Time to privatize unification policy

This is the eighth in a “Letters to President Yoon” series The Korea Times has organized to convey policy recommendations in open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to President Yoon Suk-yeol following his May 10 inauguration. — ED.

Dear Mr. President, Congratulations on your election as 13th President of the Republic of Korea. Just in office, you face a mounting number of challenges: high inflation and uneven recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the same time persistent military provocations from North Korea, most likely culminating in renewed nuclear testing, the rise of China and the Korean posture in a wider world arena, such as the Ukraine conflict and much more.

And all that, while another important election for all local and regional representatives is looming and a majority in the National Assembly lacking. No real honeymoon period for your presidency. The recent news from North Korea is particularly worrisome. In a country without any basic immunization, neither by vaccination nor by previous infection, the fast-spreading omicron variant, now already having affected five percent of the population, might have devastating consequences.

Some aid goods have obviously been shipped from China but given the size of the outbreak it is not more than a drop in the ocean. And there are no signs for a North Korean acceptance of aid to set up a longterm solution for the COVID-19 problem by vaccinating the population. Fortunately, your government did immediately and unconditionally offer aid to North Korea; but, not surprisingly, this answer was completely ignored by Pyongyang.

While still it is a strong signal for your new policy that you offered the aid, the result could resemble that of the last government: South Korea makes offer after offer, and North Korea snubs it. And once another — surely looming — military provocation occurs, and South Korea protests it, all kind of communication soon breaks down.

What makes inter-Korean negotiations, even about so benign a topic as offering aid for helping to combat the coronavirus, so difficult? For one, North Korea is always careful, even paranoid, about the potential destabilizing effects of anything coming from South Korea. North Korea studied the downfall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe very closely and one lesson it has learned is not to trust even peaceful opening up processes vis-a-vis the Southern neighbor.

However, there is another, though related issue: North-South relations have always been handled by both sides on the highest political level. There is no realm in North-South relations not governed by the state. Even so-called “civilian exchanges” are in reality carefully staged, and politically strongly orchestrated by governments.

In North Korea, where there is no civil society, this is not surprising. But also in South Korea, every move — for example, aid to North Korea granted by civilian organizations, visits by South Koreans to the North or even chance encounters at international events — has to be approved by the government, or at least promptly being reported and judged by the government. Failure of which leads to severe punishment.

Yet, can there be another way to handle non-governmental exchanges? Take the example of divided Germany. Certainly, the situation of Cold War Germany was different from that of the Korean Peninsula today, but one of the most striking differences is that during all the time of division, but in particular after the new Ostpolitik of the 1970s, there was an ever-widening realm of private, genuinely non-government-controlled exchanges between East and West.

When I as a child and later teenager visited my relatives in KarlMarx-Stadt (today fortunately called Chemnitz again) in East Germany, we needed neither prior approval nor later reporting to the West German

government. Day trips from West Berlin to East Berlin in the 1980s were no problem and visa free. The important thing is that the West German government from the 1950s tried to encourage private exchanges like sending letters, care packages etc. to the East, but never wanted to control it.

In South Korea, a mistrust from the government regarding its own citizens prevented the people from reaching out privately to the North. The mistrust is fixed in particular in the infamous National Security Law. While the goal, national security, is absolutely legitimate, it is highly questionable if this law in practice still helps to achieve it or rather works to prevent meaningful private exchanges while not adding to national security.

Some provisions, e.g. on blocking North Korean websites, are technically obsolete for everyone with a virtual private network (VPN), and politically counter-act their own purposes (by making North Korean news, being illicit and usually quite boring propaganda, more attractive). Others are seeing citizens not as people with rights (within legal limits), but rather as subjects of government control.

So, President Yoon, my proposal to you: free unification policy from all the ballast of the previous decades — privatize it! This does not at all mean condoning illegal behavior, which further should remain illegal, like circumventing sanctions, spying etc. But it would mean to get rid of unnecessary inhibitions for genuine private contacts. And these private contacts then would be the hotbed for the growth of the one resource lacking most between North and South: trust.

One might think that given the aggressive posture of North Korea there are more important policy initiatives, like bolstering defense etc. But the last two decades clearly showed that neither conservative nor liberal governments under the current framework were able to prevent North Korea’s military from growing. Freeing North Korea policy from total government control would not immediately change this and does not need to be the only policy toward the North (bolstering defense is not such a bad idea, either!).

Nevertheless, it would be a way to achieve long-term building of trust and of new, civilian actors in policy which could sensibly add to governmental-led policies. Then, for example, the acceptance of South Korean knowledge and material aid to combat the pandemic would be much more likely to be accepted. And, since it involves one of the strongest taboos in South Korean politics, the National Security Law, only your government, Mr. President, could enact such a policy, because no one would accuse you of being a secret admirer of North Korea’s regime.

When your new Minister of Unification Kwon Young-se, in the nomination hearings in the National Assembly, said that unification policy is a relay race rather than a policy changing completely every four years according to government’s whim, he said something very important, and with direct reference to the German experience.

Great to hear that! But the second step now would be to go further, and to let the government do, what it can do best (defense, national security, large-scale humanitarian aid) and the civilian sector that, which only civilians can do (people-to-people exchanges). Thus, trust building can start, and the relay race unification policy can grow stronger year by year. Good luck for you and the Republic of Korea and the Korean Peninsula for such an endeavor.