Asia Times: The Koreas: Seeking advice in Germany


	October 10, 2000	atimes.com

Editorials

The Koreas: Seeking advice in Germany

As North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's special envoy, Vice Marshal Cho Myong-rok, confers with Washington officials, some of his country's diplomats and their South Korean counterparts have been quietly conferring with German officials and parliamentarians. The topic? Easy. How do you go about reunification of a divided nation and what awaits you when it happens? Marshal Cho may get a Washington concession: The US seems ready to strike North Korea from its list of states promoting terrorism. But the Berlin coffee shop chats by the diplomats of the two Koreas may prove more relevant to the Koreas' future.

Though now under discussion, there are no diplomatic relations between Germany and North Korea. But, of course, in the good old pre-1990 days of the (East) German Democratic Republic, there were formal relations between the two communist states. The former North Korean embassy on Berlin's Glinkastrasse survives at semi-diplomatic status and remains staffed by a handful of comrades. Normally, they don't wander far from their fortress-like abode, but recently they've been getting around a bit more and have been seen visiting the German foreign ministry and the offices of East Germany's former ruling party, renamed Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One frequent interlocutor of the North Korean diplomats is PDS leader Gregor Gysi. Now an elected member of parliament, Gysi recently told his visitors a number of things they may not have found easy to swallow: "You won't be able to stay in power," he said from hard-earned experience, "but if North Korea takes the lead among unifiers, you may perhaps be able to safeguard your dignity." That's not likely the message the Pyongyang diplomats wanted to hear. Still, they apparently found the conversation sufficiently useful and intriguing to invite Gysi and his deputy, Wolfgang Gehrcke-Reymann, to North Korea to explore further how the Germans managed to bring about peaceful national unification.

Not only the North Koreans, but also their southern compatriots have been making the rounds seeking advice from Germans deemed most knowledgeable in reunification matters. Both Koreas are concerned they might lose control over the political processes kicked loose with the June Kim-Kim summit. "Did you have a program for reunification?" asked Paik Kyung-nam, head of the South Korean Presidential Commission on Women's Affairs, in a recent conversation with German Family Affairs Minister Christine Bergmann, a former citizen of East Germany. "The next time around we'll make such a program," was Bergmann's telling, tongue-in-cheek reply. There were no plans or programs. Neither the East German resistance nor East Germany's communist leaders nor the West German government had planned or foreseen the November 9, 1989 breaching of the Wall.

Among the most sought-after discussion partners of the South Koreans is social democrat Egon Bahr, former right-hand man of Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor who formulated the equivalent of President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine" policy, the policy of "change through rapprochement" for effecting change in East Germany through closer relations with the East rather than attempts at isolating and villifying it. The Bahr/Brandt "Ostpolitik" is the subject of keen study and Bahr was closely questioned on its precepts and on the negotiations that led to the 1972 East-West German "basic treaty", in a meeting with representatives of the South Korean embassy, Seoul National University, and the Unification Ministry. His advice: One small step at a time.

Another German much in demand is the last and only freely elected prime minister of East Germany, Lothar de Maziere. He has been to South Korea twice on lecture tours and was asked just how it was possible to maintain a functioning state apparatus while at the same time winding it up and preparing it for liquidation. And then, of course, there is Wolfgang Hummel, one-time manager of the "Treuhandgesellschaft", the trust corporation tasked with privatization of former East German state-owned enterprises. Speaking at (formerly East) Berlin's Humboldt University this past spring when he laid down the principles of his unification policy that opened the way to the North-South Pyongyang summit, Kim Dae-jung said he was "shocked" at the high price of German unification. Hummel is a man who can explain it. Though touted as the East Bloc's most successsful economy, Hummel and his colleagues found that few if any of East Germany's enterprises were viable. To date, western Germany has pumped nearly half a trillion dollars into the east to keep the economy functioning and meet social welfare payments. Reconstruction of a former communist command economy is as demanding as the task of political unification.

However valuable the German advice the Koreas are eagerly seeking, they will have to find their own road toward national unity. In that regard, Koreans from North and South living in Germany are well ahead of their governments. In June, they held a Reunification Congress in Berlin and invited, well, ex-communist Gysi who had this to say: "Organize unification in such a way that every North and South Korean feels that he is part of it and continues to have an important and useful role in it after it happens. In case the North Korean elite is simply made to lose its privileges and sent home, there is the threat of a wave of nostalgia developing that can keep the country divided even after formally it becomes one." Gysi knows what he's talking about. Ten years after unification, the east-west divide in Germany persists and continues to hamper economic progress.

(Factual aspects in this editorial are adapted from an October 6 article by Petra Bornhoeft in the online edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel; opinions expressed are ours).

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