Korean unification – just not right now

In downtown Seoul, traditional Korean food stalls jockey with the fashion houses of Zara, H&M and the other big high street brands. The young Koreans thronging the streets here are the stylish millennials of any major city. It is a different world to the rarefied air of the National Assembly where – in a meeting room which recently hosted US President Donald Trump – green tea is politely served to waiting journalists and officials before the arrival of National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee Sang.

Moon is a six-term lawmaker who views achieving reunification with North Korea as an almost sacred duty of the country’s politicians. That is not just rhetoric. The goal of reunification is written into the country’s constitution and Korea has an entire ministry devoted to it.

Sensitivities surrounding the diplomacy on reunification are high in South Korea at the moment.

I and 11 other journalists from Asia Pacific have been invited here to report on denuclearisation and demilitarisation efforts on the Korean Peninsula, following the breakthrough meeting between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June.

That meeting took place against the backdrop of heightened tensions over the escalating war of words between Trump and Kim. There has been a dramatic deescalation in those tensions since the June summit.

Hopes were high when it was announced in September that Kim would visit Seoul this month – the first time that a North Korean leader will have set foot in the South’s capital since the division of the Korean Peninsula. But officially that date has been pushed back to next year – though some Korean lawmakers spoken to privately hold out hope it will still happen this year.

That makes this a tricky time for South Korea – and is the reason most of the officials who have been lined up to speak to us on this reporting tour have insisted their comments are not attributed.

The Speaker, Moon Hee Sang, was supposed to be one of those – but after our meeting he had a change of heart. Moon had talked about his hope that Kim would still visit Seoul this month and address the National Assembly, as Trump had also done. It is clearly a message he wants to be sure Kim hears.

The Speaker also gave a stark assessment of the current situation as a once-in-1000-years opportunity for both Koreas to agree to peace. His assessment was a reference to the unique chemistry between the three key players in the current negotiations on a de-nuclearised North Korea – Trump, Kim and President Moon Jae In, who has driven much of the current process.

But there is also a growing awareness that in South Korea there is a building mood against unification, long seen as the natural corollary to lasting peace. To older Koreans, who include today’s generation of leaders, the 70-year separation of the two Koreas – imposed by allied forces after World War II – is a national tragedy, cleaving a line through families, the Korean culture and national identity.

But younger Koreans, who have long lived under the shadow of North Korea’s nuclear threat, see only an impoverished and hostile neighbour, and a people with whom they have little in common. It is not just younger Koreans – a 2017 survey by the Korea Institute for National Unification shows public support for reunification has steadily declined, with 57.8 per cent seeing it as necessity, down from 69.3 per cent in 2014. But among those in their 20s just 38.9 per cent think unification is necessary.

When it was agreed the two Koreas would march under the one flag at the Winter Olympics, it triggered a backlash in South Korea after being viewed as an exercise in political propaganda. Young Koreans were particularly aggrieved over the two countries fielding a joint ice hockey team as it was seen as North Koreans usurping the place of its own country’s athletes.

But the economic cost of unification is another factor. The estimated $5 trillion cost will be largely borne by South Korea, which is experiencing an economic downturn, including rising unemployment. Unification – just not now – seems to be the current mood.

Officials hold to the line, however, that South Koreans still want unification – even if there is no agreement on the pace of change. As one high-ranking official notes: Living under the constant shadow of a nuclear-armed North Korea is not an option either.

Tracy Watkins travelled to Korea with funding from the US Department of State, the public affairs unit of the US embassy in Seoul and Meridian International. Their stated purpose in funding foreign journalists is to examine the policy of the US and its allies toward North Korea.