Body
On a roundtable at the American Political Science Association, Dave Kang outlined some of the results of a multi-year project on reunification he has been leading with Victor Cha. We have expressed our doubts about the prospects for sudden political change. Even were the country to collapse—whatever that means--the extraordinary costs of reunification are likely to deter swift absorption.
But we are appropriately humble: most analysts missed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Jasmine revolutions, and in any case some one has to be thinking about the possible.
The premise of the Cha-Kang project is that we need to draw lessons from other civil war and state collapse settings. Drawing on a range of papers available on their website (and reproduced below), Kang highlighted some of the take-aways from their comparative work:
- Most people believe that collapse would unleash a destabilizing flood of refugees; given the ever-widening wage differential, we put ourselves in that camp. But Kang noted that in other civil war settings, people do not necessarily want to leave their homes in large number; rather, they are driven to do so by circumstance, including lack of security and income. The crucial task for an orderly unification is to provide security in place so that people have incentives to stay put.
- “Don’t knock everything over.” One lesson from the Balkans and particularly Iraq is that cooperation with local officials is needed to run the state, including provision of basic social services. Radical programs of change, such as de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi army, have disastrous consequences. Kang cited the case of the East German army, where only one-star generals and above were let go. The Bundeswehr took 100,000 lower-level soldiers on a trial basis on ultimately kept 24,000.
- A related problem has to do with lustration or transitional justice: whom from the old regime gets punished? The answer may be “the fewer the better.” We would like nothing more than to see the criminals at the top of the North Korean regime go to trial for their various crimes. But experience with transitional justice elsewhere--including South Africa--suggests that it may be best to resist such impulses.
In a next phase of the project, Cha and Kang plan to drill down on the issues of migration, public health and the bureaucracy. Papers are available here; the entire team is identified below:
Working Papers
Note: Please do not cite or quote without author's permission
North Korea: Migration Patterns and Prospects
By: Courtland Robinson, August 20-21, 2010
Health Reconstruction in North Korea
By: J. Stephen Morrison, August 20-21, 2010
The Environmental Issues of the Unified Korea
By: Jinsuk Byun, August 20-21, 2010
Preparing for the Possible: Korea Integration Proposals
in the Event of a Sudden Collapse of North Korea or Sudden
Reunification
By: Jong Han Kim, August 20-21, 2010
The Iraq: Lessons Learned in the Context of
Regime Change in North Korea
By: Rusty Barber, August 20-21, 2010
Transitional Justice in North Korea: Accountability
for Human Rights Atrocities in North Korea
By: Seong-Phil Hong, August 20-21, 2010
The Challenges of a Post-Reunification Korea:
Lessons from Reconciled Civil Conflicts
By: William J. Long, August 20-21, 2010
Higher Education Harmonization with the DPRK
By: Stuart Thornson, August 20-21, 2010
DPRK “Collapse” Pathways:
Implications for the Energy Sector and for Strategies Redevelopment/Support
By: Peter Hayes, August 20-21, 2010
SOE Reform in China: Lessons for North Korea?
By: Gary H Jefferson, August 20-21, 2010
