Chapter Nine
Approaching Unification
It all started with cows.
In June 1998, Hyundai conglomerate founder Chŏng Chu-yŏng led a convoy of trucks across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. He was going home. The eighty-two-year-old Chŏng, a native of T’ongch’ŏn in northern Korea, brought with him five hundred head of cattle. He was repaying a long-held debt. The eldest of eight children, Chŏng left grade school to support his family. After working on a railroad and at construction sites as a young man, Chŏng was ready to leave home and seek his fortune elsewhere. He decided to walk to the capital city of Seoul a hundred miles (160 km) away. In order to make his way, Chŏng stole one cow from his father to support his needs. Soon after he reached his destination, the peninsula was divided and he could never return home. In Seoul, Chŏng worked at a rice mill, and in 1940 he opened an auto repair shop. When U.S. occupation forces came into Korea after World War II, Chŏng won construction contracts from the United States and from the Korean government, including the building of a 250-mile (400-km) highway between Seoul and Pusan, under budget and ahead of schedule, which the World Bank had previously declared an unfeasible project. Chŏng went on to build the world’s largest shipyard at Ulsan, benefited from U.S. contracts in Vietnam and the Middle East, and grew Hyundai to seventy-nine companies totaling $80 billion in revenues. Now, as one of the richest men in Asia, the Hyundai magnate sought to settle his debt with his homeland. As the first civilian to traverse the DMZ, Chŏng opened a new era in inter-Korean relations.
These cows marked the start of an era of so-called Sunshine Policy on the Korean Peninsula. The brainchild of former political dissident and Nobel laureate Kim Dae-jung, the policy, in its purest form, lasted about one decade, from about 1998 to 2008, during the governments of Kim and Roh Moo-hyun. It earned its moniker, “Sunshine Policy,” from Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the Sun. The Wind and the Sun debated which was more powerful and agreed to test their capabilities by stripping a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind went first and blew as hard and as cold as it could on the old man, but this only caused the man to pull his coat tighter around his collar. The Sun went next and shone light and warmth on the old man. After a moment, the man relaxed and removed his clothes to bathe in a stream. The fable’s message of persuasion over force was a metaphor for introducing to the South Korean public and the world a new way of dealing with the DPRK. It focused on engagement and cooperation, rather than containment, as the way to reduce Pyongyang’s insecurity, to create moderation in its behavior, and, ultimately, to facilitate reform in the DPRK and the conditions for inter-Korean reconciliation. “The challenge,” as then–foreign minister Hong Sun-yŏng put it at the time, “is to construct policies that protect the national security of the South against the North’s belligerence while simultaneously coaxing the North to expand engagement with the outside world. This would expose the closed North Korean society to international ‘sunshine’ and promote internal reform.”1
A great deal of controversy surrounds the Sunshine Policy. At one point, it captured the world’s imagination and garnered praise as a way to end the Cold War on the peninsula. However, after North Korea’s provocations and nuclear tests, it was harshly criticized by some as a terribly misdirected policy.2 In retrospect, the policy had three traits. First, it was supposed to be transformational, not transactional. What this meant was that the Sunshine Policy sought to rewrite the entire terms of inter-Korean relations. It would be implemented not through a tit-for-tat negotiation (i.e., “you give me this, and I will give you that”), but through a wholesale change in South Korean policies toward the North that would create the conditions over time to change North Korean behavior permanently. In the interim, informed by this long-term objective and not by short-term expedience, Seoul would countenance a lack of reciprocity by the North, since decades of mistrust and animosity do not melt away immediately.
Second, the Sunshine Policy was informed by a spirit of magnanimity, not maliciousness. It was based in a deeply held view that North Korea was not an inherently “evil” country (after all, its people were still Korean), but that its errant path was an accident of history. Great power politics led to Korea’s unfortunate division in 1945, even though Korea was not a combatant in the Pacific War, and this division ultimately created the North Korea we see today. North Korea’s flaws, in this sense, represented the ultimate manifestation of Korea’s victimization as the “shrimp caught between whales.”
Finally, the Sunshine Policy was about generosity, not pedantry. It reflected a confidence that South Korea had won the postwar and Cold War competition that had started between the two regimes since 1948. Favoring Seoul, the economic gaps were now insurmountable, the quality of life was hardly comparable, and the futures so widely disparate between the brightness of the South and the grim future of the North. The well-known satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula at night, where the southern half is awash in lights, compared with the utter darkness in the north, constituted the ultimate illustration of this outcome. And for Sunshine Policy advocates, this picture meant that it was time for the winner to give rather than withhold.
And give they did. By one ROK government estimate, the DPRK benefited from a total of $3 billion from the South during the decade of the Sunshine Policy.3 This far surpassed what the North is estimated to have received from China during the same period ($1.9 billion). The highlight of the Sunshine Policy was the June 2000 summit between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang. But this event did not come without a price. The ROK put up about $500 million in order to secure the meeting. While this, ostensibly, was for the purchase of “business licenses” to start economic cooperation projects in the North, this fig leaf of a justification fell away when the DPRK—at the time, inexplicably—at the last minute delayed the scheduled summit meeting by one day, because the money had not yet been transferred to their bank accounts. This revelation, first broken as a news story by American journalist Don Kirk in January 2003, caused an uproar in South Korea and prompted claims that Kim “bought” a Nobel Prize.4 A subsequent investigation by state prosecutors fingered, as the fall guy, Hyundai’s Chŏng Mong-hŏn, the fifth son of Chŏng Chu-yŏng. Chŏng was indicted in June 2003 for passing nearly $200 million of a state bank loan directly to the North. In August 2003, he committed suicide by jumping off the twelfth floor of the Hyundai building in downtown Seoul.
SUNSHINE TROPHIES
The majority of the Sunshine Policy money went to two endeavors that became the signature projects, the Kaesŏng Industrial Complex and the Hyundai Kumgang (Korean for “Diamond”) Mountain tourism project. The Kaesŏng Industrial Complex is a joint North-South industrial park located on the outskirts of Kaesŏng, a city of about 300,000 near the border between the two Koreas (just a ten-minute drive from the DMZ). Over one hundred South Korean firms operate there, employing 47,000 North Korean workers in a marriage of ROK capital and technology and inexpensive North Korean labor. The complex produces mostly light-manufactured consumer goods, such as running shoes, watches, chopstick sets, and the like. The South Korean government and businesses from the South have invested about $26.9 million, but about $26 million of this has gone to the government directly rather than in form of wages to workers. North Korea selects all of the workers, about three-quarters of which are young women from the city of Kaesŏng, and their interaction with South Korean managers and foremen is kept to a bare minimum. After the steep “social insurance” and “cultural” fees, the workers take home about $45 a month to work forty-eight hours per week, and get three square meals a day, which, in the North, is a reward in itself. Since Kaesŏng is so well quarantined off from the rest of the North Korean economy, the leaders in Pyongyang are in favor of the project, because it allows them to think like capitalists at their convenience. The latest demand from Pyongyang (after detaining an ROK executive for over four months at Kaesŏng) is for a new fee structure in which they will charge land-use fees as well as hike monthly wages from the current $75 to about $300, effectively undermining the cost advantage of being in Kaesŏng.5 In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Bush’s envoy for North Korean human rights, Jay Lefkowitz, also raised questions about human rights issues associated with the complex, citing as highly problematic the fact that workers make a mere $2 per day.6 Others have followed his lead, highlighting the fact that North Korean labor laws don’t protect workers at Kaesŏng from exploitation, discrimination, sexual harassment, and child labor, and don’t allow them to strike or bargain collectively.7
In fostering his Sunshine Policy, Kim Dae-jung relied primarily on two groups: the big Korean chaebŏls (conglomerates, such as Hyundai, Samsung, and LG), who would provide the money, and South Korean NGOs, who would provide the people to transform relations. The Kumgang Mountain tourism project is as clear a representation of this as any. The Kumgang Mountain tourism project is a special administrative region in North Korea that allowed visitors to take in the sights and scenery of Kumgang Mountain; perhaps the most famous peak on the Korean Peninsula and the subject of Korean art and poetry dating back thousands of years. Visits, it was thought at the time, would allow South Korean people to feel romantic about North Korea and about the Sunshine Policy without having to deal with political realities of the regime in the North. It would also give the leaders in Pyongyang a stake in inter-Korean reconciliation while ameliorating their fears of threats from the South.
Hyundai’s Chŏng Chu-yŏng was instrumental in the establishment of Kumgang. In early 1989, Chŏng made a trip to the North and requested that Kim Il-sung allow South Korea to develop the area. As Chŏng saw it, the tourist venture would help heal the wounds of scores of South Koreans who, like himself, had been separated from their homes in the North, and would also earn the North Koreans a great deal of foreign currency. In 1991, Kim Il-sung met with Reverend Mun Sŏn-myŏng, the founder of the Unification Church, the worldwide religious movement best known for holding “mass weddings” in which he and his wife simultaneously marry thousands of couples. Also a native of the North, Mun made his own proposal to Kim: to turn Kumgang into a vacation resort. It just so happened, though, that Mun’s request was at a time when remissions from Japan to North Korea were falling, and, feeling somewhat strapped for cash, Kim Il-sung said yes. From here, a feasibility study was undertaken and plans drawn up. But not all were in favor of the endeavor. The South Korean government was initially reluctant to let tourists go up north, just as the North Korean military were not necessarily happy about having South Korean tourists in their country. Furthermore, the Unification Church wasn’t able to bankroll the project. And so, when Kim Dae-jung, with his Sunshine Policy, came to power, the moment was ripe for Hyundai to seize. And as an initial gesture of good faith, Chŏng delivered the five hundred cows to North Korea through the DMZ.
In November of 1998, the first group of 900 South Korean tourists made their way up to Kumgang. By the end of 2001, 400,000 South Koreans had made the trip. Initially, it was very popular, with many elderly southerners venturing to the complex to walk, once again, on their native soil from which they had so long been separated. It also became a popular honeymoon destination, with couples claiming that rather than Saipan or Guam, Kumgang was “a more meaningful way” to start their marriage.8 And yet, it was still not financially viable. Hyundai was contractually obligated to field a minimum number of tourists, and many months it had to fork over substantial amounts of money. To try and attract more tourists and cut expenses, a road was built in 2002 so that tourists could take a bus across rather than the ferry boats they had taken thus far. The two sides also agreed to set up a rail link to the west, connecting with Seoul and easing travel to the resort. (In the end, the two sides never managed to link their railways.) The number of tourists peaked at 250,000 in the year 2000, and until its suspension in July 2008, 1.9 million South Koreans made the trip.9 In 2002, the resort hosted the first-ever inter-Korean reunion of families separated by the war: tearful events that reunited long-lost brothers, sisters, cousins, and even lovers after fifty long years. But the project as a whole remained a financial black hole for Hyundai, which, in the end, invested $600 million in Kumgang Mountain and ran it at an operating loss of about $300 million. The resort was constantly underfunded and in need of government subsidies to keep its doors open.
In total, Hyundai’s eight projects in North Korea, including Kaesŏng and Kumgang, have amounted to $1.5 billion in investment. And while the South Korean government and business have swallowed these losses, the North has ended up profiting handsomely. Kaesŏng is thought to annually generate up to $34 million in hard currency for the regime, and Kumgang has cost the South Korean government $76 million in aid alone since its inception.10 Add these to the $150 million or so that Hyundai-Asan transferred to the North Korean government on a yearly basis, and the numbers begin to take on some significance.11 In the end, though, it was politics rather than economics that brought the Kumgang tourism project screeching to a halt. In July of 2008, Pak Wang-ja, the fifty-three-year-old South Korean wife of a retired police officer and mother of one, had gotten up early during her stay in Kumgang to watch the sunrise from the beach. As she made her way to her chosen vantage point, she reportedly stumbled into a restricted area of the site. Witnesses claim that they then heard two shots ring out within a ten-second interval, one of which struck Park in the torso and the other in the buttocks, killing her in short order. According to an eyewitness, three soldiers then ran out of the woods nearby and kicked her body to check if she was dead.12 This led to a political crisis, and the Lee Myung-bak government ordered the tours suspended until further notice. And not a South Korean soul has set their foot in the tourism complex since.
Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued the Sunshine Policy under a different name (the Peace and Prosperity Policy). Roh maintained Kim’s policy of engagement even in the face of unprecedented North Korean provocations, like the 2006 nuclear test, because he believed that the belligerence was driven by core insecurities and paranoia on the part of the DPRK regime. The hallmark of the Roh policy was the October 2–4, 2007, summit, also in Pyongyang. The DPRK received several major infrastructure projects in the North, including ROK financial commitments to enlarge the Kaesŏng Industrial Complex beyond the pilot phase, to build a railway connecting Kaesŏng to Sinŭiju up the length of the northern portion of the peninsula, to build a highway connecting Kaesŏng and Pyongyang, and to build a port complex at Namp’o. These financial commitments were made literally weeks before the end of Roh’s presidency, and while some critics saw it as an attempt by the progressive government (and the DPRK, for that matter) to lock in the next ROK president, I believe Roh’s intentions were genuine, not political. He believed in the Sunshine Policy as the best way to deal with North Korea, and believed the policy was in South Korean national interests. During his presidential campaign, he insisted that “for the existence and prosperity of the nation, the Sunshine Policy is absolutely necessary, and thus must be carried on.”13 The projects he committed to, therefore, would have invested far beyond the $3 billion already given to the North.
AVOIDING UNIFICATION
The Sunshine Policy gained the support of many Koreans and the world community. The June 2000 summit featured an embrace by the two leaders, which was, undeniably, a cathartic event for all Koreans. The summit produced a joint declaration that, among other things, said the two sides agreed “to resolve the question of reunification independently and through the joint efforts of the Korean people, who are the masters of the country.”14 The words in this document were not nearly as important as the transformative effect the summit had. Young South Koreans described Kim Jong-il as “cute” and “cuddly,” rather than as an evil dictator. The day after the summit, the numbers of those who feared a North Korean invasion dropped from 40 percent to 10 percent. South Korean soldiers asked their superiors if the summit meant that North Korea was no longer their enemy. According to South Korean polling data from the time, the summit brought Kim Jong-il’s popularity ratings from 15.1 percent up to 50.2 percent, and positive images of North Korea went from 11.4 percent to 46.5 percent.15 The event captured the front page of international newspapers, and Kim Dae-jung was widely praised for a transformative policy that reduced tensions in the region and raised the prospects of a new era of peace and cooperation in East Asia.16
But there was a practical yet silent motivator for the Sunshine Policy. That was the fear of unification. By the time Kim Dae-jung came into office in 1998, the economic gaps between the DPRK and the ROK were inordinately wide, exponentially more so than the gaps between the two Germanies at unification. In 1989, when the unification of East and West Germany took place, the West’s economy was about ten times the size of the East’s—a substantial gap to be filled to bring the two economies together. In Korea, the comparable gap was by a factor of thirty-two.17 The DPRK had just emerged from the worst food crisis in the history of the country, which left as many as one million dead. Refugees were trickling into China by the thousands in search of food, and Beijing grew worried this would turn into a flood. There was widespread concern that the regime might finally be at the end of its rope, eight years after economic abandonment by its Cold War patrons. Adding to the problem, the ROK was in the midst of the worst financial crisis in its postwar history. The country suffered a severe liquidity crisis as credit dried up after a string of debt defaults nearly bankrupted South Korea. In the first few days of the crisis, the Seoul Stock Exchange tanked, the value of the Korean won plummeted, and within months, Moody’s dropped the ROK’s long-term credit rating six whole positions (on a twenty-one-position scale).18 The last thing that the government in Seoul could contemplate was the enormous financial task of unification. The dreaded outcome was what was known as a “hard landing,” a sudden collapse of the DPRK, which would be thrust upon the South Koreans to clean up and which would cost on the order of hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars.19
The unwritten purpose of the Sunshine Policy was, therefore, to avoid a hard landing. It was to push off unification for as long as needed, possibly for generations. The policy assumed the DPRK recognized that the key to survival was reform, and that the Sunshine Policy would nurture and encourage positive change in this direction. Eventually, engagement would facilitate a “soft landing,” a slow and controlled process of integrating the two Koreas, but on a timeline that extended decades or even a half-century, which rendered unification irrelevant for any near-term government. In this sense, the DPRK and the ROK agreed on one clear aspect of the Sunshine Policy: to avoid unification. Kim Dae-jung clearly stated so in his inaugural address in 1998, when he said his goal was peaceful coexistence with the North and explicitly pronounced that “the longer-term goal of unification can wait.” In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Kim reiterated this point, saying, “Unification, I believe, can wait until such a time when both sides feel comfortable enough in becoming one again, no matter how long it takes.”20 Thus, while the Sunshine Policy was lauded by the Nobel committee in Norway, it was creating a decade-long narrative for a generation of younger Koreans that unification was normatively a bad thing—too expensive, too dangerous, and too difficult. Therefore, avoid it.
UNIFICATION DISCOURSES
This was not always the case, of course. For decades, the dominant narrative on both sides of the Korean Peninsula was about achieving unification as the overarching goal of the Korean people. During the Cold War, this could only be achieved through the victory of one side over the other. For North Koreans, the discourse centered on liberating the Korean people from U.S. military occupation and from exploitation by a South Korean government that was a “puppet” of American imperialism. The phrase that came to epitomize the view in the South was “pukch’in t’ongil,” or “songgong t’ongil,” which meant “march north” or unification by force. This discourse privileged unification as the immediate goal, but with obvious differences in terms of who should predominate. Compromise was alien to the relationship. On the contrary, “pukch’in t’ongil” was the ultimate zero-sum game between the two Koreas. One side’s gain, no matter how minor, was the other side’s loss. The relationship was one of mutual hostility, with shootings and firefights a nearly daily occurrence along the DMZ in the 1960s and 1970s, killing in aggregate over nine hundred soldiers and civilians. The only channel of official dialogue was through the military armistice commission (MAC). The purpose of the MAC was purely armistice maintenance and armistice violations, and there was no channel for peace talks or inter-Korean engagement or reconciliation. Any other channel, if it existed, was deemed not only illegitimate but illegal.
The two Koreas were locked into what scholar Samuel S. Kim once famously referred to as the “politics of competitive delegitimation.”21 This mentality was evident in things like the Syngman Rhee government-initiated version of the “Hallstein Doctrine” (this policy lasted from about 1953 to 1973), which stipulated that the ROK refused to have diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the rival North Korean regime. So, when countries like Republic of Congo sought in 1963 to recognize both Koreas as legitimate, Seoul ejected the Congolese embassy and declared its diplomatic personnel persona non grata. This zero-sum mentality was also manifest in South Korea’s infamous national security law. It was illegal to have contact with North Koreans, to listen to any North Korean radio or television broadcasts, or to possess any materials or information about the North. Indeed, any mention of engagement with the North was deemed treasonous, and grounds for torture and imprisonment. Likewise, it was evident in the two countries’ competition within the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1975, the DPRK applied and became a member of the fairly peripheral and loosely organized movement. Not to be outdone, however, South Korea felt compelled to apply, even though there was a better-than-even chance it would be rejected from membership because of the stationing of U.S. troops on its soil. (It was, in fact, denied membership.) Even when it came to U.N. membership, the DPRK would not accept a dual-membership formula that would bring both countries into the international organization, because it could not stand that the ROK would be accorded legitimacy in the United Nations, even if it meant the DPRK would be accorded the same legitimacy as an independent nation-state. For Pyongyang, the only formula that was acceptable was a “one-Korea” formula, which meant only a unified Korea under its rule. For this reason, the two Koreas never achieved permanent membership from 1948 until September 17, 1990.
Even the periods of brief thaw in inter-Korean relations were not the result of an early belief in the Sunshine Policy but derived from cold balance of power calculations. The DPRK, for example, made numerous proposals for improved relations with the South. These included a 1950 peace conference proposal (ironically, on the eve of the Korean War), a 1957 five-point peace treaty proposal, a 1960 unification proposal, and a 1974 letter to the U.S. Congress proposing bilateral negotiations with the United States to replace the armistice with a peace treaty. All of these proposed the establishment of a Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryŏ, identified as one nation (presumably, with the DPRK in charge) but operating with two systems. Each of these proposals, however, was designed to achieve one objective, which was the removal of U.S. forces from the ROK, and indeed this troop withdrawal constituted the precondition for every proposal.
The most significant interaction between the two Koreas during the Cold War period were a series of secret negotiations between Kim Il-sung’s brother Kim Yŏng-ju and the chief of South Korean intelligence, Yi Hu-rak, which led to the July 1972 North-South Joint Communiqué. Both Koreas were somewhat paranoid about the emerging détente among their great power patrons, commencing with Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972. The North hinted at an interest in starting talks, and the South responded by proposing Red Cross talks, which were essentially covert official talks, because both Red Cross delegations were stocked with as many intelligence officials as there were Good Samaritans. Three months of Red Cross talks started in August 1971 and went nowhere until the decision was made to bump the dialogue to a higher and more secret level. Chŏng Hong-jin, a Red Cross delegate from the South who was also deputy director of international affairs at the KCIA, went as scheduled to a Red Cross meeting on neutral territory at Panmunjom in March 1972, and then exited the back door of the building on the North Korean side and was whisked undercover to Pyongyang for direct talks. This paved the way for the visit of KCIA director Yi Hu-rak to make a series of covert return trips.
Staying secretly in North Korea, alone, at the height of the Cold War was not a comforting experience for South Korea’s chief spy. According to a wonderful account of the events by Donald Oberdorfer, Yi was awakened late on his second night in Pyongyang and rushed into a sedan. Not told where he was being taken by the two burly officials in the front seat, Yi sat helplessly as the car roared down dark and empty rainswept streets. Yi was certain he was being taken someplace to be tortured. Instead, he was taken to a villa to meet the Great Leader himself, Kim Il-sung.22 The July 4 communiqué, signed by Yi Hu-rak and by Kim Il-sung’s brother Kim Yŏng-ju enunciated three principles of agreement between the two Koreas. One, unification must be achieved through the independent efforts of the Koreans and without external interference. Two, unification must be achieved peacefully and not by force. Three, the two governments committed to seeking national unity as a homogeneous people that transcends politics and ideology. While the surprise agreement was widely heralded as an important breakthrough for peace on the peninsula, the motivations for Seoul and Pyongyang were less benign. Each suffered intense fears of abandonment as their superpower patrons—the United States, China, and the USSR—entered into a period of détente with one another, and therefore the two Koreas sought a temporary reprieve in their otherwise contentious bilateral relations.
Moreover, the zero-sum nature of inter-Korean relations became evident shortly thereafter. Kim Il-sung saw the 1972 communiqué as a victory in luring the South Koreans away from the United States with the first clause that committed both countries to disavowing external interference in peninsular matters. North Korean ambassador to East Germany, Yi Chang-su, reported to his interlocutors in Berlin that the Park regime had “capitulated to this peace offensive,” and that this tactical move by the North was undercutting the alliance between Seoul and Washington.23 Pyongyang also saw the communiqué as a coup because the appearance of a thaw in Korea caused several countries in the Western bloc to establish relations with the North, thereby undermining the South’s Hallstein Doctrine. Of course, this was not the way Park Chung-hee spun the agreement. The ROK president saw it as a clever way to “tether” the DPRK threat.24 He said that putting a hand on the enemy’s back is the best way to feel when he will attack you.
It was no surprise, therefore, that the two sides could barely agree in subsequent working-level meetings on an agenda for discussion, let alone reach any agreements. And only two years after the North-South Joint Communiqué, the North tried to assassinate the South Korean president, killing the country’s beloved first lady Yuk Yŏng-su with a bullet through her head.
About one decade later, another set of exchanges were prompted by heavy rains and landslides in South Korea, which left 190 people dead and over 200,000 homeless. Seeing even a natural calamity in the South as a zero-sum win for itself, Pyongyang offered ostentatiously to send relief supplies as a propaganda ploy. President Chun Doo-hwan unexpectedly accepted the assistance. The Red Cross used this as an opportunity to restart North-South talks, which spanned from September 1984 to September 1985, and these led to some small-scale family reunions. While this period is also seen as a thaw in relations, it, too, was deeply embedded in competition. Chun initiated secret talks with the North alongside the Red Cross negotiations. These were facilitated by a Korean-American professor, Channing Liem. Liem was formerly the South Korean delegate (observer) to the United Nations, who left his position after Park Chung-hee’s 1961 military coup to become a professor at State University of New York at New Paltz, where he was quite critical publicly of Park’s martial law. (Chun came to power in a military coup in the aftermath of Park’s assassination in 1979.) Employed as Chun’s unofficial emissary, Professor Liem met with Kim Il-sung. During this meeting, Kim raised the idea of a summit. Talks then moved into the KCIA channel, where some forty-two secret meetings took place between the two sides since May 1985, including a secret trip to Seoul by former North Korean foreign minister Ho Tam, but these meetings fell apart when the DPRK demanded the end to the annual U.S.-ROK “Team Spirit” military exercises. Moreover, when the DPRK’s flood-relief contributions arrived, the ROK ridiculed the poor quality of the clothing, rice, and building supplies sent by the North. It afforded South Koreans unique insight at the time into how much better off they were doing than their counterparts, and thus proved embarrassing to Pyongyang.
With the end of the Cold War, the discourse on unification then evolved to one dominated by a fixation on absorption—that is, for the North, avoiding it, and for the South, achieving it. Beginning from the late 1980s, the success of South Korea’s Nordpolitik created a new, unwelcome geostrategic situation for the North. While the Roh Tae-woo government talked about northern diplomacy as a way to break down Cold War barriers and economically engage with Communist bloc neighbors on the peninsula, regardless of conflicting political ideologies, it was still informed by a healthy dose of zero-sum thinking. By normalizing relations with Pyongyang’s two key allies, China and the USSR, Seoul achieved the ultimate humiliation and isolation of its rival, especially since neither the United States nor Japan recognized the North. Seoul’s northern diplomacy created real fears of encirclement in Pyongyang, which facilitated two of the most substantive agreements in North-South relations to date: the Basic Agreement on Reconciliation (1992) and the Joint Denuclearization Declaration (1992). The first document put forward a comprehensive framework for ending the state of hostilities and fostering political reconciliation. It established the North-South liaison office at Panmunjom to deal with reconciliation issues and the North-South Joint Military Commission to implement and ensure nonaggression. The agreement contained clauses for mutual recognition, cooperation, consultation, and dialogue, and against internal interference, defamation, sabotage, and aggression.25 The second document committed the two countries to refraining from manufacturing, producing, receiving, possessing, storing, deploying, testing, or using nuclear weapons. It also committed the two to refraining from harboring facilities that reprocessed plutonium or enriched uranium.26
While idealists on both sides may have wanted these major agreements on political reconciliation and denuclearization to catapult Korea into the post–Cold War era, as in Europe, neither government had the will to follow through. For Pyongyang, the fears of encirclement as a result of Seoul’s northern diplomacy were real, after the USSR’s normalization with the ROK in 1990 and Moscow’s unceremonious end to patron aid and trade with the DPRK. In this regard, it saw the Basic Agreement as a way to reestablish itself on an equal footing with Seoul and cement peaceful coexistence as the status quo. Moreover, the agreement provided for a necessary semblance of a reduction in tensions while Pyongyang covertly accelerated its efforts to build a clandestine nuclear weapons program. For the South, the agreement was the beginning of a strategy to absorb the North. The ROK was experiencing a decade of double-digit economic growth, while the North’s economy was shrinking and its people were starving. It had just won world acclaim for hosting the largest summer Olympics in recent history. The Cold War competition between the two systems on the peninsula was over. Seoul emerged victorious and it was brimming with confidence. Kim Young-sam, the next president of South Korea, spoke openly about unification by absorption as the next logical step after the Basic Agreement. With German unification happening before their eyes, South Koreans sensed that their time was inevitable and soon.
South Koreans’ euphoria over unification was short-lived. It was replaced by what one could call the “German trickle-down” effect. We hosted an event in 1997 at Georgetown University, bringing together officials from South Korea’s unification ministry and German officials who had worked on unification. During the two days, the German officials explained many of the problems they encountered, ranging from currency union to unemployment. The South Korean officials were furiously scribbling down everything that was said, much more so than what would be necessary for a reporting cable. When we asked during the coffee break what they found so important, they excitedly said that the discussion was extremely interesting to them. My first thought was, “You mean, you have not studied all of these problems already?” We left with an uncomfortable feeling that the ROK government had not yet fully absorbed the lessons of German unification. Koreans subsequently became acutely aware of the difficulties and complexities of uniting the two countries economically, politically, and socially. They learned quickly that these difficulties would be exponentially more acute given the even wider socioeconomic gaps between the two Koreas compared with that of the two Germanies.
What’s critically important when considering the integration of two economies is the size of the population of the integrating economy and its per capita GDP. Certainly there are a great many other important factors, such as its technological base, natural resource endowment, and economic infrastructure. But when dealing with an economy as underdeveloped as that of the North, when it comes down to it, what policymakers will want to know immediately is how many new mouths there will be to feed, and how much they will need to be fed. In the case of Germany, when the reunification of East and West took place in 1989, the West had a population about four times that of the East, the former sitting at 61.7 million and the latter at 16.4 million. Its gap in average individual wealth, while great, wasn’t drastic, with the average Westerner making just under $21,000 per year and the average Easterner, just over $7,000.27 Also, from the early 1970s, the two Germanies engaged in fairly extensive trade, with West Germany being the East’s second-greatest trade partner (8 percent of total), behind the Soviet Union.28 And through the 1970s and 1980s, virtually millions of East and West German individuals would travel back and forth across the border, with tens of thousands even being allowed to resettle from East to West.29 Among those who weren’t able to travel, a significant number were at least able to watch West German television programs, establishing a familiarity and comfort with daily life across the border.30 Thus, with a quarter of the population, a third of its average wealth, and extensive trade, travel, and social ties, the impact of unification, while significant, was not immediately detrimental to the prosperous West. Yet the view from the Blue House in the early Sunshine years was entirely different. In the year 2000, North Korea’s 22.9 million people were nearly half of the South’s 47 million, with South Koreans, on average, being fifteen times more prosperous than their northern counterparts.31 Further, since 1953, North Korea had been wholly isolated from the South, with no travel, trade, or social contact. Studies emerged that estimated the cost of unification to be extremely expensive. While the estimated figures ran the gamut, none of them looked particularly welcoming to the South Korean leaders. For instance, in 1992, a special report of the Economist magazine (the Economist Intelligence Unit) estimated it would cost $1.09 trillion to bring North Korea’s per capita GDP to within 70 percent of that of the South. The following year, the Korean Development Institute (KDI) estimated a figure of $658.2 billion. In 1997, Marcus Noland cited a figure of up to $3.17 trillion to get the North Koreans to within 60 percent of their southern counterparts.32 In spite of the great variation in estimates, there is no doubt that these types of figures were enough to keep the South Korean leadership up at night. More recent studies are similarly varied. A 2005 RAND Corporation study cites a range of $50 billion to $667 billion over five years.33 In 2009, Credit Suisse estimated unification costs to amount to $1.5 trillion. And a 2010 expert survey by the Federation of Korean Industries came up with a cost of at least $3 trillion.34
Just as these lessons started to sink in, Korea was hit by the liquidity crisis of 1997–1998. These resource constraints bounded the view of unification. What had once been seen as possible was now seen as impossible. This did not mean that Koreans disavowed unification. But it did mean that they would like to push unification as far into the future as possible. By the end of Kim Young-sam’s term in office, he talked more about promoting a “soft landing” in North Korea than his earlier calls for absorption. Kim Dae-jung, his successor, was able to frame his ideological inclinations on North Korea as a practical necessity when he advocated the Sunshine Policy as the right solution for dealing with the North in the midst of a financial crisis. Arguably, the Sunshine Policy would have engendered much more opposition if there had not been a financial meltdown, but opponents were cowed into submission given the country’s crisis mentality at the time. Precisely because unification was considered too expensive and difficult, the best course of action was to seek engagement with the North, try to help reform their system, reduce the South’s security burden, and eventually affect a “soft landing.”
As discussed in the economics chapter, North Korea countered the Sunshine Policy with its own Moonshine Policy, exploiting the South’s generosity while offering little in return. Pyongyang engaged in economic cooperation projects, like the Kumgang tourism complex and Kaesŏng industrial site, but only because these self-contained projects offered the regime hard currency without requiring a significant opening up of the system to outside influence. Moonshine particularly exploited the Sunshine Policy’s implicit assumption that the nuclear programs of the North were not the main problem. The Sunshine Policy generally downplayed the nuclear threat, seeing it largely as symptomatic of a deeper problem the regime had with insecurity and lack of reform. The Sunshine Policy assumed that once this insecurity was rendered moot and reform took hold, the nuclear problem would take care of itself. The Moonshine Policy’s solution to this was to have its cake and eat it, too: Pyongyang would accept all that the Sunshine Policy provided to encourage reform, and would shape it in a way that would be minimally invasive to the regime. At the same time, it would continue to pursue nuclear weapons. Who benefited more from this period? At the end of the Moonshine period, the North had more nuclear weapons than before, avoided a near-collapse of the regime, and received $3 billion in cash from the South. At the end of the Sunshine period, the South had given political legitimacy to a progressive view on North Korea (in the past, such views were considered not only illegitmate but treasonous by law), had created two economic cooperation projects with the North, and had earned one South Korean president a Nobel Peace Prize. You can do the math.
TODAY’S UNIFICATION?
The Blue House, the South Korean presidential mansion, sits on a beautiful, lush, green compound at the base of a mountain. It was walled off from sight during the authoritarian days, but the streets leading to the facility were opened to the public with democratization in 1987. Unlike the White House, which actually feels quite small when you enter it, the Blue House entrance foyer opens to a high-ceilinged, grand staircase that leads up to sitting rooms, where the ROK president entertains delegations. In April 2011, our party walked through the spacious entrance and took an immediate right down a long red-carpeted corridor to a receiving room. Obama’s former national security adviser and former Marine Corps commandant General James Jones, Clinton’s former deputy secretary of defense and CSIS president John Hamre, Bush’s former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, Georgetown professor Mike Green, and myself chitchatted with the Blue House staff around a circular tea table until President Lee arrived. He invited us to join him and led us halfway down the same corridor to a European-style dining room, plushly appointed in white and gold, to sit for a more detailed discussion.
Over the course of more than one hour, we listened to the ROK president talk about his view of inter-Korean relations. He explained that his team had a different view than the Sunshine Policy. For the Lee government, engagement was right only if it was reciprocated by the North. This was a notable departure from the previous decade’s policies of unconditional engagement. The ROK president pointed to the two main proposals his administration had put forward for inter-Korean cooperation. The first was the “Denuclearization and Opening 3,000 (DNO 3,000)” proposal, in which Lee promised to raise North Korean income per capita to $3,000 per year within ten years if the North agreed to abandon nuclear weapons and open to the world. The other was the “Grand Bargain” proposal announced at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September 2009. Lee promised to make massive investments in North Korean infrastructure, to construct a peace regime on the peninsula, and to end the era of North-South strife if the DPRK committed to denuclearization and addressed human rights concerns. Prior to entering politics, Lee was a legend at Hyundai, starting out as office staff and eventually becoming head of Hyundai construction around the world. Trained as a businessman, Lee believed that if he was to invest South Korean taxpayer money into engagement, then there should be a measurable return on that investment. He said inter-Korean engagement would not be measured simply by the creation of a dialogue process. The only thing that Lee promised to give unconditionally to the North was humanitarian assistance for children and pregnant women. All other assistance would be pegged to human rights (the return of ROK prisoners of war, abductees, and captured fishermen) and to denuclearization. Lee rightly believed that the South should not be a supplicant in this relationship, as it appeared to have been during the previous decade of the Sunshine Policy, when the ROK was always looking to please the North.
I thought to myself that Lee’s remark about changing the overall tone of relations was evident early on in the administration. In March 2008, in one of his first statements about inter-Korean relations, the ROK first unification minister, Kim Ha-jung, delineated the principle that the speed and scope of inter-Korean economic cooperation would be decided by progress on the denuclearization issue. The new policy essentially said that inter-Korean meetings for meetings’ sake were not enough; there had to be results. This constituted the mirror image of the Sunshine Policy’s proclamation that “The [Sunshine] policy’s value, however, lies not only in the end result, but also in the process.”35 Similarly, when the Lee government was faced with the North’s perennial annual food and fertilizer shortfall, and was asked what his government would do, he responded with a very simple principle that spoke a great deal to how much change was apparent. Lee agreed to make some assistance available (fifty thousand tons of corn) on the condition that the DPRK request the assistance. If Pyongyang did not request it, then Seoul would not give. This might seem like pedantry, but it sent a clear message to the North that the days of Seoul knocking on the door, offering, unsolicited, to give the North food and fertilizer, were now gone. On the occasion of Kim Dae-jung’s funeral in August 2009, the DPRK requested to send a high-level delegation to pay respects to the architect of the Sunshine Policy. After some internal debate, Seoul agreed to invite the delegation, composed of six officials, led by Workers’ Party Central Committee secretary Kim Ki-nam and intelligence chief Kim Yang-gŏn.36 But after this delegation arrived in Seoul, it presumed that it would be met by the ROK president and by the unification minister, and treated with VIP status, as had been the case during the Sunshine Policy. The DPRK group was shown every diplomatic courtesy, but they were also told that the ROK president had many visiting former heads of state attending the funeral and that, protocol-wise, the DPRK delegation (which did not have a former head of state) would not be first on the list. This came as a bit of a shock to North Koreans, who had grown accustomed to being treated as South Korea’s most important guest, but was a harbinger of the new policy.
Because of these changes in tone and atmospherics, many painted Lee’s administration as packed with ideological hard-liners who are dead-set against any dialogue with the North. This is incorrect. Although there were undeniably hard-liners in the government, Lee and his national security team’s stinginess on aid and his overall tough position today had less to do with ideology and more to do with the series of provocative actions taken by the North in 2009 and 2010. Ballistic missiles tests, nuclear tests, a ship-sinking, and artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island would have made even the most liberal government in Seoul take a tough stance. On the contrary, Lee was a pragmatist who sought to change the terms of the relationship and remove South Korea from the position of supplicant. Ultimately, the key determinant of Seoul’s policy toward Pyongyang during Lee’s administration was the degree of reciprocity that the North demonstrated. If the DPRK showed even a little interest in cooperating on denuclearization or on human rights, the Lee government reciprocated with a more conciliatory tone.
Regarding a summit, President Lee said that he was not averse to having one with the North Korean leader, but that he operated on the principle that he was not going to pay the North for a meeting. In this sense, he borrowed from the Koizumi template when the Japanese premier refused to pay anything up front for a meeting with Kim, on the principle that a summit would be in both countries’ interests, not just one. Lee’s government held such a view, and indeed, two weeks after our meeting at the Blue House, President Lee met with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and said he would invite the DPRK leader to the 2012 Nuclear Summit in Seoul, but only if he undertook denuclearization. (The North Koreans subsequently rejected the invitation.) The irony of this is that while Lee’s standoffish attitude created considerable tension with the North and caused Pyongyang to eviscerate the South Korean leader in its propaganda, Lee Myung-bak arguably was the ROK president that Kim most wanted to establish contact with. Those who traveled with former president Roh Moo-hyun to North Korea in 2007 recalled that when they first met Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader politely greeted the ROK president but spent most of his time chatting with and trying to charm the delegation of business leaders that Roh brought with him. In this sense, Pyongyang has little use for South Korean politicians, and really wants to utilize them as a conduit to South Korean CEOs, because they are the ones who would know how to make money for the regime. Hyundai executives, moreover, garner special treatment in the North, compared with other South Korean chaebŏls, or conglomerates. In a country where your hometown, or “kohyang” is all-important, Hyundai’s founder Chŏng Chu-yŏng was originally from the North Korean town of T’ongch’ŏn. Hyundai also built both of the trophy enterprises of the Sunshine Policy–era, the Kaesŏng and Kumgang Mountain projects. At Kumgang, Hyundai built the port facility for the tourism complex in an astonishing six months, which won Kim Jong-il’s trust. Rumor has it that Hyundai executives were one of the few people who have ever changed Kim Jong-il’s mind on anything. The North Korean leader met extensively with the company to try to convince them to invest in Sinŭiju in the northwest of North Korea. Hyundai subsequently did a feasibility study that did not offer a positive assessment. After reading the study, Kim Jong-il was persuaded that the project was not commercially viable and recommended instead the idea of developing Kaesŏng. He reportedly complained that his own economic officials did not have as acute an understanding of business and economics. One would imagine that a summit with South Korea’s first “CEO president,” and former head of Hyundai construction, was something the North truly desired despite its rhetoric to the contrary.
At the end of our meeting with President Lee in the Blue House, he went on to say that until that point, the DPRK had rebuffed all of his proposals for cooperation. He cited the shooting of a South Korean tourist in the back at Kumgang Mountain, the torpedoing of the Cheonan, and the firing of artillery on a South Korean island. He believed these attacks were out of desperation, given the regime’s terrible state. He believed the DPRK was on its last legs, and was losing legitimacy among its people. He talked about widespread discontent stemming from the increasing trickle of information that is seeping into the country. The more the North Korean people learned, the more the regime’s leadership had no future. Time was on our side, he said, and little should be done to divert the regime from its ultimate fate. Though he did not say it openly, it was clear to all of us that the ROK president had an elegant but simple algorithm in his mind for solving the problem of North Korean nuclear weapons, human rights abuses, and conventional military provocations against the South: unification.
“THE END OF History” is a phrase made famous by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War. Then at Office of Policy Planning at the State Department, Fukuyama used this to describe the historical progression of mankind throughout history between the forces of tyranny and freedom.37 This battle between Communism and democracy culminated in the twentieth century, with the collapse of the Soviet Union signaling the end of history’s progression as mankind would evolve to liberal democracy as the final form of government.
On the Korean Peninsula, I think we are gradually approaching the end of history.38 What is interesting today is that not only in the Blue House, but across the conference circuit in five-star hotels in Asia as well as in the corridors of power in government capitals, the once-taboo topic of unification is now discussed more openly than ever in the past decade of the Sunshine Policy.
Why the change? It is certainly not because the United States has a newfound lust for collapsing the regime in North Korea. The Obama administration spurned the perceived hard-line motives of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration. Even though Obama’s policies—demanding irreversible denuclearization; applying financial sanctions; carrying out military exercises; and demanding a North Korean return to, and reaffirmation of, the denuclearization commitments of the Six-Party Talks—looked hardly different from those of the Bush administration, Obama’s inclinations were clearly toward dialogue and extending an open hand to Pyongyang, when the time was right.
No, the primary reason for the increased talk about unification has to do with three developments, all related to North Korea more than to South Korea or the United States. The first is the death of Kim Jong-il. In spite of periodic reports from the Chinese that Kim’s health was a nonissue and that he was fully recovered from his 2008 stroke, the massive heart attack that killed him in December 2011 came as a shock to the world. Everyone inside and outside of Pyongyang knew the Dear Leader was ailing, but most gave him at least another five years. The attempted succession to Kim’s youngest son amounts to a dynastic power transition that is questionable even in the best of times, and certainly far more shaky than the one that put Kim in power in 1994. While Kim Jong-il had over twenty years to prepare to take over for Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un has had barely twenty months. Junior Kim has had virtually no previous experience running the country. He has no preestablished relationships with the generals in the military as his father had cultivated just after Kim Il-sung’s death. The regents who surround the young Kim include his aunt (Kim Jong-il’s younger sister). She is the only remaining blood relative directly linked to Kim Jong-il. Rumors have it that she, too, is quite ill. Her death would leave Kim Jong-un’s uncle as the only other key elder, who has developed his own loyalties and power base within the North Korean system. We have seen such an arrangement at other times in Korean dynastic history. The outcome: the uncle tried to murder the son.
Second, there is more talk about Korean unification now than in the past because of a growing realization that some twenty-five years of U.S. negotiation with North Korea has not led to successful denuclearization. In the past, many would have contested this proposition, blaming Washington for the negotiation impasses as much as Pyongyang. But after Obama’s outstretched hand was slapped away by the North’s ballistic missile test in April 2009, and its second nuclear test the following month, very few blame the United States anymore. In short, there is a growing realization that true, verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula can only come with unification. This is not an argument against continuing diplomacy, as U.S. governments have done; it is merely a realization that diplomacy’s aims, while remaining maximalist (full denuclearization), will really amount to a crisis-containment exercise that temporarily impedes their bomb-producing capabilities until the regime collapses of its own weight and the real denuclearization process begins.
The third reason there is more talk about unification today is because the new and future leadership in North Korea does not appear capable of regime-saving reform. The massive Workers’ Party rallies in North Korea in 2009 provided the world’s first real glimpse of Kim Jong-il’s youngest son, the not-yet-thirty-year-old Kim Jong-un, who was first anointed the named successor to his father through his early promotions to the rank of a four-star general in the army and second-in-command of the party. As I noted earlier, in a country of hyper-isolation and xenophobia, the so-called Great Successor does have a relatively cosmopolitan upbringing. He was educated for a period of his life in Western Europe, and speaks some German and some English. DPRK propaganda praises him as a “brilliant genius,” wise beyond his years, with “high-tech twenty-first-century knowledge.”
But even if Kim Jong-un is enlightened, the likelihood of real reform is small, because of the ideology that accompanies his rise. Despotic regimes like North Korea cannot survive without ideology to justify their iron grip. And the new ideology, neojuche revivalism, constitutes a return to a conservative and hard-line juche (self-reliance) ideology of the 1950s and 1960s—harkening back to a day when the North was doing well relative to the now-richer and democratic South. Neojuche revivalism is laced with sŏngun (military-first) ideology, which features the North’s emergence as a nuclear weapons state (Kim Jong-il’s one accomplishment during his rule). This revivalist ideology leaves very little room for opening, because it blames the past decade of poor performance on “ideological pollution” stemming from experiments with reform. True reform in a post–Kim Jong-il era is impossible, because it would require the courage to loosen the very political instruments of control that allow the regime its iron grip on the people. This was perhaps the most important lesson of the end of the Cold War and the Arab Spring for North Korea. Even if Kim Jong-un were an enlightened leader who has the courage to attempt such reform, he would be dealing with a generation of institutions and people that are the most isolated in North Korean history. The generals, party officials, and bureaucrats of the Cold War era were far more worldly than those of the post–Cold War era. Kim Il-sung’s generation was able to travel freely to Eastern bloc countries. Kim used to vacation with Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu. By contrast, Kim Jong-il’s generation saw the Chinese Communist Party almost lose power in Tiananmen Square, and more recently watched Middle East dictators get removed, one by one, from office during the Arab Spring. Moreover, an incredibly successful South Korea sits right on the border, giving the North little room to make further mistakes. The generation of leadership the young son inherits sees nothing comforting about the outside world. Neojuche revivalism is untenable in the long term. Mass mobilization of workers without reform can only work with massive inputs of food, fuel, and equipment, which the Chinese will be increasingly relied upon to provide. Beijing seems content to backstop its Communist brethren for the time being, especially after Kim Jong-il’s death. But donor fatigue will eventually set in. Beijing officials confide that the regime would last only through one calendar year without the Chinese lifeline.
This is why people are talking about unification today. If this sounds too pessimistic, just imagine the following scenario:
Korea is free of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and chemical stockpiles as its development-oriented leadership realizes that this is the price for integration into the Asian and world economic network.
$6 billion light-water reactors jointly provided by the United States, Japan, Russia, ROK, and China are operating in northern Korea.
Washington and Tokyo have official representation in Pyongyang with foreign service officers busily at work granting travel visas and escorting visiting congressional and Diet delegations.
Seoul is providing conventional electricity across the DMZ to northern power grids.
Russia is running gas lines to Japan and South Korea through northern Korea.
The Four Powers have signed a peace treaty ending the Korean War.
Japan is providing $10 billion in assistance for major public works projects in northern Korea, supported by international financial institutions.
Today, does anyone think that this scenario is possible without significant regime-change and/or unification?
A NEW PARADIGM?
What does this new and final phase of unification discourse amount to? I am not certain. It is evolving, and has not yet been fully enunciated by any politician or scholar. Kathy Stephens, the very popular former U.S. ambassador in Korea, once described it as a “mood” at a roundtable with CSIS experts. A former political officer at the embassy in Seoul in the 1980s, and before that a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea, Stephens said that the one thing that felt different during her ambassadorship was a newfound willingness to talk about unification when, for the past decade, people just could not be bothered with it. Some critics opine that the discussion of unification is simply a manifestation of conservative government’s rule in South Korea after a decade of Sunshine Policy. But I believe it is more than that, and embraces several elements.
First, this new discourse is based in pragmatism more than ideology. As stated above, the embracing of unification does not stem from a desire to collapse the DPRK regime, but stems from a rational realization that after decades of unsuccessful negotiations, the only true solution to tangible problems like nuclear weapons, human rights abuses, and the conventional military threat is through unification. Moreover, there are pragmatic concerns about the potential instability of the leadership situation in Pyongyang. South Koreans have no control over developments inside the North; and yet they know Kim Jong-il’s death in 2011 makes the future uncertain. So there is a sense of urgency that had not existed before Kim’s death. The Sunshine Policy’s challenge was to prevent regime collapse stemming from starvation and economic decay. Money and food can help in that regard. But the challenge today is that money and food could not keep Kim Jong-il from suffering a second fatal stroke. Thus, there emerges a pragmatic understanding that Koreans must be prepared. ROK president Lee crossed this threshold in 2010, when he declared in a Korean Independence Day speech (August 15) that Koreans must start thinking about a unification tax in order to be financially prepared for the inevitable day.
Second, this new discourse is not a return to the Cold War–era pukch’in t’ongil policies of zero-sum competition, but is more internationalist, transparent, and open in its nature. In the past, Korean views of unification were very parochial. Koreans never wanted to discuss unification with any other parties for fear of external intervention by other powers in determining Korea’s fate. Koreans may have been locked in a death struggle with one another, but it was their death struggle, and no one else’s. When I left the White House, I participated, in early 2008, in several closed roundtable discussions with current and former government officials and academics from the ROK, the United States, and Japan. The topic was potential instability in the North and how the three democratic allies should respond. Japanese foreign ministry officials, in particular, were concerned that there was not enough discussion and planning among the allies, let alone with China. I was astounded at how South Korean interlocutors, many of them old friends and American-trained Ph.D.s with very cosmopolitan worldviews, completely shut down when they sensed that others wanted to talk about Korean unification. They were visibly uncomfortable with the discussion. It was a Korean issue, after all, and others should not be treading on this sacred ground. But after Kim’s stroke in August 2008, a dramatic change took place. The new view understood that while unification is for Korea, there is a pragmatic acknowledgment that Koreans will indeed need help from the outside world to effect a successful transition. Moreover, it was to Korea’s benefit to begin dialogue as early as possible in order to “socialize” the globe into thinking about unification the way South Koreans thought about unification. Discussions on unification thus became much more open and transparent, without the insecurities and “mind your own business” attitudes of the past.
What do we mean by “socialize” the globe about Korean unification? ROK leaders want to discuss unification with the world, because they want the U.N. Security Council, the European Union, and other members of the international community to support Seoul’s actions and vision when the fateful day comes. In this regard, reaching out to the world now to talk about unification constitutes an effort to explain South Korean preferences as the lead player in any multinational effort. This is a far cry from previous Korean attitudes about unification. This socialization process also extends to Korea’s twentysomethings and younger. These young, smart, and affluent Koreans grew up under a decade of Sunshine Policy and therefore hold negative (if any) views on unification, which they have been taught for years to believe was too dangerous, dirty, and difficult. Now these youths are being encouraged to think, prepare, and talk about unification in a way that was discouraged during the Sunshine Policy years.
One of the more interesting ways in which this socialization process is taking place is through a series of international conferences hosted in Korea since 2010. International conferences in Seoul, a global city, are about a dime a dozen, but the recent ones have a clear albeit subtle agenda. Using money from the unification ministry that used to be spent on economic handouts to the North under the Sunshine Policy, these conferences have unification as their primary theme. Prominent individuals from around the world are invited to opine on the topic, including luminaries like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. These individuals invariably talk about how the division of Korea is a historical aberration and that a free and unified Korea is inevitable and is something that the world will support. Sitting in the audience of these Davos-style meetings are the requisite press and corporate leaders, but a special effort is made by the organizers to reach out to hundreds of Korean university students and high school students, who apply online to be selected to attend. These become some of the hottest tickets in town (what student would not want to hear Colin Powell?), and the students listen to how the world supports Korean unification and sees it as a normative good. Moreover, they hear this positive message from foreigners who are not encumbered by the domestic baggage associated with the liberal-conservative divide in Korea whenever a Korean politician or scholar calls for unification. At one recent conference I participated in at the Shilla Hotel in downtown Seoul, the organizers created a large white board, called “Unification Board.” On this board, participating students were invited to write their thoughts about unification in multicolored sticky notes. I skipped an afternoon session of the conference to read the hundreds of scribblings on the colorful board. Many stated that they had never really thought about unification, or that they had only viewed unification as a “bad” thing that their generation should not be encumbered with. But with this conference, they felt as though their eyes were opened to the possibility that unification would benefit Korea, not hinder it, and that it was their generation’s responsibility to think about how to prepare for it. This was fascinating to me. A process of socialization was taking place, in which old views were being uprooted and replaced by new ones.
Third, the new unification discourse is about ideas more than it is about power. In other words, the Cold War–era’s pukch’in t’ongil policies were about relative power and the achievement of unification through only one path: the victory of one side over the other by force. But the new view says that what will eventually bring unification is not the use of force but the power and prevalence of ideas. These ideas relate to freedom, democracy, individual opportunity, and entitlement to human dignity. Once these notions start to seep into North Korean society, the game is basically over. This was the view that resonated greatly with President Lee in our discussions. Never once did he mention military force or sanctions as a way to collapse the regime; instead, the most potent challenge to the regime’s legitimacy came from the trickle of information getting into the North from the outside. There were many transmission belts for this information. Economic migrants who work in China illegally and return to the North bring news about the outside. Radio broadcastings by Voice of America and Radio Free Asia get picked up near the Chinese border. South Korean movies, videos, and music seep into the country on thumbdrives and through a proliferation of smuggled DVDs, CDs, and videocassette tapes. NGOs float balloons into the North with packages of Chinese renminbi, food, and newspaper stories about the Arab Spring. President Lee espoused a confidence that slowly North Koreans were learning about the outside world, which would awaken them to the illegitimacy of their leadership.
Finally, the new unification discourse is about opportunity more than it is about threats. The previous view saw unification as too expensive and dangerous. Unification was, therefore, a threat of several orders. Closest to home, it posed a threat to the lifestyles of affluent Koreans. In Japan and China, it posed the threat of tens of thousands of refugees flooding their borders. In the United States, it posed the threat of loose nuclear weapons and potential conflict with China. This all added up to instability that the region did not need. Most of all, the process of unification had too many uncertainties that made no one comfortable. The adage that the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know” was persuasive to many. The predominant way of thinking was that the late Kim Jong-il and his nukes may have been bad, but a collapsing regime with no clear leadership and loose nuclear weapons would be worse. But the new view expounds unification as perhaps the greatest opportunity in the postwar era—for the world and for Koreans. It argues counter to the narrative that the status quo is satisfactory by drawing attention to the costs that Koreans have had to endure for half a century living under the threat of war on the peninsula, all of which would be recouped.
One aspect of these recouped losses is the famous “Korea discount.” This refers to the amount by which investors, both foreign and domestic, undervalue Korean investments relative to other places to put their money. For example, Moody’s credit rating for Korea is A2, which is below that of the United States and the United Kingdom. The forward price earnings ratio for Korea is 10.8, compared with Japan at 21.6 and the United States at 15.7. These ratings all manifest concerns about both long- and short-term risk associated not just with the economic situation in the South, but the overall political situation.39 Most other investment destinations do not have on their border a technical state of war (i.e., no peace treaty and only a cease-fire armistice), and an unpredictable dictator with nuclear weapons. Attacks like the sinking of the Cheonan and the artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island only reaffirm to investors that political risk exists in Korea that does not exist elsewhere. Foreigners own about 40 percent of the shares on the Korean stock exchange, which can create untoward capital flight at the first sign of belligerence. When North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and ballistic missile in May 2009, the KOSPI dropped 6.3 percent. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, after the sinking of the Cheonan, the won depreciated against the dollar and the KOSPI dropped nearly 6 points, declining by nearly 0.4 percent.40 And the morning after the Yeonpyeong shelling, the Korean stock exchange opened 2.33 percent lower than the previous day’s close (though it quickly bounced back).41 And when the DPRK does provoke, the first reaction by the South Korean government is to project messages of calmness and tension-reduction in order to keep investors from running scared.
The point is that all these costs, borne by the Korean economy for over fifty years, would no longer be relevant, and would become part of the benefits associated with unification. Moreover, the end of the North Korean nuclear and missile threat in the region would signal the end of the Cold War and create confidence in peace dividends for all. Properly prepared for, unification could become the biggest positive-sum game in Asia for all parties. It would reap positive dividends for the entire region. Properly prepared for, unification will also result in net productivity gains higher than the costs associated with knitting the two countries back together. As Nick Eberstadt points out, in the short term, unification could help relieve the South’s labor shortage, reduce pressure on wages and production costs, and enhance Korea’s international competitiveness. In the longer term, the rebuilding of North Korea’s industrial base and infrastructure could bring a sustained construction and technological boom, lower production costs, increase productivity, and allow architects of the new, unified economy the opportunity to lay the foundations for sustained economic growth.42 As he puts it, “[T]he modernization of the North Korean economy could offer enormous spillover benefits for southern Korea. Nor would the benefits be limited to Korean nationals. Success in that venture would strengthen the framework for prosperity throughout Northeast Asia and the Pacific.”43 This is a positive and proactive view of unification, not a defensive and negative view. The result is that unification is now an “in my lifetime” concept. It is no longer something that Koreans should push off for generations and deny Korea its destiny.
“IN MY LIFETIME”
The final discourse on unification that I describe above is not naive. It harbors no false expectations that unification somehow has become an easier task. I believe all Koreans understand how difficult the task will be. It is not likely to come gradually, as Sunshine Policy advocates wish. It is probably more likely to come suddenly. Koreans will meet this challenge. They will have substantial support and help from Korea’s allies, including the United States.
But they will also need a little bit of luck. If one looks at Korean history, luck is not a trait that has been in abundance. Korea has been invaded over nine hundred times in its two-thousand-year history. It was colonized for half a century, and upon liberation from the Japanese occupation was abruptly sliced in half even though it was not an enemy combatant in the war. And yet Korea has done so well. But as Seoul National University professor Paek Chin-hyŏn once said, luck does not come to those who are unprepared. It only comes to those who are ready.
In this sense, I believe that the unification ministry’s efforts to reach out to the world and to the younger generation of Koreans through a series of international conferences and other outreach tactics is an excellent way to prepare. Money that once went fully to the North as part of “engagement” is now being put to use educating younger Koreans and socializing the world to how South Koreans see unification. President Lee’s upholding of a unification tax was a watershed moment, essentially telling his country to be prepared. At CSIS, we have engaged in a project focused on the longer-term task associated with unification—how to reenergize North Korea’s power sector; how to reconstruct its health system; how to manage the social security burden; how to reform education in the North; how to handle transitional justice. These are just a small sampling of the tasks ahead for this Herculean effort.
Finally, I believe that the new discourse on unification extends beyond the peninsula. Increasingly, countries are reaching the conclusion that the only real solution to the Korean question is unification. Japan, for example, long thought to be opposed to unification, views the costs of the status quo, with nuclear tests and ballistic missiles pointed at them from the North, as unacceptably high. Japanese officials, in fact, have been magnanimous in urging their U.S. and South Korean colleagues to have more serious discussions about unification contingencies, not even asking to participate in this, due to ROK sensitivities. While Russia supports North Korea, it also grows increasingly concerned that the nuclear program they once helped to create is now out of control. The United States has already stated in its June 2009 communiqué with the ROK that America aspires to see a Korea free and at peace.44
The one party that may not share this view is China. While, after the first and second nuclear tests, China has seen vigorous internal debate about where its interests lie on the peninsula, Beijing does not appear to be in favor of active discussions with any party about how to prepare for sudden change on the peninsula. Beijing’s actions after the sinking of the Cheonan by a DPRK torpedo fell far short of their aspirations to be a responsible stakeholder and leader in East Asia. Deterring North Korea from undertaking other actions threatening to freedom of navigation in East Asian waters is a public good that China was uniquely positioned to provide. Such actions would have won it great praise and respect in the region. Yet, unfortunately, as outlined in chapter 8, China has clung thus far to an anachronistic view of the peninsula. While others saw Kim’s death in 2011 as a moment for potential change, China saw it as a calling to promote continuity and a secure dynastic succession. One hopes that with greater dialogue among the United States, the ROK, and China, Beijing’s party stalwarts will not view a united Korea as a geostrategic risk.
ROLLING UP THE SLEEVES
When the day comes, the actual tasks of unification will be daunting. Two scenarios are generally put forth for Korean unification: “gradual” and “sudden”—or otherwise referred to as a “soft landing” or “hard landing.” It is difficult to assess which of these two possibilities is more likely. The dire condition of the North Korean economy and its people tends to point to the latter, but this is something that has been predicted, debated, and discussed since at least 1991, so there seems to be no reason to hold our breaths any longer. The preference of South Korea, the United States, and all other regional states would certainly be the former, but this is in no way a foregone conclusion, either. In reality, it will likely fall somewhere in between: not so hard as to cause mass calamity on the peninsula and in the region, but not so soft as to make reunifying Korea and rebuilding the North a simple, straightforward task. But whichever scenario plays out in the end, there are a number of policy priorities, which the government in Seoul will have to tackle, and potential problems, which it and its regional partners will have to face. This is something my USC colleague David Kang and I have recently been looking at with our Korea Project.45 Although much work has been done both in the academic and policy worlds on military contingency planning for a North Korean collapse, far less work has focused on the longer-term but inevitable tasks of knitting the two nations together into one. And so, over the course of three years, we are gathering together North Korea experts and specialists of other regions and other functional areas to try and draw out lessons from other cases that may be applicable to unifying the Korean Peninsula. And thus far, even at this early stage in the project, we have come to some interesting conclusions.
The first and foremost challenge will be taking care of the shorter-term, immediate needs of the North Korean people. The closer to a hard landing the unification scenario is, the more important this particular challenge will prove to be. It has been estimated that the initial emergency relief costs—of food, medical care, daily necessities, and, in some cases, shelter—will at the very least total some $250 million per month and could reach as much as $1.25 billion.46 The effectiveness with which this initial relief effort is carried out is crucial in winning the hearts and minds of what will likely be a shaken and bewildered northern Korean populace. This initial, large-scale humanitarian relief effort, targeted at the neediest—children, pregnant and lactating mothers, the elderly, and orphans—will be an important first step in gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the North Korean people and potentially quelling any large-scale rebellion, unrest, and mass migration. But there are limits to how much attention should be focused on immediate, short-term needs, for every day devoted to, and dollar spent on, providing immediate humanitarian relief is one that is unavailable for longer-term rebuilding of the northern economy and society. The key lesson for the Korean case, therefore, is to try to determine as early as possible in the process how and when to make the transition from handouts to the North Korean people to deeper investment in long-term restructuring. And the challenges there will be no less great than those of the immediate needs on the ground.
One crucial prerequisite for the successful unification of the Korean Peninsula will be the reconstitution of North Korea’s infrastructure. And here, transportation will be a priority. Despite being 20 percent larger,47 North Korea has less than a quarter of the total roadways of South Korea, and when paved roads alone are compared, North Korea actually has less than 1 percent (724 km/450 mi) of the South’s total length (80,642 km/50,100 mi).48 Furthermore, North Korea has just 37 airports with paved runways, as compared to the South’s 72, and has 158 merchant marine vessels whereas South Korea has 819.49 North Korea’s seven major ports—Ch’ŏngjin, Haeju, Hŭngnam, Namp’o, Songrim, Sŏnbong, and Wŏnsan—too, will need refurbishment as they have greatly fallen into disrepair in recent years. One area where the North does have somewhat of a comparative advantage is in rail, with 5,242 kilometers (3,257 mi) of total length compared to 3,381 kilometers (2,100 mi) in the South.50 But the North’s system is highly inefficient, and, for the most part, has not been modernized since the Japanese occupation, and therefore its reconstruction will be another priority. An extensive road and rail network connecting North and South, and the necessary shipping and air infrastructure needed for northern Korea to connect to the global economy, will be critical in the longer-term strength of a unified Korean economy. Another infrastructural priority will be building up North Korea’s pitiful communications network. Its sixty-year, self-imposed isolation has made it truly unmatched in this regard. For instance, in South Korea, when landlines and mobile phones are taken together, there are about 1.4 phones for each of the country’s 48.8 million people. In North Korea, by contrast, there are a mere 1.6 million phones for its population of 24.5 million—that’s just one phone for every fifteen people.51 Furthermore, North Korea’s near-complete absence of the Internet will need to be addressed. As a whole, South Korea currently has nearly 300,000 Internet hosts within its territory. In the North, this number is only 3, and only a handful of people have experience or exposure to the Internet, with the majority being only allowed to access a North Korean “Intranet.” Enabling the northern half of the peninsula to connect to the South and to our increasingly interconnected world will be a key concern in the reconstruction of the country.
A third crucial infrastructural priority will be addressing power and energy. Currently, South Korea’s electricity output capacity (417 billion kilowatt hours [kWh]) is nearly 19 times greater than that of the North (22.5 billion kWh), and this will greatly constrain northern growth. South Korea also consumes 137 times more oil on a daily basis (2.185 million barrels per day [bbl/day]) than does its northern neighbor (16,000 bbl/day), and has 20 times more length in oil and gas pipelines in its territory.52 Substantial resources will, therefore, be needed in building up the North’s infrastructure in the areas of transportation, communication, and energy.
A second area of concern will be population control. With the collapse of the North Korean state and the erosion of strict border control will come tremendous migration pressures. Years ago, it was estimated that the numbers of northerners heading south could number as many as 7 million—nearly one-third of the population.53 Today, 2 million seems a more likely figure, but a substantial one no less. The immense labor redundancy in the North will put pressure on the border southbound, as northerners migrate in search of opportunity. We also shouldn’t discount the destabilizing effects of southerners pressing northward for lands occupied by northerners, based on genealogical claims. Therefore, as unappetizing as it may sound, there would likely have to be immigration-type checkpoints for north-south travel, and perhaps a visa system akin to what Hong Kong and China currently have in place. In the North, the groups hardest hit would likely be the military and the chemical and steel industries. North Korea currently has a standing military of 1.2 million, the fourth-largest in the world.54 With the loss of the military’s raison d’être, its southern rival, much of the northern military will no longer be necessary. And they can’t simply be incorporated into the armed forces of the South, itself numbering 655,000 (for a potential combined total of 1.85 million), for such a large military would hardly be necessary nor sustainable in the absence of a North Korean threat.55 But recent demographic research carried out by Dr. Elizabeth Stephen at Georgetown finds that the ROK military will likely face a shortfall of as much as 200,000 in its projected military force level, due to declining birth rates and the aging South Korean population. Therefore, it is possible that at least some of the North’s military could be incorporated into that of a unified Korean state.
Another reason for hanging on to as much of the North’s military as possible is the lessons learned in Iraq. In 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority in the country instituted a policy of “de-Ba’athification,” an effort to root out the old elements of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party from the Iraqi state. And yet, while it was well-meaning in its intent, the policy dissolved Iraq’s 500,000-member military. And the result was half a million of armed, angry, unemployed, and increasingly disillusioned young Iraqi men, contributing, at least in part, to the multiyear, bloody civil war, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and simmers on to this day. And so, a quick incorporation of North Korea’s military and its likely-to-be-defunct steel and chemical industries into the working force of a unified Korea will be a high priority for stabilization. One possibility for a great many of these individuals may be in the reconstruction of North Korean infrastructure outlined above. History (including that of the United States) has shown that large-scale public works projects are almost a requirement for dealing with unemployment and social security problems in transitional societies, and northern Korea would likely not be an exception to this rule.
But the majority of the northern populace won’t be able to be simply and easily incorporated into a unified Korean society and government. Massive educational reform and retraining will be needed to make this transition happen. In spite of the fact that North Korea currently claims a 99 percent literacy rate and enrollment ratios of 96 percent for primary and secondary schooling (notably, 1 percent greater than the South’s 95), the content and quality of North Korean education is suspect. Comparatively, when East and West Germany reunified, some 80 percent of easterners had to undergo retraining to be able to function competitively in the unified German economy,56 and, as noted earlier, the gaps between East and West were not nearly as great as those of the two Koreas. Much like the education system, the health sector of northern Korea will have to be basically rebuilt from the ground up as well. Past cases of broken state-run health systems in Africa and Asia have shown that key priorities in reconstitution are targeted revitalization of hospitals and clinics, upgrading of skilled health-care professionals, detailed surveys of existing health assets, and costing exercises with concrete targets for training. Therefore, the unified Korean government will, at least for a time, have to deal with a greatly stressed social services system, providing high levels of educational, unemployment, and health-care subsidies, and will have to watch out for potential social disorder such as increased rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling, or crime.
A third potentially problematic issue will be the monetary union of North and South. While unification will almost certainly bring a unified economy monetized by the South Korean won, the unified Korean government will need to avoid some of the dislocating effects of the German experience of monetary union. On unification, Germany decided to convert East German marks at parity with those of the West, producing an artificial increase in East German incomes and leading to high inflation rates and about 40 percent unemployment in the initial transitional stages.57 The monetary union will, therefore, need to occur in a way that accomplishes multiple, competing objectives simultaneously. The exchange rate must be set so as to avoid the inflation and unemployment of the German experience. Yet it must also be close enough to parity to allow northerners sufficient wealth to forestall a massive influx to the south. And yet the northern Korean won must additionally be kept low enough so that northern wages are still competitively low to attract foreign investment and to take advantage of the combination of southern capital and technology and abundant, low-cost northern labor. This will most certainly be a hotly debated issue in a unified Korean government and will require policymakers to strike multiple, simultaneous fine balances between competing interests.
A final set of issues have to do with the social aspects of unifying the Korean Peninsula. One problem is that of transitional justice. How should a unified Korean government deal with the elites from the former North Korean regime? Should there be international tribunals, such as for the former Yugoslavia, or truth and reconciliation commissions, as were undertaken in South Africa at the end of apartheid? And how many of the former ruling elite should be tried and persecuted and how many should be given a “golden parachute”? As controversial as it may seem, past cases show that stabilization requires consensus, and therefore that stakeholders and preexisting elements of the former regime will need to be included. One of the recommendations of the ongoing Korea Project is that transitional justice might be administered to top political figures, but might grant amnesty to lower-level workers in exchange for information. For example, the political head of the nuclear program might be put on trial, but the scientists would be granted immunity in return for information on the location and disposition of the facilities and weapons. Similarly, the political head of the gulags might be tried, but the guards might not, in order to gain maximum information about the situation on the ground. These issues could prove to be explosive in the context of a unified Korea.
A second social hurdle will be the problem of large-scale, inter-Korean, regional political divisions. While most Koreans will welcome the marriage of northern labor and southern capital as beneficial to the united Korean economy as a whole, South Korean labor groups may be less enthusiastic. The downward pressure on South Korean wages that results from the incorporation with the North could cause the working class in South Korea to look north with contempt. The wider southern population, too, while initially welcoming unification, may grow increasingly resentful at the costs they must bear in the form of taxes and social welfare burdens to assimilate the North. And in spite of Korea’s vibrant nationalism, the more educated and affluent southerners could even come to hold superiority complexes over their northern brethren. And the northerners, in turn, may see their southern counterparts as immoral, materialistic, money-crazed, and radically individualistic. The democratically elected politicians who will be tasked with bridging these divisions and catering to their various interests will certainly have their hands full.
The third and perhaps most important and deep-seated social obstacle to overcome has to do with the North Korean people themselves. North Korea is the most isolated country on earth, and has been for most of the past six decades. When unification happens, the northerners will undoubtedly face a period of psychological dislocation as decades of indoctrination and brainwashing under the Great Leader lose all meaning. Many of the 21,000 North Koreans residing in the South are living proof of this. The latest figures show that the middle and high school dropout rates are six times higher among North Koreans than for the South Korean population as a whole. The unemployment rate among North Koreans in the South (14 percent) is four times higher than the South Korean national average, and their monthly wages ($1,134) are less than half of wages among average Seoulites.58 But the unemployment rate only includes those actively seeking employment, and an even more disheartening figure is that just 41.9 percent are “employed.”59 Nearly one-third of North Korean defectors continue to identify themselves as “North Korean” as opposed to “Korean” or “South Korean,” even after years of living in the South. Because of these integration challenges, the suicide rate among North Korean defectors is over 16 percent; nearly three times that of the South Korean populace.60
In the end, the challenges of unification are great. Some would say they are insurmountable. But pessimism of that nature truly underestimates the determination and sheer grit of the Korean people. This is a country that has thrived on adversity and turned challenge into opportunity time and time again. Undeniably, the Koreans will need help with this project from allies like the United States, and from Japan and others, and they will need to approach the unification project with an unswerving determination to succeed. And I believe they will.