President Park's Dreams of Korean Reunification

THIS seems an odd time for South Korea’s leaders to be talking up the prospects of reunification with their country’s evil twin. The economic gap between the rich south and dirt-poor north of the peninsula grows ever wider, implying mounting reabsorption costs for South Korea. And under its latest Kim-despot, the 30-ish, callow but ruthless Kim Jong Un, the North seems as hostile as ever, threatening new nuclear and missile tests and this week conducting live-fire exercises near the disputed maritime border. In response to Barack Obama’s visit to Seoul in late April an official “Peaceful Reunification” committee thundered that the North “must settle its final scores with the US through an all-out nuclear showdown”. And misogynistic bile was spat at the South’s president, Park Geun-hye: a “dirty comfort woman for the US and despicable prostitute selling off the nation”.

Yet Miss Park herself has been enthusing about the benefits of reunifying her country with this surly belligerent. In a press conference in January she picked “lay[ing] the foundation for unification on the Korean peninsula” as a “key task” for her government this year, and described the prospect as an economic “jackpot”. Then, in February, she announced the formation of a committee to prepare for reunification. In March she visited Germany, long watched by South Koreans as a model of national reintegration between thriving capitalists and struggling communists. In a speech in Dresden, where mass protests in 1989 helped topple the old East German regime, she set out three proposals to ease reunification: a “humanitarian” approach to issues such as reunions between millions of divided families; the building of cross-border infrastructure; and a plan to “reintegrate” the estranged peoples of the two countries through increased contact.

The North’s press dismissed this with predictable scorn, calling it the “daydream of a psychopath”. It did indeed seem fanciful for a number of reasons. The prospect that the North would countenance the proposals was negligible. The idea that reunification will bring an economic bonanza is, to put it mildly, controversial. Her colleagues can point to projections that a united Korea would by 2050 have a bigger economy than Japan or Germany. But that is to ignore the monumental short-term costs.

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