Rebuilding new roads to peace, security, and human development

TWO contrary impulses pull at every new state in the developing world. The first is the elite impulse to centralize political power, the better to achieve economic development and social modernization.

The other impulse stems from ethnic nationalism — as people forcibly put together by colonialist powers seek to rally round some icon symbol of unique group identity.

The postwar wave of emancipation produced a generation of fledgling liberal democracies in the new countries of Africa and Asia.

But parliamentary institutions have not always worked as advertised. Political democracy at times has proved unequal to the complex problems of societies characterized by great inequality and hierarchical traditions and capitalism.

Less than a century after independence, most of these fledgling democratic societies set up so grandiosely had reverted to authoritarian regime of various intensities.

Indeed, there have been instances that transition from democracy to authoritarianism has become so common that Harvard professor Samuel Huntington seems to justify an “authoritarian transition” for Meiji Japan, Ataturk’s Turkey, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, Park Chung Hee’s South Korea, and Chiang Ching Kuo’s Taiwan, all of which were forced to march to modernization to wealth and power.

None of the successor state has escaped this authoritarian transition. Only some regions have been relatively lucky. But, they, too, are feeling the tensions of separatist extremism and religious terrorism.

Meanwhile, China offers herself as a model of the new “mixed economy” under state direction and control.

And the Chinese model has strong credentials.

In the late 1970s, China’s economy had been smaller than Italy’s and just about the same size as Canada’s. It surpassed Germany as the largest exporter in 2009, and overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in 2010. Now only the US is ahead in GNP terms — and even that may change by 2025.

During the Cold War, the Communist bloc challenge led by the Soviet Union was at bottom military.

Now China, on its own, is challenging the West in its own field, that of the economy. The Beijing model — free market guided by state control — has resulted in an unprecedented growth for China and in some respects appears to be superior to the Western model. Consequently, China sees itself as rising in economic, military, and diplomatic power. This phenomenon is transforming the world order: the center of global gravity shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In the light of the many difficult, intractable political, territorial, religious, separatist, ideological, and ethnic conflicts in Asia and in various parts of the world, we, in the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), and the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), the members of parliament, political leaders, civil society, and religious leaders must contribute our share in promoting peace and reconciliation, peaceful settlement of disputes, sustainable human development; and in fighting poverty, disease, and climate change and environmental degradation.

While we are deeply aware of the historical and cultural roots of many of those conflicts—and the enmity and bitter divisions that have grown between rivals—we cannot turn away from the pursuit of peace because the alternative, which is conflict and war, would be immeasurably costly and make all of us losers.

In Northeast Asia today, we need to develop pragmatic and creative methods that will try to rebuild North-South relations in the Korean Peninsula — without hopefully allowing too many of the ideological differences to get in the way.

It is our hope to contribute even small efforts to peace and unification in the Korean peninsula, which now have the beginnings and potential to lead to a breakthrough long awaited by Asia and the global community.

We believe that over and above the giving up of its nuclear weapons, it would be realpolitik to expect that North Korea would hope for an iron-clad Omnibus Agreement leading to a Permanent Peace Treaty, with the South and the US that could likely include the following, as we already pointed out in our earlier conferences:

1. North Korea (The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea, ROK), as separate independent Republics, but perhaps connected together by a loose confederation, until at some point in the near or distant future, they can consider uniting like the two Vietnams or the two Germanys;

2. Withdrawal of US troops from South Korea.

3. Withdrawal of large North Korean and South Korean troops from the areas of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 38th Parallel to make the DMZ really demilitarized.

4. Development of a concrete formula for South-North Confederation where the two Koreas will be separate and independent but develop common inter-dependent synergies until they can set-up a Union or what the Greeks call “Enosis” in 15 to 25 years or earlier.

5. Develop inter-Korea commercial flights, highways, and a common railway system for the two Koreas from Pusan at the end of the Korean South facing Japan to North Korea’s Yalu border with China, which, it is hoped, will interlinkwith the Trans-Siberian Railway to Russia and to Europe.

6. Develop close political and economic relations between North and South and with China, Japan, the US, Russia, and ASEAN and work with the UN system and the global community.

7. Develop and industrialize the North Korean economy and agriculture, put an end to the recurring causes of famine, expand the education system, and immediately open the region toactive tourism.

8. North Korea or DPRK to immediately join ASEAN Plus 3 (Japan, China, South Korea) to become ASEAN Plus 4.

9. Immediately organize an adequate Development Fund for compensating North Korea for terminating its nuclear weapons and delivery system, which Fund shall be used for the North’s economic and social development and augmentation of its national budget.

10. Consider a state of neutrality for the two independent Koreas which shall actively interact with the regional and global economy so that the North, with its hydrocarbons potential, mining, and hydro-electric resources, etc. can join the South, which has already developed much earlier into a credible major economic power.

(To be continued)