, Seoul sent a team of specialists to observe the unification process between East and West Germany. When they reported back a year later, the government was shocked by the realization that reunification with North Korea would cause social and economic upheaval.

Within a short time, without anyone saying out loud that they didn't want reunification, a national consensus emerged for gradualism over absorption.

The Germanies had unified at the end of a 21-year process of familiarization, at the end of which the East Germans allowed themselves to be acquired wholesale. South Koreans, the new wisdom in Seoul went, are at the beginning, not the end, of that process.

The thinking in South Korea was that, in time, North Korea would change, or its regime would be removed, and South Korea would be invited in, like a vulture fund sorting out a failed bank, to make it our own. It will happen decades from now, South Koreans thought in 1992.

Well, those decades have passed. South Korea has had a few false starts. Three presidents have visited Pyongyang. But each time, something went wrong, and Koreans walked back to the blocks to start again.

But this time, only one athlete is walking back. The other guy has given up.

Perhaps what has to change now is the model. From Germany to Ireland, from acquisition to merger. In other words, the government in Seoul needs to play the long game and figure how, just as the larger Ireland has to figure out, how it can attract the people of the northern part, with their separate modern identity, into a new shared identity, without fear of loss, subjugation or disadvantage.

The good part of such a reset is that South Korean citizens will benefit from a reckoning with the aspects of the country that make it unattractive. One, for example, is the need to figure out why so many of the children of the workaholic generation that made the country great find no meaning in marriage and children of their own.

Another is to do something about the vicious political culture. A country that prosecutes the hell out of every outgoing administration is surely going to be as nasty as a medieval witchfinder with North Korean officials the day after the reunification celebrations.

There is also a need for South Korea to take charge of its vision and its own affairs, and particularly wrest the North Korea issue from Washington, which sees it through the military lens of its own security and has no interest in identities or reunification.

South Korea's hope in this approach is that given a glimmer of freedom, North Koreans will not be able to abandon reunification and will want to share what South Koreans have.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans."