South Korea has a Ministry of Unification in the same way that Macey's has a Father Christmas. It is something nice to tell the children. Even a cursory trip to Seoul reveals that very few South Koreans have much stomach for reunification. It is nice to talk about a yearning to be reunited with one's long-lost family, cruelly separated by a civil war that ended in 1953. But in reality, many South Koreans are sniffy about “country-bumpkin” northerners and fearful about the wrenching social and economic costs of welding their rich, shiny country to the backward rust-bucket that is North Korea.
In an interview last year, Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president who has ditched the sunshine policy of warmer relations with Pyongyang for an altogether icier stand-off, maintained the fiction. “The endgame is peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. That has never changed and that will remain our objective,” he said. There was a pause. “However, having said that, I do not foresee peaceful reunification in the near future.”
The near future never comes. Opinion polls suggest that up to half of South Koreans express a wish for eventual reunification. But nearly as many would prefer “prolonged friendly co-existence”, which looks suspiciously like code for “not on your life”. When North Koreans actually do make it south – many after arduous, sometimes death-defying journeys through China or Mongolia – they often find anything but a warm welcome. Only a little more than 15,000 North Koreans have made it to a country of 50m. Even so, some South Koreans resent what they regard as overly generous state handouts to the new arrivals.