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Back in August I did a post summarizing a fascinating survey of a multinational cast of 135 “experts,” I term I use advisedly in this context, conducted by the Ilmin Institute of International Relations on the future North Korea. While views obviously varied, the consensus seemed to be that the life expectancy of the Kim Jong-un regime was 10-20 years; it would fall due to intra-elite struggles, and that the final endpoint would be unification with the South.
Now the TNS public opinion polling agency has produced a survey of South Korean public attitudes which can be interpreted as a companion to the Ilmin survey of experts. The results are based on telephone interviews covering a random sample of 1,000 adults living in Seoul conducted between October 24-25 this year. The sampling error is +/- 3.1 percent.
Around a quarter of the respondents view the division of the peninsula as permanent, but as shown in the chart, nearly two-thirds of the South Korean public expects unification to occur. Young people had the most skeptical views with regard to the likelihood of unification.
Their time line is a little longer than the views expressed in the expert survey, with a majority of the those seeing unification as possible believing that it would take place more than 15 years out.
Most of the respondents thought that planning for unification should begin immediately, though roughly one-quarter appear to want to push preparation into the future, if prepare at all. One wonders what the correlation is between those who don’t believe that unification will occur and those who don’t want to plan: logically, if one doesn’t think an event will occur, then why undertake possibly costly planning for it?
The flip side of this is that there is a majority constituency for preparation. I’m neither a South Korean nor a politician, so I am reluctant to criticize the tactics of South Korean politicians, but former President Lee’s rollout of the “unification tax” seemed particularly maladroit. Unification planning under the current government seems to have taken on a renewed seriousness, as I addressed in a post last month.
