Kim Jong-un announced in 2024 the largest ideological shift in North Korea’s 77-year history.
The reunification of the peninsula and the Korean people, the ultimate goal of the communist state founded in 1947 by his grandfather Kim Il-sung, has not only ceased to be a priority, but has renounced it completely.
The leader of North Korea proclaimed that reunification is no longer a goal and that South Korea becomes “main enemy”a title that until now was held exclusively by the United States.
And it did not stop at mere words: Kim dismantled the inter-Korean dialogue and cooperation organizations, demolished the symbolic Reunification Arch and finally destroyed the roads and railways that had been designed to connect both countries when they were one.
The term “reunification” -tongil in Korean- It was also removed from newspapers, school textbooks and even a subway station in Pyongyang, renamed Moranbong.
All of this occurred at a time of tension between North and South, but both States have been alternating phases of conflict and rapprochement for decades without once questioning the until now sacred objective of reunification.
So what’s behind Kim’s radical paradigm shift?
The importance of reunification
The Korean Peninsula, and the Korean people, have been divided into North and South for almost eight decades.
It seems like a long time, but it is not that long compared to the more than 12 centuries in which its territory remained united under different dynasties and empires, from the year 668 to 1945.
That is why, when the Americans and Soviets divided up the country after World War II, in both the communist North and the capitalist South, secession was seen as a historical anomaly that had to be corrected as soon as possible.
Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea and grandfather of the current leader, tried by force and almost succeeded when he invaded the South in 1950.
“Kim put a lot of pressure on Stalin and Mao to allow him to invade South Korea until he succeeded in 1950, with the main objective of achieving reunification on his terms by taking control of the South,” academic Sung-Yoon explains to BBC Mundo. Lee, professor of Korean studies at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.
However, the Korean War (1950-53) left more than two million dead on both sides and the border in almost the same place as at the beginning, which consolidated the division of the country.
The armistice that ended the conflict was never replaced by a peace treaty, so to this day North and South remain in a technical state of war and separated by the almost impassable Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
Since then, two otherwise irreconcilable systems maintained a common ideal: reunification.
In South Korea, article 4 of the still current 1948 Constitution establishes as its objective “national reunification under the principles of freedom and peaceful democracy.”
North Korea, for its part, proposes “national reunification based on independence, peaceful unification and great national unity,” according to article 9 of its Magna Carta, which also mentions “the victory of socialism” as a prior objective.
Peaceful or forceful reunification?
But how to unite the country and the Korean people again? That is where both States differ, as they aspire to do so on their respective terms.
In South Korea – with more than double the population of the North and a GDP almost 60 times larger according to 2023 data – the option that has gained the most strength in recent decades is The Germany model: absorb its neighbor under a democratic free market system.
Pyongyang, for its part, has traditionally aspired to impose socialism throughout the peninsula, although since the 1980s it has also put on the table the idea of a single confederal state with two systemsin the style of China and Hong Kong.
Peaceful reunification with the coexistence of two systems was, in fact, the stated objective in the historic joint declaration signed in June 2000 by the then North Korean leader. Kim Jong-il (father of Kim Jong-un) and the South Korean Kim Dae-jung but who, over the years, remained a dead letter.
“Unification by force, no matter how many lives are lost, has always been the supreme national task of the Kim regime, from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-un,” says Professor Lee.
The Wilson Center academic believes that, deep down, “Pyongyang’s priority methodology has always been the ‘Vietnam model’, that is, forcing the United States to partially abandon the South through a combination of force and diplomacy.”
Kim Jong-un urged to amend North Korea’s Constitution to eliminate references to reunification and refer to South Korea as a “hostile state.”
This, together with the already mentioned measures such as the dissolution of cooperation organizations or the demolition of monuments and roads, marks a surprising ideological turn in the communist country and raises the question of what the North Korean leader is really looking for.
We analyze the different hypotheses that try to answer it.
Kim’s motives
Kim attributed his ideological shift to “provocations” from South Korea and the United States, such as strengthening cooperation with Japan, creating a group to coordinate responses to a nuclear attack or expanding the UN Command.
However, in recent decades there have been frequent, even more serious, episodes of tension on the Korean Peninsula, without the North considering abandoning the ideal of reunification.
Why did you do it then? For Ellen Kim, senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIC) based in Washington DC, “the North Korean regime no longer wants reunification, mainly to preserve your own system“.
“They fear the popularity of South Korean cinema, music and television series among the young generation in the North,” the academic tells BBC Mundo.
He explains that, “as people from outside send more information to North Korea, growing public awareness about the economic prosperity of South Korea and the rest of the world may call into question Kim Jong-un’s leadership.”
“Thus, the most effective way for the regime to turn the North Koreans against South Korea is point out the latter as the main enemy“, sentence.
Cristopher Green, a consultant for the Korean Peninsula at the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank, expresses himself in similar terms, who thinks that Kim Jong-un is trying to put a stop to the “growing cultural and political influence of South Korea” on the population. northern.
“Over the past 30 years, South Korean pop culture (especially K-pop, soap operas and movies) has burst into North Korea, challenging the regime’s control over information. Pyongyang has tried to stop the flow of that type of content across its borders, but with limited success,” he explains, in a column published on the ICG website.
The expert highlights that, after toughening punishments for selling or consuming foreign content since 2020, “Kim’s new turn is the institutional reflection of a trend that has been developing for several years” aimed at “preserving the regime’s legitimizing narrative and maintain ideological control”.
Other experts believe that the North Korean leader’s main objective is eliminate any possibility of the aforementioned German model being applied to the peninsula.
“It is natural that North Korea, which suffers from chronic economic and systemic crises, is concerned about possible unification through absorption. Therefore, your best survival strategy “It would be a complete political and legal break with South Korea,” says academic Bong-geun Jun, advisor for Northeast Asia at the American Institute for Peace, in an analysis published on his website.
Pure strategy?
Other analysts believe that everything responds to a mere political strategy of Kim Jong-un who, deep down, does not give up his ambitions to unify the peninsula. Of course, under his mandate.
“We can specify in our Constitution the question of completely occupy, subjugate and claim the Republic of Korea (South) and annex it as part of the territory of our republic in the event that a war breaks out on the Korean peninsula,” the North Korean leader said last January.
For Professor Sung-Yoon Lee, it is “a political war” with which Kim is trying to create destabilization in the “enemy” country.
The North Korean regime “stands out not only in calculated provocations against the US and South Korea, or in brainwashing its population, but also in psychological manipulation of the South Korean peopleinterprets the academic, who highlights that “the idea of abandoning peaceful reunification creates political and social tension in the South.”
“There is no reason to believe that Kim Jong-un has ever given up on seizing South Korean territory and its people by force,” Lee summarizes.
The expert also believes that, by considering the South Korean state as an “enemy,” the communist leader is in a more comfortable position to justify hostile actions“from flying feces-laden balloons into the South to sending combat troops to Russia to fight Ukraine, to constantly threatening to ‘wipe out’ South Korea.”
A key moment
In any case, Kim’s ideological turn comes at a crucial moment on the regional and international stage.
North Korea and Russia have exhibited their greatest rapprochement since the Cold War, with the supply of weapons from Pyongyang – in defiance of international sanctions that Moscow had also approved at the time – and finally the entry of its troops into the Ukrainian conflict.
Added to this is the uncertainty regarding the change of government in Washington after the electoral victory in November of Donald Trump, who in his previous term became the first US president to meet with a North Korean leader.
The Kim Jong-un regime, for its part, has continued to strengthen its military technology and arsenal in recent years, with missiles and nuclear warheads increasingly numerous, powerful and sophisticated.
All of this, according to experts, responds to the leader’s strategy of strengthening his position on the international stage, seeking strategic allies that allow him to counter Western pressure and project his influence beyond the Korean peninsula.
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