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rfmcdonaldKorea’s a particularly tragic case of a divided country. In the case of East Germany, it was at least possible that the Democratic Republic’s government might manage to stumble upon historic Prussian and Saxon identities to build a non-German national identity; arguably, if Stalin had chosen to make the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany a Red Prussia, Berlin would be at most a binational capital, with the residents of Stettin and Breslau just now getting used to citizenship in the European Union alongside those of Prague and Warsaw.
The strong particularisms which mark German history, though, are lacking in Korea. Under the long reign of the Yi dynasty, Korea arguably became a consolidated nation-state. Under Japanese rule, all of Korea suffered from forced assimilation and brutal militarized rule even as it experienced some long-term benefits in the form of Japanese efforts at industrialization. The past half-century, though, has created huge and yawning gaps which will make reunification next to impossible. South Korea is a prosperous society, a liberal-democratic society, on the verge of acquiring First World status and perhaps even a measure of sustainable global influence; North Korea can claim none of these things. These two countries are just too far apart now on almost every front.
Reunification was possible for West and East Germans since despite everything the two populations shared a broadly common culture and identity. West Germans lived in a prosperous consumer society that was the envy of western Europe; East Germans lived in a relatively less prosperous society that was nonetheless the envy of central and eastern Europe. West Germans watched their television stations; almost all East Germans could watch West German television, thanks to strong television transmitters which reached everywhere in the GDR save in the southeast, around Dresden. More importantly, outside economics and mass media, a German culture continued to exist across the inter-German frontier. Millions of East Germans had emigrated to West Germany, while hundreds of thousands of West German tourists visited the East. Following the imposition of the Berlin Wall, east-to-west migration was more difficult but it was still possible, while a GDR anxious for hard western currency allowed West German tourism. West Germans sent letters, visits, and consumer projects to their East German relatives, entering into a two-way if lop-sided relationship with them. Inter-German economic projects, encouraged by the two states despite Cold War ideological frontiers, also took off. The two German states might have found themselves in opposing military-ideological blocs, but if (non-nuclear) war ever began between the two blocs the reliability of the two German armies was suspect. Indeed, at least one role-playing game background was based on that suspect potential community.
By contrast, the inter-Korean frontier has been kept hermetically sealed. The inter-Korean frontier was not set from above by rival superpowers; rather, it was the outcome of a brutal civil war between two ideological factions which killed almost one-tenth of the Korean population. Since that bitter civil war, the only corridor for north/south relations was at the place on the frontier where the ceasefire which ended the Korean War was signed 51 years ago. Since then, the two countries have been unable to accept the legitimacy of the other, though it must be said that it is the north which has been the most hostile, between lethal attacks on South Korean airliners, the 1983 assassination of most of the South Korean cabinet, and sundry other low-level terrorist activities and high-level military tensions. Those North Koreans who have made it to South Korea did not escape across the heavily defended inter-Korean frontier, but rather through a third country, notably China.
To talk about reunification is to assume that a degree of mutuality is possible, that each side has valuable resources to contribute to a reunified whole. In the case of North Korea, though, all it can conceivably offer the south is a vast supply of ethnically Korean immigrants, mineral resources, weapons of mass destruction, and a territory a third greater than South Korea’s own.
Let’s say that, in 1950, after 80 years of colonial occupation and settlement, France decides to integrate Algeria with all of its inhabitants--Muslim, Christian, and Jewish--directly into metropolitan France, with rights and expectations equal to those of the metropolitan French. An integral part of this integration will involve a program of massive investments in Algeria to bring a basically poor and underdeveloped economy up to northwestern European levels. Huge investments will be made in human capital--into public health, into mass education, and so on. Equally large investments will be made in the transportation and communications infrastructures, the better to connect distant areas of Algeria with each other and with the wider European market. The French welfare system will be extended, with full provisions, to the Algerian départements Finally, French businesses will be encouraged to relocate from metropolitan France and set up shop in Algeria alongside state firms, in order to provide an indigenous material base for the new Algerian culture.
This program would be morally justified, given the intense dislocation suffered by Algerians in the course of French colonial rule and the extreme difficulty of returning to any point close to their starting point. It would also be economically ruinous. Human-capital investments wouldn’t be nearly as damaging as the construction of an infrastructure as modern and sophisticated as that of France, to say nothing of transforming a country with an untrained work force, significant cultural gaps between worker and employer, and a generally unproductive local economy into a First World society. These investments would increase Algerian standards of living, though at the cost of creating a society locked like southern Italy into a permanent and unproductive subordination. The massive diversion of resources away from the French economy, though, would definitely slow down French economic growth. In the post-Second World War era, France quickly closed the numerous gaps (technological, economic, cultural) separating it from Britain and West Germany, even surpassing these other two leading European economies on some indicators. In this setting, the chances of the French economy’s convergence with those of northern Europe drop sharply.
Another element that this scenario will introduce will be the prospect of massive Algerian immigration north. The establishment of a modern and universal public health system will reduce death rates; the extension of mass education (in French) to Algerian Muslims will provide them with the cultural capital needed to make their way in metropolitan France; the creation of a modern infrastructure will make the act of emigration substantially more affordable. In a poorer France, an Algerian immigrant population in France possibly several times as large as the one we’re familiar with will not go over well.
To be sure, the France/Algeria model I’ve just invoked didn’t apply in the German case, and likely wouldn’t apply in the Korean case, since Germans and Koreans feel themselves to belong to a single nation in a way never emulated by French and Algerians. Still, tremendous costs would be unavoidable.
Take a look at Germany, for instance. One-fifth of the East German population has migrated west, depopulating entire districts and damaging their prospects for long-term growth. The hoped-for economic boom which would bring East Germany up to West German levels of productivity and income has had only limited effect, with income stagnating at 60-70% of West German levels. East German alienation with a process that has gone on outside of their control has found expression in ostalgie, a yearning for the familiar culture of the old GDR. Germany is still a rich country, and the old GDR is possibly the richest part of ex-Communist Europe apart from Slovenia. West Germany’s economy, though, has been dragged down by the expenditure of more than a trillion euros on reunification, while the future of a East German economy exposed to relatively cheaper and more productive central European competitors is at best murky.
If North and South Korea were forced to immediately reunify, whether as a result of a Second Korean War or as a byproduct of the collapse of the North Korean regime, the costs would be significant. Assuming that the inter-Korean frontier would be opened, for instance, the pressure for a massive wave of southward migration by a North Korean population seeking much better living standards in every respect would be irresistible. As Jonathan Edelstein commented once,
South Korea simply can’t afford to emulate West Germany’s approach to reunification. Promptly opening the frontiers would risk the destruction of the dysfunctional North Korean economy and the destabilization of the South Korean economy with an influx of potentially millions of desperate Korean migrants. Making massive public investments in the infrastructure of North Korea would risk bankrupting the South, given how South Korea unlike West Germany simply can’t afford a necessarily more ambitious task with its sparser financial resources. In the meantime, the regionalism of modern South Korea--manifested by the historical marginalization of the Cholla provinces of the southwest in South Korea’s political and social elites and economic development--would risk coming heavily into play in the direction of a vastly disadvantaged south. In the worst-case scenario of reunification, Korea’s economy could be dominated by a division between a collapsing north and a vastly indebted south, its population by a vast and ill-managed shift towards the south of the Korean peninsula, and its political life by the presence of a north resentful of how it was vastly disadvantaged by reunification.
For South Korea and South Koreans, the best case scenario in regards to the north might be the adoption of an effective program of economic reform in the north. If North Korea liberalized sufficiently--cutting back its military spending sharply, allowing a modicum of personal if not political liberty, and perhaps most importantly engaging in Dengist economic reforms--the South could do business with it. The outsourcing of South Korean industry to countries with lower labour costs has been going on for a while; if South Korean industries had access to the compliant but well-educated Korean-speaking work force immediately to their north, both sides would benefit substantially. Eventually, at some future point, the two countries could unite, whether into a unitary structure or some sort of federation, in a situation more closely approximating the German in 1989-1990.
But this isn’t going to happen. South Korea is preoccupied with its own domestic issues, and seems to be daunted by the scale of the task of North Korean reconstruction. North Korea is completely oblivious to the question of how to modernize and liberalize, thanks to its own ideological blinders. Korean reunification might be possible at some point in a couple of decades, perhaps after a fashion in some kind of state confederation with strict border controls in order to limit the hemorrhage of North Korea’s population to a vastly better South. There’s no reason, really, for the current separation apart from the North Korean regime’s insanity, and that’s tragic.
The strong particularisms which mark German history, though, are lacking in Korea. Under the long reign of the Yi dynasty, Korea arguably became a consolidated nation-state. Under Japanese rule, all of Korea suffered from forced assimilation and brutal militarized rule even as it experienced some long-term benefits in the form of Japanese efforts at industrialization. The past half-century, though, has created huge and yawning gaps which will make reunification next to impossible. South Korea is a prosperous society, a liberal-democratic society, on the verge of acquiring First World status and perhaps even a measure of sustainable global influence; North Korea can claim none of these things. These two countries are just too far apart now on almost every front.
Reunification was possible for West and East Germans since despite everything the two populations shared a broadly common culture and identity. West Germans lived in a prosperous consumer society that was the envy of western Europe; East Germans lived in a relatively less prosperous society that was nonetheless the envy of central and eastern Europe. West Germans watched their television stations; almost all East Germans could watch West German television, thanks to strong television transmitters which reached everywhere in the GDR save in the southeast, around Dresden. More importantly, outside economics and mass media, a German culture continued to exist across the inter-German frontier. Millions of East Germans had emigrated to West Germany, while hundreds of thousands of West German tourists visited the East. Following the imposition of the Berlin Wall, east-to-west migration was more difficult but it was still possible, while a GDR anxious for hard western currency allowed West German tourism. West Germans sent letters, visits, and consumer projects to their East German relatives, entering into a two-way if lop-sided relationship with them. Inter-German economic projects, encouraged by the two states despite Cold War ideological frontiers, also took off. The two German states might have found themselves in opposing military-ideological blocs, but if (non-nuclear) war ever began between the two blocs the reliability of the two German armies was suspect. Indeed, at least one role-playing game background was based on that suspect potential community.
By contrast, the inter-Korean frontier has been kept hermetically sealed. The inter-Korean frontier was not set from above by rival superpowers; rather, it was the outcome of a brutal civil war between two ideological factions which killed almost one-tenth of the Korean population. Since that bitter civil war, the only corridor for north/south relations was at the place on the frontier where the ceasefire which ended the Korean War was signed 51 years ago. Since then, the two countries have been unable to accept the legitimacy of the other, though it must be said that it is the north which has been the most hostile, between lethal attacks on South Korean airliners, the 1983 assassination of most of the South Korean cabinet, and sundry other low-level terrorist activities and high-level military tensions. Those North Koreans who have made it to South Korea did not escape across the heavily defended inter-Korean frontier, but rather through a third country, notably China.
To talk about reunification is to assume that a degree of mutuality is possible, that each side has valuable resources to contribute to a reunified whole. In the case of North Korea, though, all it can conceivably offer the south is a vast supply of ethnically Korean immigrants, mineral resources, weapons of mass destruction, and a territory a third greater than South Korea’s own.
Let’s say that, in 1950, after 80 years of colonial occupation and settlement, France decides to integrate Algeria with all of its inhabitants--Muslim, Christian, and Jewish--directly into metropolitan France, with rights and expectations equal to those of the metropolitan French. An integral part of this integration will involve a program of massive investments in Algeria to bring a basically poor and underdeveloped economy up to northwestern European levels. Huge investments will be made in human capital--into public health, into mass education, and so on. Equally large investments will be made in the transportation and communications infrastructures, the better to connect distant areas of Algeria with each other and with the wider European market. The French welfare system will be extended, with full provisions, to the Algerian départements Finally, French businesses will be encouraged to relocate from metropolitan France and set up shop in Algeria alongside state firms, in order to provide an indigenous material base for the new Algerian culture.
This program would be morally justified, given the intense dislocation suffered by Algerians in the course of French colonial rule and the extreme difficulty of returning to any point close to their starting point. It would also be economically ruinous. Human-capital investments wouldn’t be nearly as damaging as the construction of an infrastructure as modern and sophisticated as that of France, to say nothing of transforming a country with an untrained work force, significant cultural gaps between worker and employer, and a generally unproductive local economy into a First World society. These investments would increase Algerian standards of living, though at the cost of creating a society locked like southern Italy into a permanent and unproductive subordination. The massive diversion of resources away from the French economy, though, would definitely slow down French economic growth. In the post-Second World War era, France quickly closed the numerous gaps (technological, economic, cultural) separating it from Britain and West Germany, even surpassing these other two leading European economies on some indicators. In this setting, the chances of the French economy’s convergence with those of northern Europe drop sharply.
Another element that this scenario will introduce will be the prospect of massive Algerian immigration north. The establishment of a modern and universal public health system will reduce death rates; the extension of mass education (in French) to Algerian Muslims will provide them with the cultural capital needed to make their way in metropolitan France; the creation of a modern infrastructure will make the act of emigration substantially more affordable. In a poorer France, an Algerian immigrant population in France possibly several times as large as the one we’re familiar with will not go over well.
To be sure, the France/Algeria model I’ve just invoked didn’t apply in the German case, and likely wouldn’t apply in the Korean case, since Germans and Koreans feel themselves to belong to a single nation in a way never emulated by French and Algerians. Still, tremendous costs would be unavoidable.
Take a look at Germany, for instance. One-fifth of the East German population has migrated west, depopulating entire districts and damaging their prospects for long-term growth. The hoped-for economic boom which would bring East Germany up to West German levels of productivity and income has had only limited effect, with income stagnating at 60-70% of West German levels. East German alienation with a process that has gone on outside of their control has found expression in ostalgie, a yearning for the familiar culture of the old GDR. Germany is still a rich country, and the old GDR is possibly the richest part of ex-Communist Europe apart from Slovenia. West Germany’s economy, though, has been dragged down by the expenditure of more than a trillion euros on reunification, while the future of a East German economy exposed to relatively cheaper and more productive central European competitors is at best murky.
If North and South Korea were forced to immediately reunify, whether as a result of a Second Korean War or as a byproduct of the collapse of the North Korean regime, the costs would be significant. Assuming that the inter-Korean frontier would be opened, for instance, the pressure for a massive wave of southward migration by a North Korean population seeking much better living standards in every respect would be irresistible. As Jonathan Edelstein commented once,
[A]ny country that has a GDP of $1000 per head (and spends 25 percent of it on the military) is likely to have an abysmal infrastructure, and North Korea was no exception. East Germany was at least a modern country; North Korea would need its road and rail networks and power grid built practically from scratch. I'm not sure where South Korea would find the money to do this. Integrating East Germany has cost the West $100 billion per year; integrating North Korea - even to the lower South Korean standard - would probably come fairly close in absolute terms. For a country with a _total_ GDP of about $240 billion, this wouldn't even be close to possible.
Emigration - well, the last one to leave North Korea will have to turn out the lights. East Germany lost about a million people all told; I'd expect the population decline in North Korea to be at least five times that, and possibly ten. The only way for South Korea to avoid refugee shantytowns in every major city would be to restrict population movement - and at that point, the South Koreans might as well stop talking about unity and just call the North a colony.
South Korea simply can’t afford to emulate West Germany’s approach to reunification. Promptly opening the frontiers would risk the destruction of the dysfunctional North Korean economy and the destabilization of the South Korean economy with an influx of potentially millions of desperate Korean migrants. Making massive public investments in the infrastructure of North Korea would risk bankrupting the South, given how South Korea unlike West Germany simply can’t afford a necessarily more ambitious task with its sparser financial resources. In the meantime, the regionalism of modern South Korea--manifested by the historical marginalization of the Cholla provinces of the southwest in South Korea’s political and social elites and economic development--would risk coming heavily into play in the direction of a vastly disadvantaged south. In the worst-case scenario of reunification, Korea’s economy could be dominated by a division between a collapsing north and a vastly indebted south, its population by a vast and ill-managed shift towards the south of the Korean peninsula, and its political life by the presence of a north resentful of how it was vastly disadvantaged by reunification.
For South Korea and South Koreans, the best case scenario in regards to the north might be the adoption of an effective program of economic reform in the north. If North Korea liberalized sufficiently--cutting back its military spending sharply, allowing a modicum of personal if not political liberty, and perhaps most importantly engaging in Dengist economic reforms--the South could do business with it. The outsourcing of South Korean industry to countries with lower labour costs has been going on for a while; if South Korean industries had access to the compliant but well-educated Korean-speaking work force immediately to their north, both sides would benefit substantially. Eventually, at some future point, the two countries could unite, whether into a unitary structure or some sort of federation, in a situation more closely approximating the German in 1989-1990.
But this isn’t going to happen. South Korea is preoccupied with its own domestic issues, and seems to be daunted by the scale of the task of North Korean reconstruction. North Korea is completely oblivious to the question of how to modernize and liberalize, thanks to its own ideological blinders. Korean reunification might be possible at some point in a couple of decades, perhaps after a fashion in some kind of state confederation with strict border controls in order to limit the hemorrhage of North Korea’s population to a vastly better South. There’s no reason, really, for the current separation apart from the North Korean regime’s insanity, and that’s tragic.
