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0 pointsderefr1y ago0 comments

> Should South Korea manage to unify North & South it would bankrupt them.

What if they didn't do that (at first), but instead (as an intermediate step) annexed the north as a colony with its own economy but South Korean governorship; and then opened said colony to worldwide foreign aid?

This would be very similar to the short-term arrangement negotiated between West Germany and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall. For analogous reasons, West Germany didn't want to immediately absorb/unify with East Germany; instead, they held political and military stewardship over East Germany until it could be built back up.

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vundercind1y ago

There are all kinds of stories we can come up with to get countries out of economic trouble that's basically fictional to begin with, as long as enough other states agree to believe the new stories. The actual value held by a country is the people, natural resources, and real capital. The money part's just for book-keeping, in the end.

philistine1y ago

East Germany was a tenth the economic strength of West Germany. North Korea is a hundredth the strength of South Korea, and not because South Korea is far more advanced than West Germany.

It's one of the richest country in the world, right next to one of the poorest. Unification in any sense at this point is suicide by the South. The misery inflicted upon the southern Koreans will be immeasurable if both countries are unified. The leaders of both Koreas know this.

derefrOP1y ago

Isn’t the answer, then, to just give North Korea 10x as long as a “managed” colony before unification?

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Or, alternately, given that literally everything in NK would need to be rebuilt at some point... rather than "swallowing the elephant whole", they could take incremental bites: annex a few miles of North Korea into themselves; revitalize/gentrify that part; repeat. Slowly, over 50 years.

(How? At the end of the war, they'd do a census, figuring out where every NK citizen lived as of the end of the war. Then, for each annexation, anyone already living in the annexed area as of the end of the war, would automatically become a South Korean citizen. Anyone who moved to the area after the end of the war would not, and would instead be required to vacate northward, with the SK government compensating them for the [very low value of the] home they're being displaced from, per eminent domain.)

Of course, any NK citizen would be free to apply at any time for a South Korean visa — just like a citizen of any other country can. They wouldn't be especially prioritized.

And an NK citizen would also be equally free to apply for a visa to move to literally anywhere else — possibly as a refugee. SK would probably encourage this and even assist with it.

blitzar1y ago

I am unsure of the ethics of conquering a state that is in the state of North Korea and then forcing the people (who are brothers and sisters of the South) to continue to live like that for a generation while their conquerers live (relatively speaking) like kings across the road.

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