Koreans Not All for One

SEOUL -- Kim In Woo, an aspiring architect with spiky hair and a Levi’s sweatshirt, has never met a North Korean and never hopes to meet one. In fact, the 20-year-old South Korean student would be perfectly happy to keep the North Koreans on their side of the DMZ forever.

Flipping distractedly through a Cosmopolitan magazine on a table in an Internet cafe where he and a friend are waiting for a computer to open up, Kim shrugs his shoulders at the idea of reuniting North and South. “We are enjoying an affluent life right now,” he says. “Why bother?”

Such talk would have been tantamount to heresy a few years ago. Since the peninsula was divided after World War II and convulsed by the Korean War, it has been conventional wisdom that Koreans are a people yearning to be made whole again, a people who spend their waking hours pining for their missing countrymen.

“Unification is our desire. Even in our dreams, it is our desire,” go the lyrics to a song that is as familiar to millions of South Korean schoolchildren as the national anthem.

But South Korea’s younger generations are increasingly indifferent or downright hostile to the idea of reunification. With no personal experience of the 1950-53 Korean War and little, if any, contact with North Koreans, many would just as soon ignore the very existence of the impoverished communist nation hovering to the north.

Recent events, such as the groundbreaking on a railroad connecting the Koreas and a parade of North Korean delegations heading south for officially sanctioned sporting and cultural exchanges, have been greeted with emotions ranging from trepidation to apathy.

When the North and South Korean national soccer teams faced off last month in a friendly match at Seoul’s World Cup stadium, tickets went begging. The lack of interest led the city to scrap plans to broadcast the game on outdoor screens, as it had when millions of fans took to the streets three months earlier for the World Cup.

“People my age are not that interested in North Korea. Why create problems for ourselves?” said Park Ji Sung, a 26-year-old fashion-industry worker who was drinking a cup of Starbucks coffee recently in a busy Seoul shopping district.

When pollsters query South Koreans about reunification, a large majority of respondents--about 70%--say they are in favor. For many people, to answer otherwise would be akin to saying they are opposed to peace or democracy. But when they are asked--as the newspaper Joong Ang Ilbo did in a poll published last month--if they would be willing to pay higher taxes for reunification, the number skids down to 53%. And even most of those who favor reunification say it shouldn’t happen for another 20 years or so.

“I’m shocked by the rapidity with which we have abandoned unification although we go on with the rhetoric. We’ve become a bunch of hypocrites,” said Kim Kyung Won, a former South Korean ambassador to the U.S. and president of the Social Science Institute in Seoul. “There is a lot of romantic nonsense about wanting unification, but when you come right down to it, people don’t want to pay the bills. And if they want unification, they want it in the future--the more distant, the better.”

Political analysts here trace the decline of reunification fervor to the 1997 financial crisis that sent unemployment skyrocketing and forced South Korea to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

South Koreans were also sobered by watching the costly German reunification process. Until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the very concept of a reunified Korea remained abstract. Afterward, Koreans realized that it really could happen--but that it would not be free.

Jo Dong Ho, an economist who heads the North Korea section at the Korea Development Institute, a government-funded think tank, said the German experience prompted many economists, including at his own institute, to churn out reports estimating the cost of reunifying the Koreas.

They ranged from $300 billion to $1.8 trillion, averaging around $600 billion over a 10-year period, according to Jo.

“It was a stupid exercise,” Jo said. “They were only looking at the costs, not taking into account the benefits tangible and intangible. We will have a bigger market. We will have economies of scale. We will have better access to Russia and to China.”

Along with the sticker shock, Jo said, South Korean television aired a number of programs featuring East and West Germans complaining about their resulting economy.

“People got scared. They thought, ‘Better to be in South Korea with my own friends and leave the North Koreans up there with their friends,’ ” Jo said.

Perhaps the most important person to be chastened by the German experience was Kim Dae Jung, a dissident at the time of the Berlin Wall’s collapse and now South Korea’s president. Widely regarded as one of the most ardent advocates of reunification, Kim now says it should not take place for several decades. In the interim, he says, all efforts should be made to engage North Korea in dialogue and improve its standard of living.

Some political analysts believe that Kim’s “sunshine policy”--for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize--has subtly shifted in emphasis: Instead of a steppingstone to reunification, they say, it has become a way of propping up the North to prevent a Germany-like scenario in which its communist system collapses and the country is incorporated into the capitalist South.

The South Korean government last year gave North Korea $70.5 million worth of aid, and private parties in South Korea donated $65 million, according to figures published by the South Korean Unification Ministry.

“The government of South Korea seems to take it as a matter of theology that North Korea should not collapse. One obvious reason is the financial implications.... It would be much tidier if the North would clean up its act before unification,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “That’s why North Korea is being kept alive today by ... the kindness of strangers. It has no visible means of self-support.”

Speaking informally with foreign journalists at a recent lunch, President Kim said his thoughts about reunification haven’t changed. But he said three trips to Germany in the mid-1990s confirmed his belief that an incremental approach is best.

“After the Berlin Wall fell, there remained a wall in the head. I saw the huge differences that existed between east and west Germany and the conflicts between the people,” he said. “I became more convinced that my gradual method of starting with exchanges and cooperation was the right approach.”

When asked by one journalist if it was possible that North Korea would collapse much like East Germany did, Kim’s press secretary cut off the president before he could answer, switching deftly to another topic. Economic advisors in the South Korean government also refuse to answer questions about the impact of North Korea failing, and say it will never happen.

“The South Koreans are not really afraid of the North Koreans attacking. What they worry about is North Korea collapsing and [the South] being saddled with all these refugees,” said a Western diplomat with long experience in South Korea. “It is understood that the South Koreans don’t need 23 million cold, hungry, angry North Koreans dumped on their laps. They want to keep the economic miracle rolling on.”

In North Korea, the official government line is that Koreans are one people who should be reunified as soon as possible. North Koreans who have defected to the South often remark how surprised they were to learn that South Koreans are less keen on the idea.

“This is a fiercely competitive society. People are too busy to have time to think about North Korea,” said Kim Eun Chul, 32, a defector now working for an on-line shopping company in Seoul.

“In the past I vaguely thought we must unite, but now I think each country should remain separate, just like now,” said Jeon Hae Suk, 27, an office worker. “We were apart for so long that I think problems would arise were we to mix.”

Still, many South Koreans continue to speak out passionately in favor of reunification and attend rallies. Those most adamant are often left-leaning North Korea sympathizers or, conversely, hard-line conservatives who believe that the sooner North Korea collapses the better. Mainstream opinion is generally supportive of Kim Dae Jung’s sunshine policy of engagement with North Korea. None of the three major candidates vying to succeed Kim in the December election is opposed to reunifying, but none is pushing to do it quickly.

As in any society as politically polarized as South Korea, generalizing is risky. But polls suggest that older people, especially those with relatives in North Korea, are more strongly in favor of reunification, while younger people have less interest in it.

A survey by the Korea Education Development Institute in 2000 showed that 75% of middle and high school students opposed reunification.

“The younger people are, the more they are indifferent. To them, the way Korea is divided now seems normal. It is all they know. They don’t have relatives they know in the North. They are living well and they know North Koreans are very poor,” said Paek Seung, 20, a business student in Seoul who often finds herself alone among friends in supporting reunification. “I hear this all the time. I feel helpless to convince people otherwise.”