August 15th of each year is a national holiday in South Korea that commemorates the day the Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. On this day, there is a long-standing tradition that the South Korean president outlines his vision for Korean unification. Korea has been divided into North and South Korea since 1945.
But South Korea's current president, Yoon Seok-youl, proposed a new approach this year. Rather than “peaceful unification” with North Korea, as many of his predecessors have emphasized, Yoon's vision puts “freedom” at the center of Korea's pursuit of unification.
In his speech, Yoon listed what he considered to be important tasks in moving toward a unified Korea, including “the need to change the consciousness of the North Korean people so that they fervently desire unification based on freedom.” In simple terms, this means facilitating North Koreans' freedom of access to information from the outside world.
The approach signals Seoul will continue its hands-off approach toward activists who have been flying balloons filled with leaflets critical of North Korea's Kim Jong Un regime across the border for months.
The Yoon administration has refrained from intervening in the activities of these activists, who are mostly defectors. The government cites a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling that declared their activities protected by freedom of expression.
At the same time, Yoon's approach involves protecting the values that make South Korea a “free” country and making them the guiding principle for a unified Korea, including liberal democracy, a free market economy and respect for human rights.
So far, North Korea has not responded to Yoon's announcement, and its silence is highly unusual, as it almost always responds immediately and negatively to unification proposals from Seoul.
What Korea Wants
Seoul's aim is two-fold: First, it hopes that with ample access to outside information, more North Koreans will seek a life in South Korea, which will lead to more defections across the border.
As North Korea closed its borders during the pandemic, the number of people successfully defecting fell sharply compared to 2020. But since border controls were relaxed again in 2023, the annual number of defectors making it to South Korea has nearly tripled to 196.
Recently, on August 20, the Seoul military announced that they had arrested a North Korean soldier crossing the border, the second defector in two weeks.
Seoul further predicts that the influx of information could lead to a popular uprising in North Korea, which could put pressure on the regime to either allow its people more freedoms and human rights or to topple the regime.
But such a scenario is unlikely to come to fruition: After all, North Korea's tight control over outside information has enabled the regime to survive so far.
Seoul's new vision for unification is provocative and may be unpopular in Pyongyang, and may even endanger the lives of ordinary North Koreans by encouraging Kim Jong Un's regime to tighten information controls.
Yoon's decision to formulate a new vision for Korean unification dates back several months. In March, South Korea's presidential office announced its intention to update the “ethnic community unification formula,” which has been the government's official unification policy since 1994.
This approach consists of three stages: seeking reconciliation and cooperation with North Korea, establishing a Korean Federation, and creating a unified Korean peninsula.
While the exact content of the updates is not yet clear, the decision to revise the existing unified method is not unexpected: since the method was introduced 30 years ago, it has never progressed beyond the first phase.
Seoul's decision to review and update the unification formula also came after Kim Jong Un was reported to have given up hope of unification in January, when he said in a speech to North Korea's parliament that the constitution should be amended to designate South Korea as the “main enemy.”
Retaliation from the North
A key objective of unification based on freedom would be to give ordinary North Koreans greater access to information from the outside world, something the Kim regime vehemently opposes.
Information control has been one of North Korea's top priorities for decades and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The growing consumption of foreign media in North Korea, particularly K-pop music and K-drama television, has already led to several public executions.
Retaliation against any South Korean overtures to unification based on freedom is therefore to be expected. North Korea has already sent hundreds of balloons filled with excrement and garbage to South Korea in retaliation for the leaflet drops, and in June Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, warned of further retaliatory measures if it continued, saying South Korea should be “prepared to pay a terribly high price.”
From North Korea's perspective, any attempt to distribute leaflets containing outside information poses a direct threat to the stability of the regime.
Freedom of expression and access to information are important universal values that must always be protected, but provoking the Kim regime could lead to a more repressive crackdown on the North Korean people, putting lives at risk.
For this reason, South Korea's demand for unification based on freedom may be unacceptable to the North Korean people.
Peter Han is a PhD student in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
