We are not demonising the North. We are simply telling the truth,” said the senior South Korean official as he defended the incongruity of his government’s policy in trying to build trust with the brutal dictatorship in North Korea, at the same time as exposing its terrible human rights record and seeking to haul its young leader Kim Jong-un off to the International Criminal Court.
The fact is that South Korea has to live with the expectation that at some time it will have to reunify with the North and it has a special ministry that prepares assorted scenarios. The nightmare is a sudden collapse in the north when the 50 million South Koreans would have to cope with 25 million starving North Koreans who come from a country that has a gross domestic product (GDP) that is a dramatic 43 times smaller than the South.
The South would much prefer a scenario under which some of North Korea’s present administration continued and a managed process of a gradual merger could be achieved. This would be much cheaper, but also much less traumatic for people on both sides. But however it happens, any merger will be infinitely more difficult than that of Germany in 1989, despite frequent comparisons. Merging the two halves of Germany gave Europe’s economic giant huge problems that it is still living with, but South Korea’s task will be much greater.
West Germany’s GDP was only 10 times larger than the East, making its vast economic task much easier than Korea’s would be because the impoverished North has a GDP 43 times smaller than the far richer South. In addition, the 16 million East Germans had much better understanding of what the 63 million West Germans were like, as the easterners could get West German TV and radio in their homes.
The estimated costs of unification vary widely from $600 billion (Dh2.2 trillion) to $2 trillion, but they would easily run to a lot more over time as the unified government slowly brought the north up to very high standard of infrastructure and services that the South has achieved. Finding such money must be part of why South Korea will urgently need regional support if reunification happens. There is also a major political hurdle to overcome as the South will have to win the trust of the northerners who have had 70 years of undiluted propaganda, which portrays North Korea as the trustee of the true Korean spirit: The hungry lone wolf fighting the world, while it portrays the South as the soft lapdog that has sold out to the Americans and Japanese economic imperialists.
False comparison
This hatred, which has been deliberately fomented in the North, takes a lot of its legitimacy from the desperate civil war that the two halves of Korea fought from 1950 to 1953, from which deep enmity still rages. This is another false comparison with Germany because the two parts of Germany never fought each other because they were simply divided by the occupying victors of the Second World War.
North Korea survives only because of the goodwill of the Chinese, who do not want a committed American ally to suddenly have its troops along with the Americans on their border. But despite its decades of support for North Korea, the internationalist government of Chinese President Xi Jinping has indicated its embarrassment at the antics of Kim who took over as president in 2011 when his father Kim Jong-il died. China is not happy about the missile launches, naval clashes and shelling of islands that the northerners have precipitated.
Nonetheless, the Chinese have given no indication that they want to engender change in North Korea as they continue to put up with the third member of the Kim dynasty that has ruled North Korea since 1948. They are working to achieve better relations with the new South Korean government of President Park Geun-hye, but that has not lessened China’s long-term backing for North Korea.
The South Koreans have the thankless task of being forced to take the North seriously. They share a ceasefire line that has become a dangerously armed border, but they have been separated for so long that many young South Koreans wonder if they need to seek reunification at all. The huge costs and the certainty of massive social dislocation frighten them, which is why Park’s government has started a campaign to rekindle popular support desire for reunification.
Park has taken to talking of the ‘unification bonanza’, which is based in part on the economic potential of the larger united Korea, but also on the potential of Korea being able to export its goods by road and rail to China, Russia and beyond, as well as import its all-important energy by a gas pipeline direct from Russia since North Korea shares a border with Russia near Vladivostok where the Trans-Siberian railway ends.
But as much as the democratic and well-managed southerners can plan for different scenarios of reunification, the North remains a malignant puzzle, manipulated by the Kim dynasty and its functionaries with little reference to any normality. So perhaps the most indicative quote from the Korean Foreign Ministry official who sought to explain his government’s various policies was “What else can we do?”
