The Park Geun-hye Administration’s Unification Policy: Issues and Challenges

Abstract

President Park Geun-hye popularized the notion of a unification bonanza during the 2014 New Year’s press conference. Visiting Dresden Germany on March 28, 2014, President Park gave a speech dubbed the Dresden Initiative detailing specifics of her unification policy that attempted to restore trust between South and North Korea. The so-called Trust-Building Process on the Korean peninsula has become the cornerstone of the Park administration’s policy toward North Korea. One of the advantages of the Park government’s Trust-Building Process is that it incorporates many elements of international relations theories. Thus, Park’s unification policy is more flexible in terms of policy implementation or from a strategic perspective. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that South Korea’s objective of building a foundation for peaceful unification is difficult to achieve under structural conditions in which a realist logic dominates. A brief review of South Korea’s unification policy through different administrations reveals that a lack of policy consistency and uniformity is the result of a gap between short-term tasks presented to each administration and medium- to long-term policy objectives. While implementing the Trust-Building Process, the Park administration also had to deal with North Korea’s nuclear and military provocations. These periodic setbacks frustrated the administration’s unification policy momentum. This study also shows that every administration learns from the successes and failures of previous governments. One of the positive things about Park’s Trust-Building Process is that the policy does not rely on any particular strand of extreme ideology, and it has appropriately merged elements of conservatism and progressivism in South Korean politics, and tried to be as mainstream as possible.