Dan Snow's History Hit - North vs South: How Korea Was Divided

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

The divided Korean peninsula is the last remnant of the Cold War: South Korea is a vibrant democracy, a strong market economy, and home to a world-renowned culture. North Korea is ruled by the most authoritarian regime in the world, plagued by famine and poverty, best known for its nuclear weapons. These two countries are diametrically opposed but also intrinsically connected by their long shared ethnic history. How was this country split by the great powers after the Japanese occupation and how did they take such divergent paths?An armistice to the bloody fighting of the Korean War was drawn 70 years ago - it was a call for peace not an ending. As such, the Koreas are still technically at war with each other. To untangle the intricate and fascinating history of the relationship and divide between North and South Korea, Dan is joined by Dr Ramon Pacheco Pardo- Professor of International Relations at Kings College London and Dr Victor Cha, Professor of Government at Georgetown University.Their book is 'Korea: A New History of South and North' Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsely, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Back in 2004-ish, only 20 years ago kids, 20 years ago I was filming a TV show about the Korean War and I was lucky enough to go into the DMZ, the Joint Security Area of the DMZ. You'll have seen it perhaps more recently because Donald Trump stepped into North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-un. It's a strange place. There are blue bungalows which straddle the border, which were designed for the peace talks that it was hoped would follow the armistice, the end of fighting in the Korean War. Those peace talks at that site have never really taken place. And you can go into those bungalows. In fact, when I was there, each side get a certain amount of time and tourists from both the North and South gets to go into the bungalows. In fact, when I was there, each side get a certain amount of time and tourists from both the North and South gets going to the bungalows. And then you walk around, have a look

at them, then you leave. And then the other side bring their tourists in and through the window. So you actually, inside the bungalow, you're actually able to step onto North Korean soil. So technically I've been on North Korean soil. And you get a situation where these North Korean border guards look through the windows with sort of furious looks on their faces. And the South Koreans that we were told stationed their tallest, fittest, most hench border guards at that area. So the North Koreans look at them and go, geez, they're getting better food down South. And then I was lucky enough to go to the Bridge of No Return where prisoners were exchanged at the end of the fighting. An American colonel let me go on the bridge and he said, you should be okay. You should be okay.

We haven't had anyone snatched in a while, but you should know there was a sniper with his rifle, his sights trained on the back of your head the whole time you'll be on that bridge. But don't worry, if they decide to shoot, you'll be dead before you hear the bang. And actually at that stage of my career, it took me a while to get my so-called piece to cameras out, the words you say to the camera.

I used to have to do three, four, five, six, seven attempts. That day, I stood on the bridge of no return with a North Korean crosshair on the back of my head, and I delivered it word perfect first time. There's a lesson there, folks. If you want a job doing properly, you're threatened to shoot someone in the back of the head. I'm kidding. Obviously, I do not condone that form of motivational approach. It is the most extraordinary border in the world. Gigantically fortified tunnels underneath, huge amounts of landmines and barbed wire. It's become something of a nature reserve. It's a small area between the lines. It's been overtaken by plants and animals, birds and bugs. And it's the most extraordinary contrast.

On one side, you have a totally globalised, democratic country, South Korea, a vibrant economy, huge cultural sway. It sets trends in movies, gadgets, fashion and music. My kids are keen K-pop fans. On the other side of the border, not so much K-pop going on. The most authoritarian regime in the world,

described as a hermit kingdom, isolated from the rest of the world. Everything's censored. A place where people need to have permission to grow their hair long, where people are punished brutally for what we'd consider minor transgressions. They're thrown into hard labor camps. There's been massive starvation. These two nations have been separated pretty near the 38th parallel for over 70 years, since the end of the Second World War and since, more particularly, the end of the Korean War, which followed it closely. The Korean Peninsula was where the supposedly temporary lines drawn at the end of the Second World War quickly solidified into

immovable boundaries. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about the Korean War. It began on the 25th of June, 1950, when North Korea invaded the South, hoping to reunify the Korean peninsula, sweeping away the American-supported regime in the South. The Americans counterattacked. They pushed into North Korea. That brought China into the war, and years of attritional, positional trench warfare followed, which only came to an end when both sides agreed an armistice on the 27th of July, 1953, 70 years

ago. As I mentioned, those bungalows on the border were never used to thrash out a peace treaty. The two sides have never formally reached an agreement. The armistice has held for 70 years, but technically the war goes on. So to help me untangle the history of the Korean War and the extraordinary relationship between these two diametrically opposed, yet twinned countries,

and look at what their future could hold in the next 70 years, I'm joined today by Dr. Ramon Pacheco-Pardo. He's a professor of international relations at King's College London and Dr. Victor Cha, professor of government at Georgetown University. He also used to be director for Asian affairs at the White House National Security Council. Together, they've just written a book called

Korea, A New History of North and South. And so they're the perfect pair to help me untangle this fascinating region of the world. One which, while we might have been blinded by Ukraine recently, still has the potential to plunge us all into catastrophic nuclear warfare. Sorry about that. Enjoy! T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Ramon and Victor, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Can you guys describe briefly what Korea was like in the 19th century, which I guess was the last time it was sovereign, independent, and united? For the first half of the 20th century, basically, it was occupied by Japan, Imperial Japan, and that was the real occupation of Korea. Prior to the 20th century, it wasn't occupied, but it was a tributary state within the Chinese empire. So in that sense, it wasn't at all under any sort of military occupation as they were in the first half of the 20th century.

They were part of the Chinese empire. And there was a saying back at that time was that they were more Confucian than the Chinese. I mean, in other words, they were so game to being part of the Chinese empire, so willing to be identified with the Chinese empire, that even as a sovereign country, they still were very much a part of that tributary system. There was a brief military occupation by the United States after the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945 that lasted a few years. And then, of course, the division of the country and the formation of two independent states. But can I just come quickly back to the Japanese occupation?

Because it strikes me as so important. Unlike the tributary relationship, that was a time of proper military occupation, suppression of indigenous languages, culture, all that kind of thing that we associate with a more 20th century sort of dictatorial annexation, right? I mean, that would have been brutal and would have been felt in every house across the land. Yeah, I think that's right. Japan's empire spread wide and vast throughout most of what we call the Indo-Pacific today. But in particular, the occupation, the colonial occupation of Korea, as we get into the 1930s, as Japan mobilized for war, was particularly brutal in terms of trying to extinguish all elements of Korean identity, trying to get rid of use of the

language, actually demanding that Korean families change their names to Japanese names, forcing Koreans to give up their worship of Christianity. Western missionary and Christianity activity was most successful in places like Korea and the Philippines, and asking them to give that up and coerce worship of the state religion, Shinto. These are the longest lasting legacies of the Japanese occupation that affect every Korean until today. And what about industrialization? Did the Japanese force the pace of industrial change? And is that partly responsible for where we now regard,

certainly South Korea, as a kind of a major industrial power? There was certainly an influence, right? Like any colonial power, Japan wanted to make sure that it benefited as much as possible from the economic exploitation of the colony. What I think was important to understand is that in the case of Japan's colonization of Korea is that even prior to the occupation, there were those Koreans who were thinking, well, this is the way to go, right? And you start to see, for example, the first railroads being built from the late 19th century, early 20th century, right? Now, when Japan

occupied Korea, you see an acceleration of this process. You saw how Japan actually saw the Korean Peninsula as an entry point to Manchuria, to the rest of China, to the rest of the Asian landmass. And this included the building of railroads, the building of roads, also the building of factories, including, of course, to feed later on the Japanese troops that were expanding throughout what became the Japanese colonial empire. Let's talk about the immediate aftermath of the Second World War right to the extent, let's talk about the hours following Japan's agreement to surrender in August 1945. Was there fighting on Korean soil? Did Soviet troops arrive in North Korea? Or was it a case of the occupying power simply collapsed and there was a vacuum into which the Koreans, the Soviets,

the Chinese, the Americans tried to insert themselves. What happened in those hours and days following the fall of Japan? As you can imagine, at the end of a war with the unconditional surrender of Japan, there were a lot of things that were happening on the ground and in the geopolitics around the peninsula all at the same time. and in the geopolitics around the peninsula all at the same time. So on the one hand, you had the Soviets basically taking advantage of the fact that Japan was losing the Pacific War. So the Soviets entered the Pacific War rather late and saw an opportunity and started to

advance on the Korean Peninsula. The United States, on the other hand, accepted the Japanese surrender, was really not sure what its policy in East Asia should be. It knew that there were all these Japanese colonies, but they weren't really sure what to do with all of them, including the Korean Peninsula. And they were, of course, very distracted because they thought the next major front would be, again, in Europe, this time against the Soviet Union. So not very focused on the region, unsure of what to do with the former colonies, including that of the Korean Peninsula. And then on the Korean Peninsula itself, you had basically different nationalist groups that had been suppressed for 36 years, and now suddenly

like a pressure cooker exploded. And you had literally thousands of groups that claimed to be representing the leadership of the country, both in the North and in the South. It was this sort of chaotic situation in which the United States made the decision to come onto the peninsula, to seek a division of the peninsula, in part to stop the Soviet advance, to ensure that the capital city of Seoul was in the western half of the peninsula, and then come onto the peninsula really unsure of what it wanted to do. General John Hodge, who was the leader of the force that was brought to the Korean peninsula, came onto the peninsula literally with no instructions

other than to try to preserve order. He had no understanding of Korea. His team had gotten maybe two hours of training on Korea, whereas most teams who were going to Japan and the Philippines were getting weeks and weeks of training. And it was really just a hodgepodge of a mess on the peninsula. And I can imagine the Soviets weren't super keen on allowing the Americans to land troops there. Were they still pretty dazed from the detonation of that nuclear weapon? Were they still in the mood to kind of compromise with their wartime allies, the Americans? Yeah, so it still remains a question that's debated among academics and historians as to why Stalin accepted this, because they were already on the peninsula. The US was not. Nobody really knows for sure. I mean, one explanation is that

the US did have the nuclear monopoly at the time, and the Soviets were not ready to challenge the United States, and they saw the United States actually use that weapon in Asia. The other is that, hearkening back to history, that Stalin may have saw this as a U.S. play for spheres of influence on the Korean Peninsula, something that the Japanese actually had considered with the Russians at the beginning of the 20th century, which eventually did not work out and led to the Russo-Japanese War. And the third is that the Soviets were really not ready to occupy the entire peninsula. They didn't have correct information about how many Japanese forces were still left on the peninsula. They weren't sure if they'd have to fight their way all the way down to the southern part of the peninsula because of residual Japanese forces. There were stories about residual Japanese resistance forces that were not willing to abide by the emperor's words. So, you know, nobody really knows for sure.

But in the end, it was one of these things that the United States proposed and Stalin, for whatever reason, accepted. And how temporary was that supposed to be, do you think, even in the minds of policymakers? Was this just a little tidying up at the end of a war and unimaginable that one day, almost a century later, there'd still be two Koreas? I think it's a fair question to ask. The concept that the Allied powers had at the time was something called trusteeship, that Korea would be placed under trusteeship and eventually would be reunited after elections administered by the United Nations.

So I think the idea was that this would be temporary. But very quickly, the Cold War, both in Europe and in Asia became apparent. And I think the handwriting was on the wall when the Soviets would not allow the UN to administer elections in the northern sector of the Korean peninsula. The UN was only allowed to operate in the southern sector. At that point, the point at which I think the division would be permanent. Yeah, I guess the trajectory of the two Koreas must have been pretty profoundly different from that first moment because the Soviets and the Americans both came at it from such different ideological standpoints. It just simply the first decisions made would have been so different from each other, north and south of that parallel.

I think so. I mean, I think if you look at the Kim family, and of course, Kim Il-sung, you could argue he was annoyed by the Soviets to leave North Korea. you could argue he was annoyed by the Soviets to leave North Korea. He wasn't thinking in terms of the reunification of Korea under any sort of democratic rule. He was thinking along a communist line. So if anything, he wanted, as he did, obviously, he tried in 1950 when he invaded South Korea, he was thinking in terms of creating a communist regime, basically, that would be surrounded by two other communist powers.

One of them, of course, the Soviet Union, the one China. And obviously on the southern side, you had the opposite. You had those who were opposed to communism. And you could argue that in the beginning, the leaders of South Korea, eventually, like Xi Man, for example, if there is anything that united them was actually their opposition to communism. Maybe they didn't agree on whether they wanted a democratic country or not. Maybe they didn't fully agree on whether capitals was right for South Korea or not, but certainly they didn't want to be a communist country. The talks that they started to have, you know, some groups in the North, some groups in the South

are potentially going back to being a single country. They have been for many centuries. They stalled very quickly when it was clear that they didn't agree on the type of country that they wanted to have. And then later on, when we saw the United Nations mandated elections that were going to take place, the North refused outright to any sort of election. They thought that this was simply a plot by the United States and its allies and partners to change the nature of the whole of Korea and to make it basically an appendix, if anything, from the US that would be at the forefront of our Cold War confrontations.

So from the beginning, there was no agreement really, heavy to North and South or what type of country they wanted. One thing they agreed on is that they didn't want the division to be permanent. But obviously, here we are decades later, and the division has lasted since 1945. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waste?

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So after five increasingly uneasy years, on the 25th of June 1950, North Korea launched this extraordinary surprise attack on South Korea and attempted to basically reunify the peninsula by force. Let's just gallop through what happened and the war. But tell me first, there are so many different theories about why Stalin and why the North Koreans thought they could get away with this. They thought the Americans wouldn't mind.

What do you guys think? Why did they make that miscalculation? Of course, American troops had left the Korean Peninsula after the elections that took place in the South, and also had been a speech in the United States in which US officials were talking the defense perimeter that the US would have in Asia. Japan was part of the perimeter. perimeter, right, that the US would have in Asia. Japan was part of the perimeter. Philippines was part of it as well. But the Korean Peninsula was not part of it. And on top of that, US Congress had refused an economic support package for South Korea. So I think the North Koreans and Stalin actually had good reason to think that the US had essentially given up on the Korean Peninsula and that it

wouldn't mind an invasion from North Korea and North Korea taking over. It was indeed a huge miscalculation. But if you go back to the early months of the year 1950, you can imagine why Kim Il-sung and Stalin, of course, Mao as well, in China, fresh from his victory in the Chinese Civil War, of course, with the nationalist forces being confined to what is Taiwan today, why they would have thought that they would be able to take over the Korean Peninsula and the US wouldn't really come to the support of South Korea. I always think in terms of diplomatic messages and speeches that Dean Acheson, who is the Secretary of State, you mentioned that he gives the so-called perimeter speech. He forgets or he doesn't include Korea in that outline of

that Asian perimeter. And as a result, it gives a great boost to Mao and the North Koreans and Stalin and allows them to think they can walk away with their peninsula. I mean, that led to years of terrible war. I mean, there can be few diplomatic mistakes in the 20th century more consequential than that. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the other way to answer your question is, how did Stalin miscalculate? In part, the reason is because the United States didn't even know it would go to war for Korea in June of 1950. The defense perimeter speech that Ramon and you referred to was based on a strategic document that the United States White House had concluded in December of 1949, in which it said very clearly that the United States was going to occupy a maritime position in Asia based on Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and maybe Indonesia, then called Formosa, and the Korean Peninsula would not be part of it, hence the defense perimeter speech. So even from the perspective of the America's strategic thinkers like George Kennan and Dean Acheson, they had made a decision at the end of 1949 that Korea was not going to be

in the U.S. defense firm. Then the North Koreans invaded, and some have argued, some scholars and historians have argued, the nature of the North Korean invasion, this sort of blitzkrieg, all-out mechanized armored attack across the Korean Peninsula, so pissed off Harry Truman. It was such a blatant and overt act of aggression. It so pissed off Harry Truman that he said, we had to intervene. The U.S. had to intervene because of the nature of the aggression, because the U.N., this brand new organization that was supposed to preserve world peace, was deeply invested in Korea, right? It had monitored the elections. It had administered

the elections on the Korean Peninsula, at least on one half of it. And so you basically saw 180 degree shift in US strategy in Asia. Before the idea was that we would not get into a ground war in Asia. We would monitor closely our relationship with the newly independent, though communist China. And the focus of resources would be in Europe. And that all changed in June of 1950 because of the North Korean attack. Isn't it interesting? I don't want to get too basic here, but there's some parallels with Ukraine. Whilst Vladimir Putin was engaging in kind of curious, ambiguous, so-called little green men, influence campaigns, separatism, destabilizing, the rest of the world wasn't happy about it, but was prepared to, I think, effectively kind of tolerate that. And it's when you actually send tanks on the road to Kiev, it's when you engage in massive conventional warfare that there's something so shocking about that. It seems to trigger an international response. Very interesting.

I think it's very up comparison because they're having these comparisons about solving, so to speak, Russian invasion of Ukraine along the so-called Korean line, right, and Korean model. But I think what you have said, in my point of view, actually is more apt in the sense that I think Putin made the same mistake. He made the same mistake. He thought, in this case, NATO members led by the US, of course, also UK, Poland, others, that they wouldn't support Ukraine. But once we saw what was happening, how blatant it was, and frankly, the violations of the human rights of the Ukrainian people as soon as the invasion happened, we had to intervene. We, meaning NATO members, had to intervene to support Ukraine.

And I think this case may was clear that there was there were indications that there was going to be this support. Right. And maybe, as Victor said, in the case of Korea back in 1950, this wasn't clear. But as soon as the invasion happened, then I think there was a need to intervene, not only for the sake of Korea, but also to send a broader message to the international community. And I guess if Ukraine is similar, it's not only about Ukraine, it's about the principles that lie behind the support for Ukraine. So you kind of spiral absolutely with what happened in 1915, the Korean Peninsula. I don't want to get too excited about historical parallels, but perhaps not unlike Ukraine, but certainly not unlike the First World War in the West, on the Western Front. There's a period of great movement, of great drama.

The Americans are pushed back to a tiny pocket on the very southern tip of the peninsula. Then there's a great move north, and then the Chinese get involved. There's a counterattack. But quite rapidly, the war settles down into a savage, attritional, positional fight, quite close to where that original demarcation had been, quite close to that parallel where the Korean Peninsula had been divided. Just tell me how the nature of that war led to eventually the kind of armistice that was hammered out. Sure. So the South Korean forces were not ready for this all-out mechanized invasion by the North

and quickly the capital, the government, everybody was pushed to what was called the Pusan Perimeter until MacArthur carried out seaborne intervention through Incheon and then basically pinched North Korea's supply lines. And it was an amazing military maneuver that has been etched in history as one of those high-risk, high-return actions that so made MacArthur sort of the historic figure that he is. But the war went back and forth, up and down the peninsula. As you said, the Chinese intervention, again, another case of missed signaling.

The Chinese were signaling also. There were signs that they were going to intervene that were not heard or picked up by the United States or ignored by the United States. Stalin was involved, particularly providing air power, but wanting to never show formally that he was involved. He even dressed up his Soviet pilots in Chinese PLA uniforms so that they would not, Soviets would not be seen as directly involved in the conflict. And the war went up and down the peninsula. The capital city of Seoul changed hands several times before it settled into this sort of trench warfare stalemate that lasted for two more years. And the parallels, like you said, to Ukraine really are uncanny in a

sense. I was in Korea at a conference this past spring where the wife of Vladimir Zelensky gave the keynote address, and she too drew parallels between what is happening in Ukraine, an unadulterated, all-out attack by one country on another. The historical parallels really are there. And there are some today who argue that at some point this war between Russia and Ukraine should consider an armistice, a ceasefire like the one that we've seen on the Korean Peninsula. I don't necessarily agree with that view at this particular time. But again, the point about the parallels are there.

But this was a very bloody, very costly war in which the entire Korean Peninsula was bombarded into just a piece of rubble. In fact, U.S. Air Force targeters, they literally ran out of targets to bomb on the northern side of the peninsula because of all the ordnance that had been dropped and completely carpet bombed the peninsula. So it was a very destructive war. And as you say, in the end, not much territory changed hands such that the final border of the armistice is not unlike what it was when the two superpowers initially divided the peninsula in 1945. It's a deeply depressing story. Why did both sides come

to seek an armistice? Who was driving that? I think that it is interesting to note that South Korea didn't sign the armistice, right? Also, the leaders, they thought that with the support of the United States, they would still be able to win the war. And there were those that were actually pressing for the war to continue. But I think that the 30th parallel has de facto served as the dividing line between the two Koreas during the Korean War, that it was very difficult, not just impossible, for them to win a war. So there were all these casualties taking place,

Koreans themselves, but of course also foreign forces involved in the war. And this was a war of attrition that was leading to a stalemate, really, and no one was going to be able to win the war. And I think we know less about their thinking on the North Korean side and the communist side, but it seems that at some point Kim Il-sung actually was being pressed by the Soviet Union and by China as well to settle for an armistice because they just couldn't rule out that the US intervention would lead to the end of North Korea, but also in Europe. And there were also some fears that any sort of confrontation between the communist side and the US-led side would escalate and could lead to actual war between the US and the Soviet Union. Another interesting echo, perhaps

for the present, where you may get global superpowers putting pressure on Ukrainians and perhaps Russians in order to stave off escalation and force some kind of armistice, perhaps over the heads of the people like the Ukrainians, who, like the South Koreans you mentioned, might be reluctant to sign, but are pressured to do so. Interesting. I mean, I think it's an interesting parallel. As Ramon said, the United States did want an armistice. And not only did the South Korean president not sign it, there was at one point where he had actively tried to sabotage armistice talks by unilaterally releasing thousands of prisoners of war, which was sort of the main negotiating item,

transactional negotiating item when it came to the armistice negotiations. item when it came to the armistice negotiations. So he actually released them to sabotage the negotiations, forcing the United States to offer Syngman Rhee an alliance, a mutual defense treaty and alliance, to ensure that he would not further disrupt armistice negotiations. It was, in the end, ironically, historically, one of the most transactional alliance creations in history. So it's really humble origins for what is this year, the 70th anniversary, separating what has become an incredibly successful alliance. The difference, I think, with Ukraine, at least for now, is that the United States, the Biden administration has said very clearly that it would not, at least publicly, entertain the idea of an armistice over the head of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian president. How they feel privately as the war continues is another question, but that's at least what they say now.

And tell me about the armistice. An armistice, famously, is not a peace treaty. It's not regularizing relations, recognition. It is an agreement to stop fighting. Was this intended as a step on a peace process or was it always thought this was probably as good as you were going to get? I think it was thought of as a step in a peace process. I think in the end, just like the notion among the great powers was that Korea would eventually be unified after the Japanese left. That was certainly the initial hope, but then power politics sort of took over. And in this case as well, I think that the idea of an armistice was that it would be a ceasefire.

So the war has never officially ended on the Korean Peninsula. There was no peace treaty. The war technically still continues, but it is in an armistice. It is in a ceasefire that has lasted now 70 years. But I think it became very clear once the armistice was signed and the Soviets and the Chinese put a lot of resources and political support behind the North, the United States and Japan did the same in the South, that this division was not going away anytime soon. People would have heard a lot about that division, that difference between the two

Koreas. But just summarize, if you would, the difference in economic and political approach in the South and the North, and perhaps outcomes, quality of life as well. the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. So I think in South Korea, very quickly, there was this consensus that when it came to economic growth, you had to follow the capitalist model,

that you had to open yourself to competition. Of course, there was protectionism within South Korea, but South Korean companies were meant to eventually compete at the global level with their American peers, Japanese peers, and back then Western European peers that you couldn't have a closed economy that would be self-sufficient. And I mentioned self-sufficiency

because if you look at the two areas you have in North Korea that drove economic growth from the 1950s, 1960s onwards, it was this idea that the country should be able to provide for itself. This really never happened because there was always support from China, from the Soviet Union or Russia today. And actually, the support continues all the way until today, especially from China. But there was this idea that the country should be self-sufficient. If you look at traditional economic growth in Korea, well, the North had been the most industrialized area during Japanese colonization. You could have thought back then that it would be able to rebuild its industry and it would

be able to actually maintain this self-sufficient economic model. But that wasn't the case. When it comes to politics, in the beginning, not that many differences in the sense that South Korea was a dictatorship, of course, until 1987-88, when it had the transition to democracy and became a democratic country. Another crucial difference, of course, is that in the case of North Korea, it is the only communist dictatorship in history that has passed on from grandfather to father to son, right? Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un. So this is not only distinct from South Korea,

where now you have elected leaders, but distinct from any other communist regime, which you haven't seen the leaders of the communist regime being able to throw the regime to the sun, right, or to the children. And one last difference, which I find very interesting, is culture, how open South Korean culture has become and how international it has become. And this is not the case with North Korea. And of course, it mixes a bit of Korean tradition with communist ideas about culture.

So it's a culture that has to serve the regime, right? Not a culture that has to be appealing to people, the people of the country or people overseas, right? But it has to actually serve the regime and to portray the regime in a positive light. It has to educate the population, right? So right now we have two countries that are very, very different, actually, much more than in the past would have been, for example,

Western Germany and Eastern Germany. Well, that's very interesting. I'll pick up on that. The problems of reintegrating East and West Germany have been expensive and profound, even decades after that reunification. So you guys think that the gap between North and South Korea is even bigger than that that existed between East and West Germany? Yes, that's right. By almost any metric, the difference between the two Koreas is much wider than it was between the two Germanys when the two Germanys unified. There was much more communication between East and West Germany. There was travel between East and West Germany, as opposed to the complete bifurcation and lack

of any sort of contact between North and South Korea. So there's huge differences there in terms of relative size of the populations as well, in terms of almost any economic metric, the gaps are much wider between North and South Korea. But even more, I think, as Ramon suggested, than the economic differences between the two. as Ramon suggested, then the economic differences between the two, no doubt, as big as the South Korean economy is now, what, the 10th or 12th largest economy in the world, absorbing an economy that has a GNP the size of an average large US company, it would still be a huge feat. But the most important difference in the question is whether you can, as we see in the case of Germany, create unification of the minds of the two people, just because South Koreans are so cosmopolitan

and global now. They still identify with Korean tradition and identity, but they are so cosmopolitan and global now. And you could not find on the face of the earth a more isolated and cloistered population than the one that has developed in North Korea over the last 70 years. Maybe somewhere in a cave somewhere, you might be able to find somebody, but you could not find a bigger difference between these two peoples. Do the South Koreans want to reunify with the North? There is a lot of ambivalence in South Korea, particularly among the younger generation that reads about the division of Korea and the Korean War in history

books. It's not something that they've ever experienced. They are focused on doing well for themselves. They are part of a society that is extremely competitive, where it takes a lot of work to do well for yourself. And the last thing they are worried about or thinking about is taking care of another population of Koreans north of the border. It's a different view among the older population, people in their 60s or older who identify with the notion of a United Korea that do have more of a sense probably of ethnic nationalism or ethnic identity, some of whom maybe, if they're very old, have actually lived through a period in

which Korea was unified, even though it was occupied by a foreign country. They have different views on unification. And we've also looked at this question from the North Korean perspective, where there is actually more identification with unification among the North Korean citizens, not in terms of economic opportunity, but more in terms of ethnic identity or ethnic nationalism. So South Koreans don't identify as much with that, again, because their focus is the world. It's the global market, not the North Korean market. It's freedom and democracy around the world and in South Korea, not on authoritarianism in North Korea. But in North Korea, they don't understand global citizenry. All they understand is Korean citizenry, and that includes unification of North and South Korea.

Well, Ramon and Victor, thank you for galloping me through over 100 years of Korean history. The book is Korea, A New History of South and North. Go and get it, everybody. Congratulations on finishing it. Big achievement. And thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks. This is great.

Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure. you