[BRIEF NOTE] The Ethics of Reunification
Oct. 24th, 2005 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIt seems likely, alas, that the massive gap across the board between South and North Korea--in living standards, in governance, in death tolls--will ensure that when Korean reunification happens, it will be on massively unequal terms, with a South that resents the dependency and poverty of the North, and a North resenting its treatment by the South as a repressed colonial protectorate.
The most potentially explosive issue will be the migration restrictions that will almost certainly be imposed on North Koreans moving to the South, given the likelihood of massive southwards migrations were border controls to be lifted entirely. China's restrictions on rural-to-urban migration may serve as a model. As defensible as these restrictions would be from the perspective of South Korean workers, they would be indefensible from the perspective of North Koreans who would see migration, whether temporary or permanent, as their best way to get ahead in life. By the same measure, exploitative migration controls will encourage the growth of enthusiastically exploitative illegal immigration south, since the north-to-south economic gradients will remain for a long time. I'm skeptical that reunification will do any immediate good, seeing how, in post-Communist Europe, the least developed and most conservative countries consistently suffered more protracted and difficult transitions than their favoured neighbours. North Korean emigration to third countries--North America, perhaps the former Soviet Union, maybe even China--might still be encouraged, all the better to reduce the size of the North Korean population persuant to full reunification at some date decades in the future.
At this point, it's entirely justified to ask how moral this, perhaps the most plausible scenario for Korean reunification, really is. If the rhetoric of including the North within the Korean nation is, in fact, empty words hiding the reality of the North's colonization by the South and the maintenance of North Koreans as a captive population of low-wage labourers, doing the jobs that South Koreans' grandparents had given up on their size of the former DMZ, what's the incentive to reunify? For that matter, what effect would an unequal and discriminatory scenario for Korean reunification have on South Korean democracy? If the East Germans are unhappy after having been treated as full citizens by the Federal Republic, I can only imagine how badly Korea will turn out.
The most potentially explosive issue will be the migration restrictions that will almost certainly be imposed on North Koreans moving to the South, given the likelihood of massive southwards migrations were border controls to be lifted entirely. China's restrictions on rural-to-urban migration may serve as a model. As defensible as these restrictions would be from the perspective of South Korean workers, they would be indefensible from the perspective of North Koreans who would see migration, whether temporary or permanent, as their best way to get ahead in life. By the same measure, exploitative migration controls will encourage the growth of enthusiastically exploitative illegal immigration south, since the north-to-south economic gradients will remain for a long time. I'm skeptical that reunification will do any immediate good, seeing how, in post-Communist Europe, the least developed and most conservative countries consistently suffered more protracted and difficult transitions than their favoured neighbours. North Korean emigration to third countries--North America, perhaps the former Soviet Union, maybe even China--might still be encouraged, all the better to reduce the size of the North Korean population persuant to full reunification at some date decades in the future.
At this point, it's entirely justified to ask how moral this, perhaps the most plausible scenario for Korean reunification, really is. If the rhetoric of including the North within the Korean nation is, in fact, empty words hiding the reality of the North's colonization by the South and the maintenance of North Koreans as a captive population of low-wage labourers, doing the jobs that South Koreans' grandparents had given up on their size of the former DMZ, what's the incentive to reunify? For that matter, what effect would an unequal and discriminatory scenario for Korean reunification have on South Korean democracy? If the East Germans are unhappy after having been treated as full citizens by the Federal Republic, I can only imagine how badly Korea will turn out.
