The new doctrine must draw the North

I look forward to seeing a more elaborate — and practicable — path to unification.

Chung Ku-younThe author is a professor of political science at Kangwon National University. In an address to mark the 79th anniversary of the Aug. 15 Liberation Day, President Yoon Suk Yeol announced his new unification doctrine for the Korean Peninsula. The speech came 30 years after former President Kim Young-sam trumpeted the ambitious National Community Unification Formula in his Liberation Day speech in 1994. The Yoon administration presented a more concrete way of achieving unification based on ensuring freedom rather than revising or scrapping the earlier prescription for the reunification of the divided land. The new unification doctrine reflected the change of the times.

Article 4 of our Constitution stipulates, “The Republic of Korea shall seek unification and shall formulate and carry out a policy of peaceful unification based on the free and democratic order.” Free democracy — the results of the decades-long democratization movement — is the basic order of our society. But the expansion of freedom didn’t come by itself. It called for citizens’ ceaseless attention and participation, as well as the process of compromise and adjustment. It is sheer hypocrisy to claim that a certain political party or group can monopolize the noble values of freedom. All citizens must safeguard such values now and in the future.

President Yoon’s unification doctrine can be deemed an attempt to include such priceless value of freedom in the national community-based unification formula which reflected the end of the Cold War, the Sino-U.S. détente in the 1990s, the prevalence of democracy around the globe and the reconciliatory mood between South and North Korea.

But the situation of the Korean Peninsula and East Asia in 2024 has dramatically changed. In the 9th plenary meeting of the Workers’ Party last December, North Korea defined inter-Korean relations as “relations between two hostile states and between two countries at war, not the same ethnicity-based homogenous relations as before.” The two-state tenet testifies to the North’s unilateral abandonment of the conventional concepts — and legitimacy — of the Korean people and unification. The North’s about-turn signifies its admission of its defeat in the decades-old competition over the supremacy of their systems.

North Korea wants to find a way for survival by reinforcing its strategic cooperation with Russia after the Ukraine war. As a result, the West calls Russia, North Korea and Iran “the axis of rogues.” The emergence of the clan amid the tense standoff between democratic and authoritarian states only helps fuel the new Cold War.

The new unification doctrine can be seen as the conservative government’s strategic response to the North’s escalation of its hostilities toward the South as it did during the Cold War. The new doctrine can also serve as a blueprint for the ultimate unification of the peninsula amid the volatile international circumstances because it manifested the government’s will to uphold the value of freedom, which remained ambiguous in the past to not damage inter-Korean reconciliation.

The problem is the North’s response. It keeps mum even after the government offered to help the flood-stricken people in the North. North Korea also keeps silent after the South Korean government announced its new unification doctrine and proposed the establishment of a South-North consultative body for dialogue. The government must devise aggressive measures to bring North Korea to the negotiating table.

The government strategically cleared the vagueness in its North Korea policy through the new unification doctrine. But such a move can prompt controversy over “unification by absorption.” Given the explosiveness of inter-Korean relations, the government must convince people of the justification for the new doctrine.

The rest of the world is not very interested in the unification of the Korean Peninsula or South Korea’s policy toward North Korea. The government must understand that its value-based diplomacy can restrict its maneuvering room on a global stage. I look forward to seeing a more elaborate — and practicable — path to unification.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.