A Geo-Economic Object or an Object of Geo-Political Absorption? Competing Visions of North Korea in South Korean Politics

Abstract

The so-called Sunshine Policy launched by the liberal regime of South Korea brought about a significant transformation in its visions of North Korea. Through it, North Korea became an “object of development.” This was something different from the previous idea of North Korea as a politico-military target. However, to conservatives, North Korea remains within the politico-military realm as an object of territorial and ideological absorption. As a result, political conflicts in South Korea in the conception of North Korea – between a geo-economic object and an object of geo-political absorption – entail competitive appropriation of the discourse of “China’s colonisation of North Korea” and affect the way North Korean territory is produced.

Key Words:

• South Korea
• North Korea
• geo-economy
• geo-politics
• China-North Korea relations
• neo-liberalisation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Katherine Bennett, Hyeseon Jeong, Will Jones, Joel Wainwright, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms.

Notes

¹ In South Korea, there have been heated debates about the contradictions between Article Three and Article Four which stipulates “The Republic of Korea shall seek unification and shall formulate and carry out a policy of peaceful unification based on the principles of freedom and democracy” (H.-K. Kim 2009). This poses an impasse, how it can be possible to seek a peaceful unification with an illegal occupier.

² The term “sunshine policy” originated in Aesop’s fable, “The North Wind and the Sun” (Hogarth 2012).

³ Larkins (2010) approaches the concept of the territorial imaginary as an alternative to the objective and fixed notion of the territorial a priori. He defines it as representations of people’s being-in-space and therefore a particular sort of discursive object (Larkins 2010, 4–5). Larkins further claims that the territorial imaginary is “constituted by the ensemble of representations which extend beyond the limit imposed by the facts of experience and the deductive conclusions authorized by them” (Larkins 2010, 5). In this respect, this notion demonstrates the “historically contingent, transformative, and subjective” character of territory (Larkins 2010, 196).

⁴ Before this crisis, a unified Korea was often envisioned as a great power in the global economy, though with no specific vision of North Korea: to be “freed from the burden of unnecessary military spending and perhaps equipped with better social and economic structures, [a unified Korea] would start growing with unprecedented speed, soon overtaking Japan – its long-term rival – and perhaps even China. More zealous nationalists even said that unification would make Korea into a superpower. These dreams are long dead. The early hopes collapsed in the early 1990s under the weight of two almost unrelated events – the unification of Germany and the sudden discovery of the sorry state of the North Korean economy by the South Korean public” (Lankov 2012).

⁵ The 2012 poll of the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University shows that 46.7% of young people in their 20s think that reunification is necessary. This group is the only generation whose ratio to support reunification is less than a half, compared with 63.5% of the over-50s (Park et al. 2012, 195). Thus, there are social concerns about the growing indifference to reunification in the younger generations (The Guardian, May 27, 2013).

⁶ By using “pain” President Roh resonates with Koreans’ prevalent understanding that it is due to its geographical condition – being a peninsula – that Korea has been relentlessly invaded by neighbouring countries throughout history. He and other liberal intellectuals suggest transforming geo-political suffering into geo-economic opportunity.

⁷ Not surprisingly, these arguments were closely aligned with former US President Bush’s North Korea policy (Feffer and Lee 2001).

⁸ Moreover, Chun Yung-Woo, the former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade under the Lee Myung-bak government, claims that the KIC has become a serious impediment to North Korean denuclearisation efforts (Yonhap News, April 13, 2013).

⁹ Despite the ups and downs of economic relations between the two Koreas during liberal regimes – for instance, when military conflicts broke out in the Yellow Sea in 1999 and 2002 or the North conducted nuclear experiments in 2006, the South Korean government disrupted relations, though temporarily – not only South Korean conservatives but foreign experts consistently framed liberal policy towards North Korea as unconditional economic support (Snyder 2009).

¹⁰ While Suh Jae Jean, President of Korea Institute for National Unification, claims that the Vision 3000 policy is not based on “the assumption that North Korea would first denuclearization [sic] and open, but rather is a policy to encourage these processes” (2009, 13), the Lee government has continued to link economic aid and co-operation with the denuclearisation of the North (H. Kim 2011). For instance, it declared that “without full denuclearization by the North, there will not be any expansion of the Gaeseong complex” (cited in The Korea Times, July 2, 2008).

¹¹ Refer to the website of The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/249870. This cable was classified by the former US ambassador to South Korea, Kathleen Stephens.

¹² While most liberal and progressive groups display positive attitudes towards the KIC, some left-wing groups share the criticisms of the conservatives (see for example, Cho 2006). The KIC has also figured in the US policy debate, especially in terms of whether it financially supports the North’s regime (Nanto and Manyin 2008).

¹³ Various anti-North Korea civic groups in South Korea such as the “Fighters for Free North Korea,” “Committee for the Democratisation of North Korea” and “North Korea People’s Liberation Front” relate human rights in North Korea to regime change. In particular, Christian groups are especially active in the movement on human rights in North Korea. Many South Korean churches hold regular prayer ceremonies for human rights in North Korea (Christian Today, November 1, 2011). Robert Park, a Korean-American missionary who illegally crossed the border into North Korea in December 2009, said: “I am Christian, but I do have to say that this is not a legitimate government. We cannot talk to North Korea as if it is a legitimate government, but we need to liberate North Korea” (cited in Reuters, December 30, 2009; emphasis added).

¹⁴ In his remarks to US troops at Osan in South Korea, President George W. Bush asserted that the “Republic of Korea is now a beacon of liberty that shines across the most heavily armed border in the world. It is a light reaching to a land shrouded in darkness” (2005). Yet in the Bush administration’s criticism of the KIC he aligned with South Korean conservatives, rejecting geo-economic engagement with the North as a way to illuminate the “darkness” (cited in The New York Times, July 18, 2006).

¹⁵ Nevertheless, Nam (2006) admitted that the measures the South Korean government could adopt were too limited to tackle increasing economic ties between China and North Korea. The only advice he offered is to carefully observe the situation in close co-operation with the US and Japan.

¹⁶ These expressions or geo-economic imaginaries were also employed by the two contenders for the presidency from the opposition party. The former (a blue ocean) is from Kim Doo-kwan, the former governor of Gyeongsangnam-do (Kyunghyang Shinmun, September 10, 2012); and the latter (land of economic opportunity) was used by Moon Jae-in, a presidential candidate of the main opposition party, Democratic United, in his speech on September 16, 2012 (Moon 2012).

¹⁷ In similar context, David Harvey argues that imperialisms in the plural should be understood as “specific spatial and geographical strategies on the part of nation states or collections of nation states designed to solve the fundamental underlying contradictions of capitalism” and he contends that the South Korean state, in this sense, increasingly employs certain imperial practices (Toscano 2007, 1128–1129).