[Kim Myong-sik] ‘Unification bonanza’ is misleading slogan

The primary question about Korean reunification is how we achieve it. Discussing what we can get from it at this juncture is like putting the cart before the horse. It will depend entirely on how the two Koreas become one. 

Last month in Davos, Switzerland, President Park Geun-hye said that reunification of the Korean Peninsula would bring “daebak” not only to Korea but to the surrounding region. Her interpreter translated the word as “breakthrough” but it did not correctly convey the meaning of this informal Korean expression. English-language newspapers here put it as “jackpot,” but I would choose “bonanza” to get closer to what the president had in mind.

After she made an address to the opening session of the World Economic Forum on entrepreneurship and creative economy, WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab commented that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the huge cost of unification to be loaded on the future of Korea would be factors keeping global investors from coming to the country. Park responded by reiterating the unification daebak theory that she had first presented in her New Year press conference.

One effect of unification will be restoring the human rights of the tens of millions of people in the North who are suffering from hunger and repression. The other will be the great economic benefits to the Korean Peninsula, Northeast China and eastern part of Russia through increased infrastructure investments, the president said. Thus, the president has expressed her concurrence with a major newspaper’s projection of post-unification economic bang before domestic and global audiences.

The mass-circulation daily Chosun Ilbo had started a series of analyses on the economic impact of unification from the first week of 2014 under the title “Unification is the Future.” Using various data compiled by think tanks and university professors, the conservative newspaper predicted that national and regional economies would show robust growth after Korean unification with increased investment, trade, transportation and communication on and around the peninsula.

Chosun articles even conjectured on how much defense expenditures would be reduced in (unified) Korea, China and Japan, allowing each of them to spend more on welfare. Quoting figures released by a state-run international economy research institute, the Chosun report said annual trade volume among Korea, China and Japan would jump by $122.5 billion after the reunification of the Korean Peninsula. The unified Korea will receive 30 million annual foreign tourist arrivals on condition that 4 trillion won (about $4 billion) is invested in tourism infrastructure.

President Park’s press conference on Jan. 6 of the New Year, her first since her inauguration in February 2013, did not go into as much detail but her gleaming vision of unified Korea led the local media to decorate their headlines with the word “daebak”. Some leftists reacted negatively, arguing that only peaceful unification would bear a positive outcome. Chung Dong-young, for one, said unification by absorption would be a disaster.

One naturally wonders, why all this fuss over the unification bonanza all of a sudden in the beginning of the New Year, notably from the conservative media and the conservative government, which had all these years been more restrained about the unification issue in contrast to the liberal-progressive side. It looked as though the schedule was set for the two Koreas to sign a pact to break open the border.

Yes, there was one extraordinary development in North Korea last December that increased the possibility of an upheaval or an emergency in the North. Following the execution of Jang Song-thaek in Pyongyang on treason charges in December, pundits worldwide have given three to five years or shorter for the present regime of Kim Jong-un. But it was a little too impetuous for the Chosun editors and the Blue House staff to draw up a unification bonanza, quite coincidentally, putting aside the enormous problems involved in unification.

Well, let us suppose that the Pyongyang regime does collapse, immediately or within a few years, through a coup by disgruntled generals or a revolt of hungry soldiers or a general strike of workers and farmers. A noted North Korea security expert at the RAND Corporation has thought of some alarming consequences from such a situation and conjured a scary view. Dr. Bruce Bennet illustrated the following in his recent report:

― A near anarchy like in the present Somalia with rival factions in the People’s Army controlling mutually hostile military zones,

― A new, equally tyrannical military regime coming to power,

― South Korean military push for reunification turning the northern territory into hubs of insurgency and organized crime, if Seoul fails to integrate 1 million KPA soldiers into civil society,

― Weapons of mass destruction and nuclear scientists being obtained by terrorists,

― China’s intervention leading to military conflicts with South Korea and the United States and

― Partitioning of North Korea into hostile sections like Germany after World War II.

Our defense and security affairs officials may insist that the above contingencies in the North are all covered by their studies and strategic planning. Yet, we are aware that some and actually all of these problems would be beyond the control of South Korea alone and require international cooperation to cope with. What happened to the “multilateral process” to tackle the North Korean nuclear program provides a grim example; virtually nothing has been achieved by the six-party talks over the past 11 years.

It is nonetheless an improvement that the government has started serious considerations on unification, even if in such a fanciful manner, when we recall the apparent shortage of enthusiasm toward unification in conservative politics over the past years. Many still remember the arguments over the proposed abolition of the Ministry of Unification when the presidential transition committee was working to launch the Lee Myung-bak administration. It survived, but the ministry has remained a secondary organization under the Defense and Foreign Ministries.

That the collapse of the North Korean regime looks closer does not mean that the unification of the Korean Peninsula is at hand. Fewer people in the South believe that unification is necessary and statistics show that the younger generation is rather more afraid of what will happen to them when the two divided halves are unified. If President Park’s “daebak” remarks are aimed to relieve her fellow citizens of their concerns about the consequences of unification, she had better explore other avenues than unrealistic sloganeering.

By Kim Myong-sik 

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer of The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net. ― Ed.