Charles W. King

In addition to fewer and fewer South Koreans with direct connections to the North another major reason exists for the low support for reunification among younger South Koreans: the lesson of German reunification. Officially reunified in 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany is a major driver of economic and political progress in the European Union, and possesses increasing influence on the world stage. That Germany was unified at all can be considered a great success. In the early 1990s there was resistance to German reunification in the United Kingdom, France, and Russia for precisely the same reason as why Germany was divided and occupied in 1945. European leaders were concerned that a unified Germany would once again attempt to dominate Europe. It was at American insistence that Germany was reunified and remained a member of N.A.T.O.. Since then Germany has proved to be a staunch proponent of the European project.

The significant success of German reunification—particularly on the international stage—does not mean that it has been without its issues. There remain significant differences between East and West Germany within the unified German state. In 2009 German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that, “The process of German unity has not ended yet.” This is due in large part to the continuing economic discrepancies between the East and West. According to a report by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development in 2015, twenty one of the five hundred richest Germans live in the East, and only one of the twenty most prosperous cities is located in the former East Germany. None of the thirty largest firms on the German stock exchange are located in the East. Productivity, wages and savings are lower and fewer goods from the East are nationally or internationally significant brands. Perhaps most telling: the only two teams in the top tier of German football located in the former East Germany are Hertha BSC Berlin and RB Leipzig. The former was located in West Berlin during division, and the latter was founded in 2009 and was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2016.

While the former East Germany has grown economically since reunification in 1990, it has not yet reached the prosperity of the West. As a consequence of this the federal government of Germany continues to subsidize the east in many ways. Peer Stienbrück, the German Finance Minister from 2005 to 2009, was quoted in a 2011 interview saying, "Over a period of 20 years, German reunification has cost 2 trillion euros, or an average of 100 billion euros a year.” In the past decade is has become clear that this largess has been at the cost of other federal spending; Germany desperately needs infrastructure spending and the German military is woefully under-trained, under-equipped, and under-staffed.

The benefits and costs of German reunification are increasingly clear as we reach its thirtieth anniversary. Historians, economists, social scientists, and political scientists are producing academic studies of the project. These studies and examinations provide a glimpse into what the problems and costs of Korean reunification might look like, and every indication is that Korean reunification would be significantly more complex and costly. For this reason as well, young South Koreans are increasingly skeptical of their elders’ desire for unification with the North. As older South Koreans pass and younger ones gain political power it will become increasingly more difficult to turn armistice into unity.

Charles W. King

The 2018 Olympic Winter Games began last week in PyeongChang, South Korea. In a reprise of a number of international sporting events in the early 2000’s the North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together under a join flag during the opening ceremony and will field a women’s ice hockey team with players from both North and South Korea. This is a significant event in the simmering international crisis that is the Korean Peninsula, but it is hardly the only event of the games with geopolitical importance. Also competing under a flag that is not their own are one hundred and sixty eight “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR). The Russian Olympic Committee has been sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for its extensive state-sponsored doping program that has been revealed in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin, its President, have been vocal in their criticism of the IOC’s ban on the Russian team, to the surprise of no one. What has been surprising is the reaction in South Korea to the joint participation of North and South Korea. Created in 1990 for the Asian Games, the Korean Unification Flag has been used at a number of sporting events since, including 4 Olympic Games. This time it has received significant push back. It is doubly surprising because the pushback has come from younger, liberal voters in South Korea who to date have overwhelmingly supported Moon Jae-In and his administration’s attempts to negotiate with the increasingly belligerent North Korea. Most of the objections appear to be over the joint hockey team according to polls.

The same polls also indicate a common refrain from the rest of the world; that politics shouldn’t influence sport. This inherently conservative argument is typical of when countries or individuals use sporting events to confront others with ideas or positions they disagree with, and it fails to recognize that sport, international competitions in particular, is and always has been inherently political. Various nations including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have used the Olympic Games to showcase the superiority of their political systems. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used an Olympic medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968 to protest for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad. Sport is political because competitors are deemed to be the best in their field, held up by society as pinnacles of human achievement and role models for children to emulate. Society cares what prominent athletes believe, say, and do, and that means that sports always make a political statement. Typically that statement favors the status quo, but when prominent athletes take positions on controversial issues there is outcry not because sport is apolitical but because it is inherently conservative.

If the politics of sports typically favors the status quo then why is the unified Korean Olympic team so controversial in South Korea? The unified team received widespread support in previous iterations. The reason is that the demographics of South Korea are changing. South Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s cannot remember at time without a belligerent North without a nuclear program, the increasingly oppose reunification. Just over a third of South Koreans who claimed to be estranged from family in the North by the Korean ware remain alive, and 60% of them are over the age of 80. South Korea is in the middle of its forty years in the desert. When it comes out the other side in a generation or two there may remain little to no support for reunification. The window for Korean reunification is closing and the North knows it. North Korea’s continued pressure on South Korea and its American and Japanese allies is part of a long standing plan to reunify on the North’s terms while reunification is still possible.

Charles W. King

If the failures of nation building projects in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan must serve as a warning to policy-makers what should they look to for an example of success? The Balkan nations that NATO intervened in the 1990s are a possibility; they are in the process of accession to the European Union and negotiating their own regional free trade agreement as the EU focuses on Brexit and refugee policy. But these nations are not yet finished building the institutions that will carry them forward, as demonstrated by the ongoing corruption probes in a number of Balkan states. The Republic of Korea and the Republic of Taiwan provide better examples of successful nation building projects. When they were founded in the late 1940’s they did not have the institutional foundations that facilitated the reconstruction of West Germany and Japan. Decades later South Korea and Taiwan have joined Germany and Japan on the world stage as major allies of the United States, and significant players in the global economy. They have transitioned from ‘developmental autocracy’, to borrow a phrase from Gregg Brazinsky of George Washington University, to democratic governments.

Two of the key factors in these successes were the development of state institutions and export economies. At their founding neither South Korea nor Taiwan possessed an industrial economy or plentiful natural resources that could fill national coffers and provide an easy road to prosperity. Forced to develop economies from scratch they elected to develop for export rather than to protect against foreign imports. Successful industrial export economies require an educated workforce for the research and development, and the high quality manufacturing that sustains them. It also requires independent courts and rule of law to limit corruption and provide stability and predictability to foreign investors and partners. This strong economic development at a precursor to democratization is a common historical development, not unique to South Korea and Taiwan.

South Korea and Taiwan have also each faced a single existential threat since their founding; North Korea and the People’s Republic of China respectively. This has substantially distorted the shape of their national institutions. Where the leaders of other ‘developmental autocracies’ have used Western liberalism as a post-colonial boogeyman, and made internal dissent the primary focus of their security forces, South Korea and Taiwan could afford to do neither. Confronted with these existential threats, their militaries developed as important and respected institutions of the state rather than as oppressors of the people.

Decades of economic and institution building under ‘developmental autocracy’ provided the foundations that South Korea and Taiwan needed to become prosperous democracies. They also represent two the longest and most expensive and expansive nation building commitments the United States engaged in during the Cold War. They are not the only ‘development autocracies’ the United States supported, but they are the most successful. Policy-makers should take a number of lessons from their examples; the nature of the economic development is important, and integrating the military and other state institutions as a part of the society is essential. Subsiding dictators in exchange for policy or resources will not lead to economic development or democratization but is sometimes necessary. By having a clear conception of their strategic objectives and an understanding of the differences between the successes in South Korea, Taiwan, West Germany, and Japan and failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan policy-makers can better determine what policies to implement and how much support they can commit to.

Further Reading

Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press: 2008)

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).