Korean reunification movement: ideas and realities

A great number of proposals and counterproposals for national integration have been exchanged between Seoul and Pyongyang. But deep mistrust has still kept the two Koreas from making a breakthrough in their unification movements. The international and domestic environments which have been newly formed since the middle of the 1980s have pushed them to break the status quo on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas, however, seldom abandon their cold war thinking vis-a-vis each other. This comprehensive study found that distrust and hostility between North and South Korea are an inevitable result of the dynamics that division produces. Division dynamics which are characterized by ideological polarization, legitimacy rivalry, and security paranoia have impeded inter-Korean compromise and reconciliation by intensifying misperception, distrust and hostility. To make matters worse, the political systems of North and South Korea have further escalated inter-Korean conflict. By taking advantage of the division for their political interest, the political leaders of the two Koreas have incited inter-Korean hostility. The end of the cold war, drastically decreasing the North-South rivalry in ideology, legitimacy and security, has offered the two Koreas a favorable unification milieu. But dynamics of mistrust that the North and the South have escalated since their division seldom decrease. The domestic conditions of the two Koreas still block breaking the vicious cycle of North-South mistrust. This research concluded that only when North and South Korea can change their present domestic conditions, in particular North Korea, will they make some meaningful progress in their reunification movement.