[EAI Working Paper] Koreans' Perceptions of North Korea and Unification

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Editor's Note

The East Asia Institute (EAI) has conducted the <Korean Identity> survey every five years since 2005. As the fourth installment of the first series of the 2020 survey, "History, Nation, State, and the World as Seen by Koreans," EAI has published a working paper by Professor Hwang Tae-hee of Yonsei University. This paper examines the current state of South Koreans' perceptions of division and North Korea and analyzes changes over the past 15 years. Regarding perceptions of division, respondents acknowledged both North and South Korea as they are, but recognized only the South Korean system as the legitimate and sovereign government. Concerning North Korea's nuclear weapons, a majority of respondents viewed them as a significant security threat to South Korea and predicted that North Korea would not abandon its nuclear program. The proposed countermeasure of developing indigenous nuclear weapons has consistently received majority support since the 2005 survey. Finally, a significant portion of respondents preferred a neutral policy over excessive intervention in North Korean human rights issues, indicating that North Korean human rights are not viewed from a universal perspective. Skepticism towards unification has intensified; not only did 'Unified Korea' rank low as a long-term national goal for South Korea, but the opposition to unification, arguing it is not necessarily required, surpassed the majority for the first time in the 2020 survey.

※ The following is the introduction to this working paper. Please refer to the attached file above for the full text.

I. Introduction

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Following liberation, the Korean Peninsula experienced the tragic civil war, after which division became entrenched. Now, the generation that directly experienced the Korean War constitutes a minority of the Korean population. For them, division is an externally imposed border, devoid of the visceral memory of the Korean War, and has become a distant historical event. Within the prolonged system of division, a new generation has begun to emerge, one that has not directly experienced industrialization and democratization. Meanwhile, the change of government to the Moon Jae-in administration in 2017 has provided an opportunity to experience alternating unification and North Korea policies under conservative and progressive governments. While people, governments, and policies have changed, what remains unchanged from 70 years ago is the reality of confrontation between North and South Korea. North Korea remains the primary security threat to South Korea. By the end of 2017, it had nearly completed its long-held ambition of developing nuclear weapons, which began in the 1950s, and South Korea is responding to this security threat by centering its strategy on the alliance with the United States. Amidst these developments, the 'Korean Identity' of the immediate post-Korean War era, which emphasized the importance of a single ethnic nation and accepted unification as a given, has inevitably undergone significant changes. Analyzing these changes by examining Koreans' perceptions of division, North Korea, and unification historically is the first step toward understanding 'Korean Identity.'

With this critical perspective, this chapter provides a multi-faceted analysis of the survey results from the 'Korean Identity Survey' conducted jointly by the East Asia Institute, the Center for East Asian Co-existence and Cooperation Studies at Sungkyunkwan University, and the JoongAng Ilbo in the first half of 2020, from the viewpoint of Koreans' perceptions of North Korea and unification. The 'Korean Identity Survey' has been conducted by the East Asia Institute at five-year intervals since 2005. Through the results of four surveys, this study identifies the current state of Koreans' perceptions of division, attitudes toward North Korea, preferences for North Korea policy, and perceptions of unification, and analyzes how these have changed from 2005 to 2020.

■ Author: Hwang Tae-heeProfessor of Political Science and International Relations at Yonsei University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester and has held positions such as Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Korea University, and Head of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Yonsei University. His main research areas include economic sanctions and aid, audience costs, human rights, and the politics and economy of North Korea. His relevant publications include "Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments: The Case of Disaster Preparedness" (BJPS 2019, co-authored), "Do sanctions spell disaster? Economic sanctions, political institutions, and technological safety" (EJIR 2019, co-authored), "Talking to Whom? Changing Audiences of North Korean Nuclear Tests: Supervised Machine-Learning Analysis of the KCNA" (SSQ 2017, co-authored), and "Detecting audience costs in international disputes" (IO 2015, co-authored).

■ Contact and Editing: Seo Ju-won, EAI Research Fellow

Inquiries: 02 2277 1683 (ext. 206) jwseo@eai.or.kr

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