One Korea again: when, if and how?

• Author: Ilitchev, Aleksandr
• Position: Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation - Book review

Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation Roland Bleiker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 224 pages.

Roland Bleiker, former Swiss delegate to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea, deserves to be commended for a book which offers an unorthodox view regarding the nature and source of the recurring pattern of conflict and tensions on the Korean Peninsula. He is right in calling the peninsula "an anachronism in international relations." (1) The continued impasse in international efforts to resolve North Korea's nuclear issue, augmented by the fury of the current nuclear crisis, seems to confirm the need for "fundamentally new forms of thinking and acting." (2) Bleiker makes a point that "it is hardly possible to find a way out of the current security dilemmas through the political mind-sets that have created them in the first place." (3) Noting that "dealing with North Korea is perhaps one of the most difficult security challenges in global politics today," Bleiker ventures into neither a survey of great power policies, nor a thorough analysis of technicalities and negotiation tactics. Rather, his ambition is to "chart a different route, identifying broad patterns of conflict and possibilities for peace that emerge from rethinking the policies that sustain these patterns." (4) He undertakes this task using a multidisciplinary approach and an impressive array of sources, including ones related to Korean history and culture, as well as more generic philosophical, psychological and political science studies.

Bleiker gives the geopolitics surrounding the peninsula their due, but he puts the phenomenon of the divided Korean nation at the centre of his approach. He asserts that "the very antagonistic identity constructs" held by the two Koreas is the key source of tension on the peninsula. (5) Moreover, Bleiker adds that the "present security dilemmas can be seen as emerging from a fundamental but largely ignored tension between the idea of Korean identity and its rather different practical application." (6) He argues for the need to scrutinize the "role of identities ... at various levels, from the individual to the national to the international," in order to understand "how threats emerge and generate security dilemmas." (7) Bleiker observes that there is a "strong, almost mythical, vision of homogeneity" in both parts of Korea, which portrays the division of the peninsula as a "temporary disruption of Korean identity and assumes that unification will eventually recover the lost national unity." (8) However, there is also the reality of the half-century of political division, which Bleiker traces correctly to actions by the United States and the Soviet Union after they ended the Japanese occupation in 1945, and which became entrenched during the Korean and Cold Wars. As a result, the two Koreas have developed identities that are not only distinct, but also "articulated in direct and stark opposition to each other." (9) Indeed, Bleiker points out, those identity constructs, "born out of death, fear, and longing for revenge," portray the opposite side of the divided peninsula not only as an ideological archrival but also as a threatening "other," as something that is inherently evil and thus incompatible with one's own sense of identity (10) To him, these identities are based upon "artificially created and diametrically opposed ideological images of the world," instead of being constructed along such "natural" lines as race, ethnicity, language or religion. (11)

Bleiker reminds the reader that the antagonistic views of national identity permeate all aspects of society, from diplomacy to everyday life, in both Koreas. In the South, such a view is based on anticommunism, while in the North it is driven by an anti-imperialist discourse, primarily against the United States and Japan. However, notes Bleiker, the North Korean identity has a major difference from its asymmetric twin in the...