Hastening Korean Reunification: The Writing on the 38th Parallel

Nicholas Eberstadt

From Foreign Affairs, March/ April 1997

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Summary:  Pacific powers would like Korea to reunify slowly, but the North is soon likely to implode, its economy deteriorating as its weapons of mass destruction accumulate. Rapid reunification would spur economic growth, as in Germany, and reduce regional tensions. South Korea's liberalization of its own economy and strengthening of its civic institutions will prepare it to assist the North. China and Russia may not go along, but Western governments should stop coddling Pyongyang. America should underwrite a united Korea's security, and Japan its finances.

Nicholas Eberstadt is a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. This essay draws on a longer study for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

Whatever their differences, the five governments that must contend most directly with Pyongyang-Seoul, Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, and Moscow-all assume that a rapid reunification of Korea would run contrary to their national interests. Implicitly or explicitly, their policies all posit that a gradual drawing together of the two Koreas would be optimal for financial or geopolitical reasons.

In South Korea, pronouncements about unification have been explicit and detailed. In 1991, according to that year's July 4 Washington Post, then-President Roh Tae Woo declared, "Our people do not want an accelerated reunification." Despite his subsequent fall from grace and the perennial disagreements on the point in Seoul, this cautious sentiment continues to guide the South's policy. Studies by the Korea Development Institute, the Republic of Korea's (ROK) leading quasi-governmental economic think tank, have argued that "the German experience demonstrates that national unification involves enormous costs, and, going forward, this is probably the most critical concern for South Korea," and that "the experience of German national unification convinced a large number of South Koreans that sudden economic integration in Korea . . . will result in disaster." Rather than risk derailing the South Korean economic "miracle," the prevailing consensus in Seoul goes, the South should try to plan for a reintegration with the North over a period of several decades, while the North reforms its polity and transforms its economy.

What are the alternatives? The notion of purposely working to prepare for, and thereby perhaps to hasten, Korea's reunification may seem fraught with risk-and it is. Such a strategy can offer no absolute guarantee that reunification would be peaceful. But in the perilous years ahead, no strategy can promise perpetual peace in the Korean peninsula-or northeast Asia, for that matter. Indeed, all of East Asia, as the political scientist Aaron Friedberg said in the Winter 1993-94 International Security, is "ripe for rivalry," and will be for many years to come. Under the circumstances, a policy that prepares for and attempts to expedite the coming of a free, peaceful, and united Korea looks decidedly superior to the alternatives.

Calculations that parallel the South Korean government's lead the four great powers of northeast Asia to a similar evaluation of the merits of a gradual reunification. Although President George Bush declared in Seoul in 1992 that "the day will inevitably come" when "Korea will be whole again," American policy does not anticipate that day any time soon. On the contrary, the "Agreed Framework" Washington reached with Pyongyang in 1994 outlines a prolonged and expanding American engagement with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Brokered after the North's refusal to permit inspection of its nuclear sites, the document envisions Western construction of two modern reactors in North Korea at an estimated cost of over $4 billion in exchange for a freeze on the country's nuclear program, eventual inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the ultimate dismantling and removal of the suspect facilities and materials-obligations that are not to be fulfilled for years to ...

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