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A particular genre of North Korea speculation considers what unification might look like. In addition to the inevitable “scenario”-style work are some efforts to calculate the costs of unification, to which we have contributed. But the post-transition dynamics will be deeply political as well as economic. How will North Koreans view the past in a unified Korea in which they are materially better off but distinctly second-class citizens in terms of skills and social status?
One of our favorite analysts, Andrei Lankov offers up a depressing but must-read speculation in the Asia Times on “the inevitability of Kim revisionism.” Drawing on insights generated by his own Soviet background, he argues that the eradication of a positive narrative about the communist era was most likely where opposition was strongest (for example, in Poland). In the late 1990s, Lankov notes that as many as one third of East Germans told pollsters that unification was a mistake and that they would prefer to move back to the DDR. In Russia, nostalgia for Stalin and the communist era is by no means limited to the political fringe.
Lankov argues that the situation in North Korea will even be worse, as individuals who invested in specific assets tied to the regime—such as a schoolteacher—see the value of those investments driven to zero. As Lankov notes with great sympathy, these individuals are not necessarily collaborators or criminals; they are just ordinary citizens who will have to cope with a world turned upside down.
What would this narrative look like? According to Lankov, something like this:
“In 1945, the North undertook a brave social experiment, which had great potential but went awry due to manifold reasons. To some extent, the problems were created by the inefficiencies of the system. But the major blame should be laid at the feet of outsiders, as usual in Korea's tragic history….[I]t was the Americans who made the most trouble by maintaining a strict blockade on the North. In spite of all of this, North Korea managed to remain even with the South until the early 1970s (more radical proponents of the myth will probably say 1980) and achieved much in such fields as education, health care and culture. Its home-grown culture was pure, national and free of foreign corruption.
Its people enjoyed a moderate but stable lifestyle. This state was presided over by Comrade Kim Il-sung. He might have had some shortcomings - for example, he trusted dishonest and manipulative advisors and sometimes let slanderers put innocent people into jail. Nonetheless he was a real national hero, a former independence fighter, and hence was morally superior to pro-Japanese collaborators who used to run the Southern republic in his times…Therefore we should see ourselves as equal, or perhaps morally superior to the Southerners.”
Lankov offers up one additional parting jab: that this narrative might even find sympathy on the South Korean left, which has had its own difficulties coming to grips with the North Korean regime.
