창작과 비평

 

* The following lecture was given in the ANU Korea Institute Distinguished Lecture Series and delivered on August 25, 2009 at the Law Link Theatre, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The speaker wishes to thank Professors James Fox and Hyung-A Kim of the Institute for the invitation and Vice Chancellor Ian Chubb for his warm welcome.

 

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1. Opening Remarks

 

I wish to open by expressing a deep sense of loss at the recent passing away of our former president Kim Dae-jung, who during his long and turbulent life had done so much for South Korea’s democracy and for promoting peace in the Korean Peninsula, and even in death presented the nation with a valuable opening for inter-Korean reconciliation.

 

After a year and half of escalating tension in the peninsula since the advent of the Lee Myung-bak administration, we have recently seen signs of change. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang in early August and his meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-il would be the first ice-breaker. Chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun of the South Korean business group Hyundai followed in mid-August. Then, Kim Dae-jung’s death last week occasioned North Korea’s decision to send a special delegation to join in the mourning, resulting in the first high-level official dialogue under the new administration, including a conversation with the president himself.

 

These developments are certainly new and striking compared to what had been going on just a short while before. But in a longer perspective one has a curious sense of an old pattern being repeated, of a roller coaster ride familiar to residents and observers of the Korean Peninsula at least since the first North-South joint communiqué of July 1972. Will the thaw this time be followed once again by another freeze at some future date? Or will it even prove a real thaw?

 

I do not foresee an infinite repetition of the cycle in any event. But in order to break this painful pattern and establish genuine peace in Korea and the surrounding region, we need to make note of such pattern as may exist and the way it functions.

 

 

2. Korea’s division as a ‘division system’

 

Although Korea was first partitioned in 1945, I have a notion that something like a ‘division system’ began to take shape only after the Korean War (1950-53) ended in a stalemate. In any case, the country remains divided to this day by the armistice line (MDL or the Military Demarcation Line), and the sheer longevity of the division would serve as a prima facie evidence for some systemic force at work. Indeed, Korea’s division has outlived the comparable cases of Vietnam, Germany and Yemen, reunified respectively in 1975, 1990, and over the years 1990-94.

 

Of course, that is far from conclusive evidence for the existence of a division system. The unusual antagonism and striking actual divergences between the two Koreas would constitute a prima facie evidence precisely to the contrary. Still another counter-argument would be found in the extraordinary paucity of economic integration and even rudimentary social intercourse (such as exchange of mail, let alone movement of people, across the MDL). Yet, looked at more closely, these offer additional arguments for a common system encompassing the whole peninsula, the very antagonism serving to reinforce vested interests on both sides and the lack of intercourse betraying a systematically enforced separation.

 

In today’s lecture I will simply posit that the two Koreas constitute neither two ‘normal’ members of the international community, nor a ‘normal’ single nation divided by pure external imposition, but something quite unique, a pair of exceedingly divergent societies that nevertheless are encompassed by a single ‘system’ or ‘regime’. On the basis of this unilateral assertion I will try to further elucidate the concept by considering what difference such a concept would make, assuming it’s a valid one. I wish, however, to remind you, firstly, that I am talking about a ‘system’ in a fairly loose sense, and secondly, that the division system represents a sub-unit of the world-system, which arguably is the only real (i.e., practically self-enclosed) social system in existence.

 

And there is a third point. Despite its longevity and powers of endurance, the division system is also an essentially shaky structure because ill adapted to some even more enduring realities of the peninsula: the existence of a population with a millennium-long or even thirteen centuries long experience of unified national life, a population divided with no just cause by outside forces and hence keenly aware of infringements to their right to a democratic and autonomous life, and, at least in its Southern half, the vibrancy of civil society that is increasingly conscious of the existence of the division system.

 

Hence, what we have is not a static system but an historically changing one, whose main trajectory I would trace as follows.

 

I have said that the partition of the peninsula began to harden and take on a ‘systemic’ nature only after a calamitous, internecine war. From 1953 to 1961, however, it is yet in its formative stage; only Park Chung-hee’s long dictatorship (1961-79) and Chun Doo-hwan’s ‘Fifth Republic’ (1980-87) represent the period of relative stability—I say ‘relative’ because even during this period of iron rule there were no lack of challenges. The June Democratic Movement of 1987 begins to destabilize the division system by removing one of its pillars, namely, dictatorship in the Southern half, soon followed by another blow, this time the geopolitical one of the collapse of the East-West Cold War regime that had done so much to sustain the status quo in Korea. This period of instability enters a new phase with the first inter-Korean summit of 2000 and the June 15 Joint Declaration, as these have opened the prospect for a peaceful and gradual transition to a post-division age. The Lee Myung-bak regime opens yet another phase by severely endangering that prospect, but hardly an entirely new period of complete reversal—a point to which I shall return.

 

 

3. What difference does the concept make?

 

When we view the divided Korean states not as two discrete components of the world-system but as a pair of rather anomalous members operating within the parameters of a unique peninsular sub-system, the opposition between the two states, or peoples, or ideologies, ceases to represent the essential problem for its population. Because both Koreas belong to a common system or regime, the ruling circles on either side share a certain congruence of interest despite their vociferous (and often genuinely felt) enmity toward each other. Oppression by these colluding vested interests, though to a different degree and in a different manner on either side, constitutes the essential problem for ordinary people throughout the peninsula, and the more apparent conflict between the states or ideologies serves largely to mask it. For the sake of adequate perception and effective practical action, then, we need to make the crucial shift from a state- or ideology-oriented approach to a people-oriented one entailed by the concept of the division system.

 

The concept enables another equally crucial shift, namely, the turn to a global, rather than a merely national, perspective. Because the division system is understood as a local manifestation of the world-system, its overcoming does not denote the nationalistic goal of unification as such, but the building of a more democratic, egalitarian and environment-friendly society than is possible on the peninsula under the division system. The goal of transforming the latter thus becomes inseparable from various local tasks of reform vital to such a future society and, at the same time, merges with the larger, longer-term objective of building a new global civilization.

 

But how do these conceptual shifts apply to the immediate goal, for instance, of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula? First of all, I should emphasize that North Korea’s nuclear tests signify a division system in severe crisis rather than its reversion to the earlier stage of relatively stable confrontation, when Pyongyang felt no need for a nuclear bomb. The tests represent a desperate attempt on the part of its leadership to break the status quo that has become unbearable, without, however, endangering their regime. Thus, it would be fairly safe to predict that dismantling its nuclear program would not be possible unless some formula is found to meet these apparently contradictory aims.

 

In the ‘people-oriented’ discourse of the division system, too, the status quo rates as something to be surmounted; and merits of preserving the Pyongyang regime would be weighed principally in terms of the needs of the peninsula’s population. Here we must face the sober (and sobering) fact that, for all its misdeeds, the regime’s sudden demise will work havoc on the lives of people in North and South and threaten the security and prosperity of the whole Northeast Asian region as well. Nor can Korea’s division be abolished by either military conquest (Vietnam), unilateral annexation (Germany), or collusion between the two governments (Yemen, but even there ultimately unsustainable).

 

The only alternative, it seems to me, is the one actually agreed upon by top leaders of two Koreas in June 2000, namely, to pursue a path of gradual, step-by-step reunification passing through an intermediate stage of confederation (or ‘low-level federation’, which is Pyongyang’s preferred formula). This necessarily involves a guarantee of the continuation of a separate North Korean state at least for a certain period, but on condition that it collaborates with its confederal Southern counterpart in moving toward a more peaceful and integrated peninsula. Naturally this process will need full support from the international community, particularly the immediately concerned powers, but the groundwork for such support, too, already began to be laid in the September 19 Joint Communiqué of the Beijiing Six-party Talks in 2005.

 

The international community, especially the United States and other participants of the Six-party Talks, have a responsibility to join in this grand endeavor precisely because the division system signifies a sub-unit of the world system, a local manifestation of its workings that have so far been largely oppressive and unjust insofar as the majority of Korean people are concerned. The North Korean nuclear problem will not be finally solved until such strategic shift is agreed to. Simply offering military security and piecemeal ‘compensations’ have not worked so far, and is not likely to work in future.

 

Responsibility for improving the human rights situation in North Korea is likewise a complex affair. In principle the primary responsibility for the plight, particularly the political repression, of any people must rest with the government in question, and this goes for North Korea, too. But if the two Koreas belong to a single division system, responsibility for human rights in North Korea must also be shared—to varying degrees, of course—by all the major actors of this system, certainly by many South Koreans and the U.S. government for helping to degrade the lives of people in the North by their threats or malign neglect and by policies of sanctions and embargos. Here again we need a nuanced sense of what responsibility to attribute to the division system as such and what to particular actors within it, and a deliberate and sagacious role-sharing in the choice of means among all those genuinely wishing to improve the situation.

 

 

4. Some regional implications and agendas

 

South Korea like other countries has multiple, partially overlapping regional identities. Let me start by enumerating some of the regions it belongs to.

 

If the two Koreas were ‘normal’ members of the inter-state system, the Korean peninsula itself would constitute the most immediately relevant region for them. But since a single division system encompasses the peninsula, I would classify the agenda of managing the problems of the system and eventually overcoming the system as primarily a peninsular, rather than a regional, agenda.

 

But of course it is a regional, even a global agenda as well. The most visible illustration may be found in the Six-party Talks, whose immediate task is to address North Korea’s nuclear program, but in tandem with the larger goal of building a peace structure in Northeast Asia. These two goals are mutually dependent: just as no secure peace is possible without resolving the nuclear issue, neither can the latter be fully resolved without a grand concerted effort toward regional cooperation and common prosperity.

 

The Six-party Talks also reminds us that Northeast Asia isn’t quite the northern cartographical half of East Asia. While the latter includes Southeast Asia and thus covers a larger area than the former, with security concerns foregrounded in Northeast Asia the non-East Asian countries U.S. and Russia often assume full membership in regional frameworks as in the Beijiing talks. And then, East Asia in another usage functions as a sort of civilizational category, referring to an area that shares the legacies of the former China-centered world, to the exclusion of parts of Southeast Asia.

 

However each term is defined, South Korea, at least, belongs squarely to both Northeast Asia and East Asia. But the glaring problem is that North Korea, which does the same, remains excluded from most regional frameworks. ‘ASEAN+3’, for instance, offers the more promising of venues for regional consultations among those currently available, but it will not be able to realize its full potential until the Six-party Talks or some comparable initiative has produced tangible results and enabled its evolution into ASEAN+4 (i.e., including DPRK). The same goes for the East Asian Summit (EAS), let alone such more comprehensive and looser structures as APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) or ASEM (the Asia-Europe Meeting).

 

EAS by now has extended beyond East Asia and even beyond the pale of the Asian Continent with the inclusion in 2005 of India, Australia and New Zealand. The expansion seems to be of ambiguous nature: on one hand, a healthy recognition of the importance for regional cooperation of these new members, yet on the other hand, possibly an attempt by Japan (and the U.S. behind it) to limit the efficacy of ASEAN+3 and China’s increasing influence within it.

 

So far as Australia is concerned, however, I find a great significance in its embracing (at least partially) an ‘East Asian’ identity. For Australia, about which in my immense ignorance I must speak under correction, has a rare strategic position in promoting East Asian regional cooperation, with its special historical, cultural ties with the West, and its substantial Asian trade and its geographical location in the ‘Greater Eastern Asia’, so to speak.

 

Australia is also one of a limited number of states participating in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) to enjoy diplomatic relations with both Koreas. ARF, though far from a coherent organization, happens to be the only wide-ranging regional framework in which DPRK (since 2000, together with Mongolia and Papua-New Guinea, joining the ten ASEAN countries and ten others including South Korea) is a formal member. Seeing how the division of the Korean peninsula constitutes a serious bottleneck in the path toward a Northeast Asian, and by extension a wider East Asian, regional framework, Australia can promote its own regional agendas and help itself by helping the Korean people to overcome their division system.

 

Let me close by noting that in saying ‘Australia’ I have not only its government but also its citizens in mind. For I find the distinguishing feature of Korea’s reunification effort in the space that a gradual, step-by-step process opens up for civic participation. I assure you that South Korea’s civil society at any rate has the will and increasingly the capacity to make use of whatever space that is available; and I feel certain that, as the process deepens, ordinary people of North Korea too will join in, though in ways not easy to foresee at this time.

 

Thank you.