Park Geun-Hye still pushing for reunification

President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday made another pitch for her signature reunification vision, emphasizing that it’s time to end the pain of a divided Korean Peninsula.

“I think the time has come to fundamentally resolve the pain of a division on the peninsula, as next year marks the 70th anniversary of that,” she said in a video message for the inaugural World Conference on North Korean Studies.

The two-day forum opened at Seoul’s Yonsei University, drawing more than 150 South Korean and foreign scholars. [….]

“The government is continuing support to substantively help North Koreans, endeavoring to expand cooperation and exchange, with the door for dialogue open, while dealing resolutely with North Korea’s provocations,” she said. [Yonhap]

It’s a sad statement that the President of South Korea has to market something that ought to be the fondest wish of the people of any divided nation state, particularly one where each is in such desperate need of the other’s resources. If only Park could articulate a credible path for bringing that about. What she’s saying, unfortunately, sounds like a slightly less permissive version of the same thing that’s been failing for two decades.

I had hoped that this interview with Professor Shinn Chang-Min would help me understand the ideas that Park Geun-Hye herself has articulated so poorly. The interview is interesting, readable, and filled with novel and unconventional ideas, and Shinn is realistic enough about the nature of the regime. At the end, however, it was a bit like listening to the Underpants Gnomes present their business plan—I still didn’t understand Phase 2, how Shinn expects to reunify Korea without removing the principal obstacle to that outcome.