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The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 239
* The first author’s contribution to the paper is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea
(Grant No., 2016S1A3A2924409).
** Chung-Ang University; E-mail: [email protected]
*** Yonsei University; E-mail: [email protected]
KOREA OBSERVER, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer 2018, pp.239-268
© 2018 by INSTITUTE OF KOREAN STUDIES.
https://doi.org/10.29152/KOIKS.2018.49.2.239
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry:
A Theory of Multilevel Veto Players and the Persistence
of South-North Korean Rivalry, 1954-2007*
Chaekwang You**, Kiho Hahn***
The paper begins with the simple questions of why and how South-North Korean
rivalry or inter-Korean rivalry has persisted for decades. To answer these questions,
I develop a theory of multilevel veto players and test the hypotheses drawn from
the theory for the case of the hostile relations between South and North Korea from
1954 to 2007. Central to the theory is that maintenance of the rivalry is the result
of rival leaders’ efforts to maximize either the national interests of their country or
their own personal interest—staying in power—subject both to the external constraint
of great power intervention and to the internal constraint of challenges by hardline
veto groups. By applying this theory to the case of the inter-Korean rivalry from
1954-2007, the paper finds that the leaders of South and North Korea have maintained
their hostile relations over the past five decades because they believe that maintaining
the relations will help them either maximize their nation’s security interest or increase
their chances of remaining in power, subject to the constraints. Specifically, the
constraints have prevented the rival leaders from resolving the issues in dispute on
the battlefield or at a negotiation table, making the inter-Korean rivalry persist across
time. The findings offer a contribution to an enhanced understanding of the maintenance
process in international rivalries, most notably the inter-Korean rivalry.
KeyWords: South Korea, North Korea, the United States, the Soviet Union, China,
rivalry maintenance, security ties, hardline veto players
240 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
I. Puzzle
The South-North Korean rivalry has long been characterized by the most militarized
and contentious relationship in the history of contemporary international rivalries.1 Not
only have the two rivals experienced one of the bloodiest wars in the post-WWII setting,
they also have continued to engage in numerous small wars and low-intensity conflicts
across time. Worse, there is no sign of improved relationship between the two Koreas
in the near future.
Scholars of international politics and Korean politics offer competing explanations
of why the two Koreas have maintained this costly rival relationship for decades.
Focusing on the 1950 Korean War, some argue that the mistrust and animosity generated
by the war are major causes of the rivalry’s endurance and that the rivalry will persist
unless the two Koreas overcome the war’s legacy (Cumings 2005). It also has been
argued that the North Korean leaders’ extremely belligerent attitude, which originates
from their obsession with regime survival, has led to the consolidation of the rivalry
between the two Koreas (Cha 2012; Khil and Kim 2006). Scholars working in the
realist tradition stress that the security dilemma between North Korea and South Korea
(or the US) has led to the North’s hawkish foreign policy, which in turn results in
the South’s realpolitik response, leading to the persistence of the militarized competition
between the two Koreas (Kang 2003; Kim 2011). According to Harrison (1997), the
great power patrons like the US, China, and Russia (previously as the Soviet Union)
also are often considered as contributing to the persistence of the inter-Korean rivalry
(IKR).
Although quite helpful, however, these studies have examined the impact of such
diverse factors as the 1950 Korean War, the North’s paranoia for regime survival, the
security dilemma, and the influence of neighboring great powers on the endurance of
the IKR separately.2 Accordingly, a compelling and comprehensive model of how the
1. The paper’s definition of international rivalries is built upon Klein, Goertz, and Diehl’s (2006) renewed concept
of international rivalries. According to them, an international rivalry refers to a “dyad between the two same
states characterized by: 1) repeated hostile interaction, 2) high levels of militarized disputes over an extended
period of time, and 3) the interrelation of issues in disputes.” For the details of Klein et al.’s reconceptualization
of international rivalry, see James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl. 2006. “The New Rivalry Dataset:
Procedure and Patterns.” Journal of Peace Research Vol 43 (3) (May): 332-340.
2. The term “inter-Korean rivalry” (IKR) is borrowed from Kim’s historical sketch of the entrenched hostility
between South and North Korea. See Samuel S. Kim. 2011. “The Rivalry Between the Two Koreas.”
in Asian Rivalries, edited by Sumit Ganguly and William R. Thompson, 145. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 241
factors combine to yield the decades-long, costly IKR has yet to be theorized. Moreover,
most studies of the North-South rivalry remain silent about the impact of domestic
political conditions either in the North or in the South on the endurance of the IKR.
Noting this weakness, the paper proposes a novel theory of the maintenance of
the international rivalries. By interweaving the key insights from rational choice
approach and theory of veto players, it develops a “theory of multiple veto players”
for rivalry maintenance and demonstrates the utility of the theory by applying it to
the case of the maintenance of the IKR, 1954-2007.
Central to the theory is that leaders of rivalries must maintain their hostile relations
across time because they believe that maintaining the relations will help them maximize
either the security interests of their countries or their personal interest—remaining in
power—subject to the external constraint of great power patrons’ intervention and to
the internal constraint of challenges from hardline veto players at home. Both constraints,
the theory maintains, prevent the rival leaders from having a motivated interest in
resolving the issues in dispute either on the battlefield or at a negotiation table, making
the rivalries persist across time.
The paper is constructed as follows: the first section provides a detailed review
of existing studies of the endurance of hostile South-North Korean relations, with an
emphasis on both the strengths and weaknesses they have displayed. The second section
presents a novel and comprehensive theoretical framework—a theory of multilevel veto
players —and derives a set of hypotheses from the theory. The third section offers
an in-depth and crucial case study on the maintenance process in the IKR from 1954
to 2007 and presents the empirical results, which largely confirm the hypotheses. The
paper concludes by highlighting both an avenue for future research and policy-relevant
implications.
II. Debate on Durability of the IKR
Scholars of international politics and Korean politics have striven to offer
explanations of why South and North Korea have continued to compete militarily against
each other. Focusing on the initial shock, the 1950 Korean War, Bruce Cumings argues
that the mistrust and animosity created by the war are the major causes of the
maintenance of the IKR. Specifically, he asserts that “the true tragedy is that the War
solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace.
Today the tensions and the problems remain” (Cumings 2005, 298). From Cumings’s
242 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
standpoint, therefore, the two Koreas’ failure to solve the issues in dispute in the war
is a direct cause of the decades-long persistence of the IKR.
Centering on the extremely belligerent preferences of the North’s top leadership,
Victor Cha (2012) argues that the hostile relations between the two Koreas have persisted
for decades partly because of the leadership’s consistent strategy of regime survival
and partly because of the South and US’s inconsistent, often contradictory engagement
policies, which have widely oscillated between military confrontation and diplomatic
compromise. Thus, Cha predicts that the IKR will persist unless the North experiences
a major change in its totalitarian governance structure and unless the South and its
ally the US abandon a policy of compromising with the North.
Contrary to Cha’s argument, David Kang emphasizes the security dilemma between
North Korea, South Korea, and the United States. Regarding causes of the IKR’s
persistence, therefore, Kang maintains that, given the prevalence of the security dilemma
in the Korean peninsula, the IKR persists for two major reasons: 1) the United States
refuses to give security guarantees to North Korea until it proves it has dismantled
its weapons program, and 2) the North refuses to disarm until it has security guarantees
from the United States. Hence, he claims, stalemate or rivalry maintenance is a natural
outcome (Kang 2003, 43).
Selig S. Harrison pays greater attention to the role of the US in the persistence
of the IKR, claiming that the indefinite continuation of the American military presence
in Korea is at the heart of the persistence of the hostility between South and North
Korea (Harrison 2002, 347). According to him, the US has made the IKR persist for
many decades, resting upon a questionable set of assumptions: 1) US disengagement
would create a power vacuum; 2) China, Japan, and Russia would move into this
vacuum, competing for dominance; and finally, 3) a reunified Korea without US
protection would seek a military alliance with one of its neighbors. Without any
meaningful change in the assumptions, therefore, Harrison claims that the continuation
of the IKR is inevitable.
Samuel Kim’s (2011) study is one of the few in which the theory of international
rivalries is directly applied to an analysis of causes of durability of the IKR. According
to Kim, the IKR is a militarized competition between two divided, incomplete
nation-states, which has long displayed the features of zero-sum and often violent
fratricidal politics of national identity mobilization (Kim 2011, 145). As to the causes
of the maintenance of the rivalry, Kim argues that it has persisted over an extended
period because the two Koreas have constantly failed to end a “legitimacy-cum-identity
war.” He also adds that Korea’s unique place in the geopolitical sphere where four
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 243
great powers—the US, China, Russia, and Japan—have competed with one another
to increase their influence, has contributed to the perpetuation of inter-Korean hostility.
Although quite helpful, however, these studies have examined the impact of such
diverse factors as the 1950 Korean War, North Korean leaders’ paranoia for regime
survival, the security dilemma between the two Koreas, the continuation of US military
presence, and irreconcilable identities on the endurance of the IKR separately.
Accordingly, how these diverse factors combine to yield decades-old costly IKR has
yet to be theorized. Moreover, the impact of the two Koreas’ domestic politics on the
maintenance of the IKR has received little attention. Noting these weaknesses, the
following section develops a novel and comprehensive theoretical framework in which
domestic political factors as well as external factors are subtly combined with the rival
leaders’ concern both for national interest and personal interest to explain the persistence
of the IKR.
III. Analytical Framework: A Theory of Multilevel Veto Players
In this section, we present a theoretical framework of the rivalry maintenance, which
can be described as a theory of multilevel veto players, by interweaving the insights
from the theory of rational choice and of veto players. The theory of multilevel veto
players consists of two parts: 1) rational political leaders having multiple goals and
2) multiple levels of veto players, meaning both external and internal veto players.
Above all, the theory posits that rival leaders have two broad goals. First, they
seek to promote the security interests of their country (Huth 1998; Huth and Allee
2001). Second, they seek to maximize their personal interests, primarily staying in power
(BDM 1994). With two such goals in mind, rival leaders try to maximize their interests
subject to both external and internal constraint.
Regarding the constraints rival leaders may encounter, the theory focuses on the
constraints from both external and internal veto players. To identify the veto players,
we draw on George Tsebelis’s theory of veto players. In his pioneering work on veto
player, Tsebelis defines veto players as “partisan actors whose agreement is needed
to alter existing policies” (Tsebelis 2002, 31). Major veto players at the national level
are the executive body (the president and prime minister) and ruling and opposition
parties in the lower and upper houses in a legislative body. According to him, a change
in the status quo of a policy requires a unanimous decision of all veto players. Grounded
in this idea, Tsebelis demonstrates that the probability of making policy changes
244 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
decreases as the number of veto players increases and as their preference diverges.
Policy adherence to the status quo thus becomes more likely as the number of veto
players increases and their preferences diverge (Tsebelis 2002, 19-37).
We apply and expand the concept of veto players for the explanation of the
maintenance of international rivalries. Specifically, we make the assertion that there
are two types of veto players—external and internal—that might be involved in the
maintenance process of international rivalries. At the external level, the theory asserts
that great power patrons, which might be involved in rivalries through security ties,
serve as key veto players who will prevent rival leaders from resolving the issues in
dispute on the battlefield. The ties between great powers and the states engaged in
rivalries help rival leaders both develop and consolidate mutually hostile regimes by
facilitating the provision of military and economic aid from the powers to the regimes
(Thompson and Colaresi 2011; Bacheli 2001; Kapur 2005). Such aid, however, often
encourages the leaders in rivalries to have inflated hopes for military success and to
be rushed into military conflicts against each other.
When the leaders are engulfed in military conflicts against each other, however,
the great power patrons, who are often obliged to intervene in the conflicts due to
the security ties, are likely to prevent rival leaders from escalating the conflicts to a
full-scale war. Keenly aware of the prohibitively expensive costs from intervention in
head-to-head military confrontation between rivals, the patrons are likely to press rival
leaders not to escalate the conflicts partly by threatening to use their military force
and partly by hinting at withdrawing military and political support for the rival leaders
(You 2016; Oberdorfer 1997; Bacheli 1991). Knowing that their country’s national
security interests and their personal interest of remaining in power will be significantly
compromised if the patrons’ military action and pressure are set in motion, rival leaders
are likely both to end the conflicts in stalemate and to return to the previous status
quo without achieving their stated military goals. In this way, external veto players—the
great power patrons—will make rivalries persist through the failure of battlefield
solutions
The failure of battlefield solutions often generates the so-called sobering effect, which
may encourage rival leaders to bring the issues under contention to the negotiation
table (Contas 1991, 141).3 Faced with attempted negotiation to end rivalries, however,
3. The “sobering effect” refers to the moment in which two rivals come to realize a real danger of all-out
war after escalating their small-scale military conflict. The effect often leads rival leaders to seek negotiated
solutions rather than military ones. For greater discussion on the effect, see Dimitri Constas, eds. 1991.
The Greek-Turkish Conflict in the 1990s: Domestic and External Influences. New York: St. Martin Press:
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 245
various hardline veto players, such as conservative ruling and opposition parties,
militaries, and various antagonistic societal actors, often step in. Armed with hawkish
threat perceptions and preferences, these hardline veto players structure domestic
political conditions such that rival leaders may be prevented from building consensus
on how to resolve the issues under contention at the negotiation table.
Specifically, the theory contends, hardline veto players at home constrain their
leaders from compromising with foreign enemies at the negotiation table in several
ways. First, hardline veto players within government, who might predominate in rivalries
against the backdrop of decades-long hostile relations, make it extremely difficult for
rival leaders to set the negotiated termination of rivalries as the primary policy agenda.
Although the rival leaders may agree to negotiate ways to resolve rivalries, the veto
players may compound the negotiation by narrowing down the range of diplomatic
bargaining. Finally, the veto groups will prevent the leaders from implementing the
measures by hinting at removing the rival leaders from power if they over-cooperate
with foreign rivals (Huth 1998; Hensel 1999; Colaresi 2004). Knowing that further
diplomatic movement may threaten their tenure at home, therefore, the rival leaders
abandon their efforts to resolve disputed issues at the negotiation table, thereby making
rivalries persist through the failure to negotiate solutions.
Taken together, the theory of multilevel veto players postulates that rivalry
maintenance is the result of rival leaders’ efforts to attain two broad goals: 1) promoting
the national security interest of their country and 2) maximizing their personal interests
(staying in power), subject to both external and internal constraints. At the external
level, the great powers having security ties to both parties in a rivalry may prevent
rival leaders from resolving their contentious issues on the battlefield by hinting at
military intervention and at withdrawing military and political support. At the
domestic/internal level, the hardline veto players block the leaders from resolving their
issues at the bargaining table by hinting at political punishment. Knowing these external
and internal constraints might not only undermine the national security of their countries,
but also risk their domestic political survival, rival leaders often delay or discard both
battlefield and negotiated solutions and return to the previous status quo, thereby making
rivalries persist across time. These arguments lead to the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. External veto players or great power patrons prevent rival leaders
having multiple goals from resolving the issues under contention on
the battlefield, thereby making rivalries persist across time.
134.
246 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
Hypothesis 2. Internal veto players, notably hardline veto players, inhibit rival
leaders with the goal of remaining in power from resolving the issues
under contention at the negotiation table, thereby making rivalries
persist across time.
IV. Case Study: The Persistence of the IKR, 1954-2007
To test the hypotheses drawn from this theory of multilevel veto players, I used
the method of hypothesis-testing crucial case study. The method has been utilized widely
by various studies in political science because of its potential strength in testing
theoretically driven hypotheses against a crucial case (Eckstein 1975). A case is crucial
if the facts of that case are central to either the disconfirmation or confirmation of
a theory (Gerring 2007; Levy 2008). Following this logic, the maintenance of the
South-North Korean rivalry, 1954-2007, is treated as a crucial or illustrative case, which
can be used to confirm a new theory—a theory of multilevel veto players.
As previously discussed, existing studies on the IKR have shown little interest in
the identification of a causal mechanism by which the two divided Koreas are forced
to maintain costly and deadly rivalrous relations across time. The legacy of the 1950
Korean War, North Korean leaders’ paranoia for regime survival, the security dilemma
between the two Koreas, the continuation of the American military presence, irreconcilable
identities, and the geopolitical curse have been examined separately as possible causes
of the endurance of the IKR. However, the studies have rarely examined how the
variables are inextricably intertwined to produce the persistence of the IKR.
Therefore, the paper develops a novel and parsimonious theoretical framework called
theory of multilevel veto players, in which the variables such as great power intervention,
challenge of domestic hardline groups, and leaders’ concerns for both national and
personal interests are subtly combined to explain the persistence of international rivalries.
The case study on the maintenance of the IKR, 1954-2007, is conducted to confirm
the theory.
The IKR case substantially confirms the validity of the theory of multilevel veto
players by proving that the causal chains that the theory generates are present. The
framework identifies two causal mechanisms of rivalry maintenance: 1) an international
rivalry is likely to persist if rival leaders having the goal of maximizing both national
interest of their country and their personal interest (staying in power) experience great
power intervention in their military conflicts, and 2) an international rivalry is likely
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 247
to persist if the leaders having the goals face challenges from hardline veto players
who oppose a negotiated termination of the rivalry. If these causal mechanisms are
present in the IKR, a theory of multilevel veto players will be confirmed. The results
show that the mechanisms are very clearly manifested in the case of the IKR, 1954-2007,
and that the case substantially confirms the theory.
V. Origin of the IKR
The origin of the IKR cannot be explained without reference to the 1950 Korean
War. While the two Koreas had already shown some inter-communal hostility since
their independence from Japan in 1948, it was only after the Korean War that they
displayed the essential features of an international rivalry. The 1950 Korean War was
one of the bloodiest wars since WWII. Although the figures are uncertain, a widely
accepted estimate of Korean War casualties is that 900,000 Chinese and 520,000 North
Korean soldiers were killed or wounded, as were about 400,000 UN Command troops,
nearly two-thirds of them South Koreans. US casualties included 36,000 dead (Oberdorfer
1997, 9-10). After the 1953 cease-fire agreement that officially ended the years-long
bloody battle on both the South Korean and North Korean sides, the two Koreas fell
into a trap of international rivalry in which the vicious cycle of military confrontation
and fragile peace proceeds indefinitely.
The disastrous outcome of the war played a pivotal role in the rise and consolidation
of South-North Korean rivalry. Above all, the war encouraged the leaders and public
in the two Koreas to develop extremely hostile enemy images of each other and created
the regimes in which they could institutionalize hostility in almost every aspect of the
two Koreas’ societies. Anti-communist regimes in the South such as those of Rhee
Seung-man, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan, for example, systematically
demonized the North’s regime and claimed that the whole legitimacy over the entire
Korean peninsula belongs to only the South (Kim 2011). The situation in the North
was not much different from that in South Korea. Grounded in the battlefield savagery
of the war, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung not only depicted the South as a great
enemy, but also pursued the policy of revolutionizing the South if the situation was
ripe (Cha 2012).
Believing on both sides that its rival’s next military invasion was only a matter
of time, the two rivals rapidly strengthened their militaries and sought to pursue a
policy of mutual denial. Consequently, the two Koreas began to engage in a fierce
248 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
arms race, which often resulted in numerous military confrontations just short of war.
At both the military and psychological levels, therefore, the two Koreas began to display
an archetypical feature of an international rivalry—an entrenched hostility.
VI. Security Ties and IKR Maintenance Through Failures
of Battlefield Solutions
The 1950 Korean War structured external security conditions on the Korean peninsula
such that the two Koreas might continue their mutually antagonistic relationships across
time in two major ways. First, it encouraged the leaders of the two Koreas to link
the security fate of their countries to great power patrons to ensure a continued military
confrontation against each other. Through security pacts with the patrons, the two Koreas
were given a chance to improve their military capabilities on both the quantitative and
qualitative dimensions and prompted to be involved in numerous military conflicts in
the belief of a decisive victory. Second, the patrons, notably the US, has stepped into
military conflicts between the two Koreas to avoid the escalation of the conflicts into
a full-fledged war and to prevent them from resolving their disputed issues on the
battlefield, thereby promoting the persistence of the IKR.
A. Security Ties, Restored Power Parity, and Military Conflicts in the IKR
Since the formulation of the security pacts with the two Koreas, great power patrons
have served as key external veto players who exert a strong influence on the maintenance
of the highly contentious relations between them. The United States, which became
a major security patron for South Korea by signing a mutual defense treaty in 1953,
for instance, offered approximately $356 million in aid in 1958, almost three times
South Korea’s total budget of $143 million. The South also relied heavily on the United
States for the acquisition of weapons, equipment, and logistics (Moon and Lee 2009).
In 1970, the US Congress also approved an extra $100 million military aid package
to South Korea with the commitment that the US would continue to help South Korea
modernize its military capabilities (Oberdorfer 1997).
The North also secured military and economic support from China and the Soviet
Union by signing the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship treaty
and the DPRK-Soviet Union Agreement on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual
Assistance, both in 1961. It is still quite vague how much military aid China gave
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 249
Figure 1. Changes in Two Koreas’ Military Expenditure, 1960-2004
05000
10000
15000
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000year
ROKmilexp DPRKmilexp
† ROKmilexp refers to the levels of South Korea’s military expenditure, while
DPRKmilexp refers to the levels of North Korea’s military expenditure.
†† Both the South and North’s military expenditures are expressed in millions of
current-year US dollars.
††† Source: Correlates of War (COW)’s Military Expenditure Data (v. 5.0)
to the North from 1960 through 1970, but some historical sources show that China
directly transferred fighter jets like MIG-15s, MIG-17s, and Shenyang F-4s, along with
36 submarines to the North and helped it create six fighter regiments and one infantry
division throughout the 1960s (Cassidy 1980). The Soviet Union and China also served
as fraternal countries, which significantly contributed to North Korea’s reconstruction.
According to documents from the USSR Trade Ministry, exactly one-third of
reconstruction aid to the North came from the USSR and 29.4 percent from China
(Armstrong 2005).
Such a profligate flow of military and economic aid from the security patrons to
the two Koreas allowed the leaders on both sides to achieve a near parity in their
military prowess. The two Koreas’ rough military balance, which had persisted for nearly
two and a half decades, began to collapse in the late-1980s. Figure 1 illustrates how
the military balance between the two Koreas has changed across time.
As displayed in Figure 1, the two Koreas had maintained relatively rough military
parity until the late 1980s. During the period of 1960-1988, therefore, the mutual hostility
between the two rivals hit the highest point. The near parity in military capabilities
allowed the two Koreas to engage in a fierce militarized competition over various issues
250 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
Year MID Names
1964 DMZ Clashes
1965 DMZ Clashes
1966 DMZ Clashes
1967 DMZ Clashes
1968 A 31-member commando team infiltrated the Blue House.
1969 Six North Korean soldiers infiltrated Huksan and Chumunjin.
1970 Three North Korean infiltrators were shot to death at Kumchon.
1974 North Korean patrol vessels sank two South Korean fishing boats. A first North Korea dig was found.
1975 Two North Korean infiltrators were intercepted at Kochang.
1976 The Tree Trimming Incident occurred.
1978 A third North Korean infiltration tunnel dug under DMX was discovered. A team of three North Korean armed agents killed four South Korean citizens.
1979 Three North Korean agents were intercepted while trying to infiltrate the DMZ.
1980 Three North Koreans tried to infiltrate the South across the estuary of Han River. Three North Korean agents were shot dead off the southern coast of Kyungsang Namdo.
1981 Three North Korean agents were shot to death in the upper stream of Imjin River.
1982 Two North Korean infiltrators were spotted on the east coast.
1983 The North bombed the Martyr's Mausoleum in Rangoon, Myanmar.
1984 A North Korean agent killed two residents of Taegu, South Korea.
1985 A North Korean spy ship was sunk by the South Korean navy off the coast of Pusan.
1986 A bomb blast at Kimpo International Airport in Seoul killed five and wounded over 30.
1987 Two North Korean terrorists bombed a Korean Airline Boeing 707.
1990 The fourth North Korean infiltration tunnel dug under the DMZ was discovered.
1992 Three North Koreans in South Korean uniform were shot dead at Cholwon, Kwangwondo.
1995 A North Korean patrol boat fired on a South Korean fishing vessel, killing three South Korean fishermen.
1996 Twenty-six North Korean military personnel landed on the east coast from the submarine. Twenty-five North Korean infiltrators were shot to death.
1997 Five North Korean soldiers opened fire at South Korean positions after crossing the Military Demarcation Line in the Cholwon sector. Three North Korean patrol boats opened fire at South Korean patrol boats.
1998 A North Korean midget submarine was seized after it was spotted entangled in South Korean fishing nets off the South Korean town of Sokcho. North Korea test-fired a new three-stage taepodong-1 missile.
1999 Several North Korean ships provoked a nine-day naval confrontation off South Korea's western coast in the Northern Limit Line (NLL).
2001 A North Korean patrol boast crossed the NLL.
2002 A gun battle erupted between the two Koreas' naval ships in the Yellow Sea.
2003 North Korea test-fired a short-range anti-ship missile into the East Sea.
Source: Correlates of War MID data set (v. 4.0); Nanto 2003 “North Korea: Chronology of Provocations 1950-2003.”
Table 1. MIDs Between the Two Koreas, 1964-2003
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 251
such as security, political legitimacy, and national identity.
With inflated hope of military success from the aid given by the great power patrons,
North Korean leaders believed that the North’s enhanced military standing changed
the security environment in the Korean peninsula to overwhelm the South in key strategic
posts such as the DMZ and the Yellow Sea and East Sea. Believing that initiating
and winning the conflicts against the South would help him not only maximize the
North’s security interest, but also his domestic interest of remaining in power, Kim
Il-sung engineered numerous militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) against the South
(Kim 2011). Facing the North’s military provocations, however, the South’s leaders,
including Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, did not back down. Knowing the
negative consequences of the North-initiated MIDs on the nation’s security interest and
their power base at home, these authoritarian South Korean leaders confronted the
North’s provocations with strong military resolve. Table 1 presents a summary of all
major MIDs between the two Koreas during the period of 1964-2003.
As illustrated in Table 1, the two Koreas experienced MIDs in nearly every year
from 1954 onwards. Except for the military disputes that remained purely threats, all
other MIDs have been associated with actual use of military force for either offensive
or defensive purpose. What is more interesting, however, is that an overwhelming
majority of the conflicts—approximately 67 percent of all MIDs—occurred when the
two rivals maintained a rough parity in their military capabilities. At the center of the
MIDs was an unwarranted belief on each side that the aggressor would achieve a short
and decisive victory against the other on the battlefield, relying on the nation’s enhanced
military standing its great power patrons helped create.
Each of the MIDs added a new layer of hostility to the existing one, which has
led to further consolidation of the rivalrous relationship between the two Koreas across
time. Provoked and angered by military attacks from each other, the leaders of the
IKR have become willing to socialize both the elites and public to believe that the
two Koreas would not coexist peacefully and that the hostility between the rivals should
be coped with militarily at the last moment.
B. Fatal MIDs, US Interventions, and Failure of Military Solutions During
the Cold War
Rivals often try to end their hostile relations on the battlefield while they persist
across time (Thompson 2011). However, it is important to notice that not all militarized
disputes between rivals lead to actual termination of rivalries. Out of the disputes, it
252 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
is the fatal militarized dispute that brings the leaders of rivalries closer to ending their
hostilities on the battlefield. In the fatal MIDs, the leaders of rivalries militarily confront
each other with military resolve of almost the same strength, often escalating the disputes
into a major military clash. In the case of the IKR, the two rivals have experienced
approximately 30 MIDs during the period 1960-2003. However, only six of the MIDs
(approximately 20 percent) were “fatal” in the sense that the two Korean leaders were
dragged into a near-war situation.
However, it should be noted that in those fatal MIDs, the two warring parties—the
South and the North—have systematically been prevented from resolving their issues
in dispute by fighting, thereby maintaining their hostile relations. The major reason
for this is because the two rivals’ great power patrons, notably the United States, the
South’s security patron, has intervened in nearly every fatal MID and pressed the leaders
of the two Koreas not to escalate the MIDs into a full-scale war. Worried that the
escalation of the MIDs would lead to the outbreak of a second Korean War, in which
its intervention would automatically be required, the US pushed South and North Korean
leaders into the adoption of self-restraint by hinting of military retaliation on the North
and of political and military sanctions on the South. The leaders, who were concerned
about the negative effect of the US intervention on the national interest of their countries
and on their political survival, therefore, curtailed or even discarded their efforts to
cope militarily with each other, helping the IKR persist.
The first fatal MID in the IKR was the North’s infiltration into the Blue House,
a residence of South Korean President Park Chung-hee on January 12, 1968. The military
clashes the infiltration stimulated brought the two Koreas to the brink of a full-fledged
war for the first time since the 1950 Korean War. Built on the confidence that military
assistance by China and the Soviet Union created within the North’s government, Kim
Il-sung dispatched a 31-man commando team to assassinate South Korean president
Park Chung-hee and to overthrow his military regime. The military clashes between
the commandos and Korean military officials led to the killings of 30 North Korean
infiltrators and of several South Korean civilians and members of the Korean National
Police (Cha 2012, 55).
Surviving the North’s commando attack, the hawkish Park Chung-hee immediately
ordered the South Korean army to prepare for a massive military retaliation against
North Korea. Accordingly, another war between the two Koreas was a very real
possibility. Considering Park’s plan costly as well as risky, however, the Johnson
administration forced the South to stop its retaliation plan. Cyrus Vance, the former
US vice president who was dispatched into Seoul as a special envoy of President
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 253
Johnson, for instance, made it clear to President Park that “the South should not launch
its independent military attack against the North” (Kwak 2003). Fearing that the
retaliation would lead to US withdrawal of its military and political support for his
military regime, President Park finally gave up the retaliation plan. Because there was
not a decisive battle resulting in the declaration of a winner and a loser, the two countries
relapsed into the restive state of the IKR, despite the North’s 1968 attack.
Another fatal military conflict between the two Koreas, dubbed the “Tree Trimming
Incident,” occurred in 1976. On the morning of August 18, 1976, South Korean
workmen, accompanied by a 10-man American and South Korean security team, were
trying to trim the boughs of a big tree that obstructed the view between two guard
posts manned by US and ROK forces within the Joint Security Area. Considering the
trimming a violation of the 1953 armistice, the North’s military officials demanded
that the trimming stop and killed US Captain Arthur Bonifas and Lieutenant Mark
Barrett (Koh 1977). The South Korean Army was on high alert and ordered to prepare
for a major retaliatory attack on the North.
Facing the rapidly emerging chance of war between the two Koreas, however, US
President Gerald Ford stepped quickly into the incident and vehemently opposed the
South’s reprisal. Ford especially emphasized that “in the case of Korea to gamble with
an overkill might broaden very quickly into a full military conflict” (Oberdorfer 1997,
79). Keenly aware that military retaliation without US consent would worsen the South’s
security interest by creating tension in the US-ROK military alliance, President Park
finally agreed with the US to launch only a limited military operation, called “Operation
Paul Bunyan,” in which the two allies removed the tree (Oberdorfer 1997). Accordingly,
the two Korean War rivals were prevented again from resolving the hostility from the
incident through open conflict.
The pattern of military conflict between South and North Korea changed from direct
military provocations and infiltrations to indirect military encounters, as exemplified
by the North’s terrorist attacks on the South that began in early 1980. While the North
continued to display its extreme belligerence toward the South, it began to exploit
terrorist tactics as a major tool for overthrowing the South’s regime. During the state
visit of President Chun Doo-hwan to Rangoon, Burma, for instance, North Korean
soldiers detonated a powerful bomb. In the thunderous explosion, thirteen members
of the South Korean cabinet and an ambassador to Myanmar were killed (Yoon 2003).
Anger and animosity toward the North poured out from all levels in the South.
Accordingly, South’s Korean commanders in Chun’s government proposed that the
South Korean air force bomb the North in retaliation.
254 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
However, the South’s plans to launch a counterattack on the North were delayed
several times and eventually abandoned due to strong US pressure on Chun’s government.
In a visit to President Chun, Richard Walker, the US ambassador to the ROK, made
a strong argument against retaliation by citing US President Reagan’s call for the South’s
self-restraint, even though he said that “North Korea was behind the attack” (Oberdorfer
1997, 143). Believing that military retaliation against the US would have resulted in
the Reagan administration’s withdrawal of political support for his regime, which was
severely suffering from a lack of democratic legitimacy, President Chun had to cancel
all planned counterattacks against the North. Consequently, the two Koreas were
deprived of yet another chance to wrestle with each other on the battlefield.
C. Continued Combat, US Interference, and Failed MIDs in the Post-Cold
War
North and South Korea continued their fierce, militarized competition during the
1990s. Among other incidents was the “Gangneung submarine infiltration of 1996,”
which brought the two rivals again to the brink of all-out war. On September 18, 1996,
North Korea covertly dispatched a spy submarine around the coast of Gangneung, though
it became stranded in the East Sea around Gangneung and was discovered by South
Korean civilians (Oberdorfer 1997, 387-388). The incident led to a deadly military
showdown between the North’s infiltrators and South Korean Special Forces at the
Chil-Sung Mountain in Kangwon province. Nearly 25 North Korean infiltrators were
killed in the fighting, while the South suffered 12 casualties, including army personnel
and civilians.
The North’s submarine intrusion provoked South Korean President Kim Young-sam
into declaring that “ROK forces had selected twelve strategic targets in the North for
air, naval, and ground retaliation” (Oberdorfer 1997). Shocked by the South’s extremely
belligerent stance, the US accelerated its diplomatic effort to push Kim’s government
into the adoption of self-restraint. During the summit of the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation forum in Manila on November 24, for instance, President Clinton asserted
that “South Korean forces would not initiate military action against the North without
American consent” (Oberdorfer 1997, 392). At the same time, Clinton officials pressed
the North hard to issue a statement of deep regret. Knowing that a military attack
in retaliation would undermine the South’s national interest by complicating the
four-party peace talks process about the North’s nuclear crisis, Kim’s government
accepted the statement and cancelled the planned counterattacks against the North.
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 255
The two rivals became engulfed again in a series of deadly military confrontations
throughout the 2000s. During this period, the rivals were the closest to a real war
than ever before because they directly collided with each other in the Yellow Sea,
using heavy machine guns and cannons. On June 10, a dozen North Korea crab-fishing
boats, escorted by six North Korean patrol boats, were confronted by South Korean
patrol boats, which interpreted the boats’ move as crossing the NLL. The South’s patrol
boats pushed the North’s vessels to get back across the NLL. Provoked by the South’s
blunt push to the NLL, a North patrol boat fired a shot toward a South patrol boat,
which was answered by a hail of fire from the South’s vessels, leading to a 14-minute
gun battle on the Yellow Sea (Oberdorfer 1997, 423).
Alarmed by the battle and worried about the risk of it escalating into major naval
warfare, however, the US quickly intervened by dispatching its naval force to the area
and pressed South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to stop hunting down the North’s
vessels (Van Dyke et al. 2003, 145). Knowing that further military operation against
the North would lead to ROK-US alliance friction and that it would encourage the
US to withdraw its support for his reconciliation policy toward the North, therefore,
President Kim displayed remarkable self-restraint in the use of counter-military force,
thereby ending the first Yeonpyeong naval battle.
The first naval clash between the two Koreas in the Yellow Sea sowed the seeds
for the second naval battle in 2002. Believing that the naval battle of June 1999 was
a shameful defeat, the North launched a pre-emptive military strike on the South’s
patrol boats while the South’s attention was on the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup. Along
the NLL near Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, a North Korean patrol boat opened
fire with its 85-mm gun and scored a direct hit on one of the South Korean patrol
boats, resulting in the deaths of six South Koreans, serious injury to nine South Korean
sailors, and the sinking of the South Korean frigate (Oberdorfer 1997, 424-425).
Responding to the North’s fire, other South Korean patrol boats used their 40-mm and
20-mm guns against the North Korean boats. About ten minutes later, two more patrol
boats and two corvettes reinforced the South Korean vessels and severely damaged
one of the North Korean craft (Van Dyke et al. 2003, 146).
The second naval battle near the Yeonpyeoung islands made the possibility of a
second Korean war real; however, the US gave a speedy and vigilant response to the
battle, preventing the two antagonists from crossing the red line. The US-led UN
Command proposed military talks in which the two Koreas were able to discuss ways
to end the clash (Van Dyke, et al. 2003, 146-147). The US also urged both the South
and the North to show self-restraint in the battle and to not escalate it into a major
256 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
military clash. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was desperate to obtain
continued US support for his Sunshine policy, was also ready to accept the US proposal
of self-restraint. Accordingly, the South endured some damage from the battle and
returned to its previous posture, which led to the North’s self-restraint as well. Thus,
the IKR had to persist despite the two deadly naval clashes in the Yellow Sea. Table
2 presents a list of all fatal MIDs between the two Koreas, the presence/absence of
intervention by the great power patrons, and outcomes of the disputes from 1954 to
2007.
Year Name of Fatal MIDs Great Power Intervenor Outcome†
1968 Blue House Attack United States Stalemate
1976 Tree Trimming Incident United States Stalemate
1983 Rangoon Bombing United States Stalemate
1996 Gangneung Infiltration United States Stalemate
1999 1st Yeonpyeong Naval Battle United States Stalemate
2002 2nd Yeonpyeong Naval Battle United States Stalemate
Source: Correlates of War MID data set (v. 4.0); Nanto, et al. 2003; Oberdorfer 1997
†The definition of a stalemate is derived from Goertz, et al (2005). A stalemate is considered to occur when
neither of two warring parties or combatants achieves a decisive military victory on the battleground.
Table 2. Fatal MIDs, Great Power Interventions, and Outcomes of the MIDs
As shown in Table 2, it is not surprising that a stalemate has always resulted when
the two Koreas fought against each other and that the IKR has persisted despite the
battles. The major reason why the MIDs between the two Koreas resulted in stalemate
is that the US has stepped in at nearly every MID between the two Koreas and prevented
either of the two sides from prevailing on the battlefield. Fearing that the disputes
might escalate into the Second Korean War, which would require its participation, the
US has tirelessly intervened in the MIDs between the two Koreas and prevented them
from crossing the line into all-out war partly by hinting at massive military retaliation
against the North and partly by hinting at withdrawing its military and political support
from the South. Knowing the repercussions of US intervention in the security interest
of their countries and their standing at home, the leaders of the two Koreas have been
forced to display self-restraint in the disputes even though neither achieved a decisive
victory, thereby fostering the persistence of the IKR across time.
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 257
VII. Failure of Negotiated Solutions and Persistence of the IKR
The 1950 Korean War structured domestic political conditions in the two Koreas
such that the hardline leaders and their officials have installed and consolidated mutually
antagonistic regimes against each other and maintained quite contentious relations over
time. The hawkish regimes on both sides—the governments of Rhee Seung-man, Park
Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan in the South and Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il in
the North—provided a fertile ground for hardline elites, including militaries, to thrive
within their governments and to pursue a policy of mutual denial and head-to-head
confrontation.
The hardline leaders and the officials of the two Koreas began to adopt a quite
antagonistic policy against each other in a reciprocal manner. The reasons they stuck
to the policy were two-fold. First, the leaders pursued the policy because they believed
it might serve the security interests of their countries. Experiencing a moment of national
collapse during the Korean War, the leaders of the two Koreas came to realize that
military preparation with the highest alert and continued contentious policy would make
their countries safe as well as protected. Second, the leaders of South and North Korea
found that they would lengthen their tenure if they sold the policy of mutual denial
to their domestic audiences. Given that the vivid memory of antipathy and enmity during
the war remained in the public’s mind, they knew that the policy would help shore
up their legitimacy at home.
A. Strongmen, Peace Initiatives, and Failed Negotiations During the Cold
War
From 1954 onwards, South Korean President Rhee Seung-man and Park Chung-hee
skillfully used the public’s fear of encountering another military attack from the North
partly to fortify the South’s military standing and partly to tighten their grip on power.
By overstating the threats from the North, both authoritarian leaders convinced the
South’s public to believe that another attack was imminent and the only way to achieve
reunification was to cope with the North militarily (Cumings 2005, 318). Accordingly,
the hardening of the antipathy and feud against the North, an initiator of the Korean
War, was inevitable.
The situation in the North was not much different from that of the South. With
the end of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung brainwashed the North Korean people to believe
that he was a national hero who achieved a near-margin victory against the US, the
258 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
most powerful Western imperial power, in the Korean War. By linking such a
self-perceived victory to his personal character and capability, Chairman Kim did not
hesitate to rally popular support by invoking threats from the South. In addition, Kim
Il-sung purged his political opponents like Park Chang-ok and Choi Chang-ik, creating
a highly centralized system that accorded him unlimited power and generating a
formidable cult of personality (Oberdorfer 1997, 10-11). Built upon the system and
cult, Kim systematically demonized the South, thereby creating little but hostility toward
the South.
The persistence of mutually hostile regimes in the two Koreas helped the so-called
hardline veto players—political elites having preference over the use of military
force—prevail in their societies throughout the 1960s and 1970s. However, introduction
and empowerment of the hardline veto players on both sides made it extremely difficult
for the two Koreas to end decades-long hostile relations at the bargaining table in two
major ways. First, the hardliners became less willing across time to set the issue of
the inter-Korean rapprochement as a major foreign policy agenda and more willing
to adopt the policy of mutual denial. A wide range of foreign and security policies
designed to isolate the other side, such as Park’s regime’s policy of applying the
Hallstein principle to the North and Kim Il-sung’s policy of tightening the relationship
with the Soviet and East European Communist Bloc, were adopted and systematically
implemented by the hardliners (Chung 2006; Armstrong 2005).
Second, the leaders of the two Koreas, although agreeing to set the inter-Korean
rapprochement as a foreign policy agenda, intentionally shied away from the commitment
to rapprochement because of their concern for remaining in power. The best example
of this is the South-North Korean Joint Statement of July 4, 1972. A radical power
shift in the international system—the 1972 Sino-US rapprochement—opened a window
of opportunity for the two Korean leaders to sincerely discuss reunification in the Korean
Peninsula by resolving all issues under contention via negotiation. By declaring the
Statement, the leaders agreed to attain inter-Korean rapprochement in three ways: 1)
unification achieved through independent efforts made by the two Koreas, 2) unification
achieved through peaceful means, and 3) national unity sought by transcending
differences in ideologies and systems (Kim 2011, 152).
However, it did not take long to realize that the 1972 Joint Statement was just
an attempt for the leaders to use it to tighten their grip on power. Kim Il-sung, for
instance, used the Statement as a card to induce the withdrawal of US troops and to
link it to the fortification of his power base at home (Oberdorfer 1997). In a similar
vein, the South’s President Park Chung-hee saw the Statement as an opportunity to
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 259
strengthen his control of South Korean society. When the implementation of the
Statement was stalled, Park did not hesitate to use the faltered implementation as an
excuse for justifying his effort to create an anti-communist authoritarian regime called
the Yusin (Kim 2011). Therefore, the first negotiation for the inter-Korean rapprochement
collapsed, continuing the IKR through the failure of the Statement.
President Park’s hardline policy toward the North was inherited largely by his
successor, General Chun Doo-hwan, who came to office through a surprise military
coup after Park was assassinated by his loyal officer. The reemergence of such hardliners
in the South, combined with Kim’s ongoing tight control of the North, significantly
contributed to the persistence of the IKR in two ways from 1980 to 1987. First, both
Chun Doo-hwan and Kim Il-sung had not displayed a genuine intent to improve the
two Koreas’ relationship. Accordingly, the issue of the inter-Korean rapprochement was
rarely brought to the bargaining table. Second, a wide range of diplomatic contacts
and talks, which were held during the 1980s, were focused on functional and humanitarian
issues such as provision of aid for natural disasters and the reunion of separated families,
which had hardly affected the rapprochement of the IKR (Kim 2011).
B. The Post-Cold War, Soaring Optimism, and Failed Agreement in the 1990s
The leaders of the two Koreas faced another critical moment for improving their
relationship by nearly all aspects when the Soviet Union and its satellite communist
regimes abruptly collapsed in the late 1980s. This systemic shock, dubbed the end of
the Cold-War, created a hope in the Korean peninsula that the entrenched hostility
between the two rivals, which was considered an extension of US-Soviet rivalry, would
be compromised and overcome, thereby prompting the North’s behavioral challenge.
Against the backdrop of such monumental change in the international security
landscape, South Korea’s first elected President, Roh Tae-woo, began to pursue a policy
called Nordpolitik toward the former communist countries like the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. Not only did Roh and his officials
restore diplomatic relationships with these former communist countries, they also used
them to induce a change in the North’s foreign policy. Accordingly, Roh’s officials
offered a series of peace proposals to Kim Il-sung who was fearing that his nation
could be completely disconnected from the international community in which its former
communist allies had gone. Kim Il-sung finally agreed to participate in the negotiation.
The negotiation led to by far the most important document adopted by the two Koreas
since the Joint Statement of July 4, 1972.
260 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
In the “Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation
Between the South and the North,” initialed on December 13, 1991, the two Koreas
came closer than ever before to accepting each other’s regime as a legitimate government
with a right to exist (Oberdorfer1997). In the Agreement, both sides agreed to: 1) mutual
recognition of each other’s system and an end to vilification and subversion of each
other; 2) mutual efforts to transform the present state of armistice into a solid state
of peace; 3) nonuse of force against each other, implementation of confidence-building
measures, and large-scale arms reductions; and 4) economic, cultural, and scientific
exchange.4
However, the milieu of compromise and cooperation, which the 1991 Agreement
stimulated on both sides, did not last long. Having felt that the North made too many
concessions to the South in the Agreement, DPRK military officials vetoed the gradual
implementation of the Agreement (Oberdorfer 1997, 264). The nuclear issue discussed
in the meetings also posed a daunting challenge to the implementation of the Agreement
on both sides. In the Agreement, the two Koreas signed a pledge to not test, manufacture,
produce, or possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities. But such
a pledge led to military officials’ resistance based on the belief that the Agreement
was all on the part of South Korea, not the North. As a result, Kim Jung-il systematically
moved away from the Agreement and returned to his previous anti-ROK posture
(Oberdorfer 1997).
The challenge to the Agreement also rose to the surface in the South. Capitalizing
on the suspicion of the North’s nuclear pledge, hawkish politicians of the Minjung faction
in the ruling Minja party were allied with a flurry of anti-communist groups to delay
the implementation of the Agreement. Worried that the challenge from the faction would
lead to a decline in his approval rating, President Roh became more passive in the
fulfillment of the Agreement. Eventually, the Agreement lost its final momentum when
the North declared its withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty, which resulted in
the outbreak of the 1993 nuclear crisis in the Korean peninsula (Kim 2006, 60).
C. Empowered Doves, Hawks’ Resistance, and the Failure to Reconcile
in the 2000s
It was only after two reformist presidents in the South came to office that the two
4. The full text of the 1991 Agreement is available online at http://nkinfo.unikorea.go.kr/nkp/term/viewKnwldgDi
cary.do?pageIndex=4&dicaryId=161&searchCnd=0&searchWrd (accessed on Nov. 23, 2016).
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 261
Koreas were approached again through diplomatic channels to discuss ways to end
their costly rivalrous relationships. Kim Dae-jung and Roh Mu-hyun, who had a dovish
preference towards the North, were elected as the president of South Korea in 1997
and in 2003, respectively. When these two reformists took office, many dovish elites,
who had given up their dovish preference toward the North, made huge inroads into
the South’s domestic politics. Dae-jung and Mu-hyun filled key governmental posts,
notably the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Korea Unification, with the elites who
were ready to join their effort to diplomatically engage the North (Han 2002).
Specifically, the influx of reformist and dovish presidents and their officials structured
the South’s domestic political condition in a way that a policy of rapprochement through
negotiations could be devised and implemented. Immediately after arriving in office,
for instance, President Kim Dae-jung placed the highest priority on rapprochement with
the North. Instead of supersizing the threat from the North, President Kim, a staunch
believer in Korea unification by peaceful means, took a bold diplomatic initiative called
the “Sunshine” policy toward North Korea. At the center of the policy was the idea
that South Korea should seek to lead North Korea down a path toward peace, reform,
and openness through reconciliation, interaction, and cooperation with the South (Moon
2012; Cha 2012). Drawing upon this liberal idea, Kim made his historic visit to
Pyongyang on June 13-15, 2000.
After completing rounds of talks about the ways to build lasting peace in the Korean
peninsula, President Kim Dae-jung and Chairman Kim Jung-il announced the famous
“2000 Joint Declaration of Peace and Cooperation in the Korean Peninsula,” in which
nearly every disputed issue between the two Koreas was scheduled to be resolved
through peaceful negotiations (Moon 2012, 21). The Declaration included: 1) an
agreement to achieve reunification independently and through the joint efforts of the
Korean people, 2) an acknowledgement that there was a common element in the South’s
proposal for a confederation and the North’s proposal for a loose form of federation,
3) an agreement to promptly resolve humanitarian issues, 4) an agreement to consolidate
mutual trust by prompting economic cooperation, and 5) an agreement to hold dialogue
between relevant authorities in the near future to implement the above agreements.5
However, the 2000 Joint Declaration failed to gain momentum during the
implementation phase. Among others, it was the dogged challenge from hawkish political
forces in the South that unraveled President Kim’s peace initiative toward the North.
5. A full description of the declaration is available online at http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/file/resources/
collections/peace_agreements/n_skorea06152000.pdf (accessed on Nov. 29, 2016).
262 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
Armed with rather antagonistic rhetoric and preferences toward the North, the Hannarah
Party, a major conservative opposition party, and anti-communist societal actors accused
the Kim government of over-cooperating with the North. By problematizing the legitimacy
of the Declaration, these hardline groups made their strong case that unconditional giving
of aid and lack of a reciprocal move from the North would only serve the North’s
interest (Moon 2012). Having expected that further pursuit of his Sunshine policy would
undermine his political standing at home by empowering these hawks, therefore,
President Kim shied away from his earlier commitment to the Declaration when the
North refused to reciprocate the South’s proposals. The IKR thus persisted once again
through the failure of the negotiated solution, the 2000 Joint Declaration.
President Roh Mu-hyun, who came to office right after President Kim Dae-Jung,
made a determined effort to achieve the desired legacy of President Kim and struggled
to bring the relationship between the two Koreas again to a path toward a negotiated
termination of hostility or rapprochement. What made Roh’s policy distinguishable from
Kim Dae-Jung’s Sunshine policy, however, is that he tried to make the process toward
the rapprochement “institutionalized as well as transparent” (Moon 2012). Knowing
that the backdoor deals and unilateral cash payments by the South during the 2000
Inter-Korean Summit presented an enormous political hurdle to President Kim by
empowering anti-North Korean forces, Roh informed both public and conservative elites
that his journey to Pyongyang was driven purely by his and his officials’ concern for
constructing peace in the Korean peninsula through the adoption of concrete action
plans (Moon 2012).
During his visit to the North from October 2nd
through the 4th, President Roh and
his officials made significant progress with their North Korean counterparts toward an
improved relationship between the two Koreas. In the “Joint Declaration on the Peace
and Prosperity in the Korean Peninsula of October 4, 2007,” President Roh and
Chairman Kim agreed with three principles, which would guide future inter-Korean
relations. Those were: 1) building durable peace in the Korean Peninsula, 2) fostering
mutual prosperity, and 3) achieving reconciliation, exchange, and unification.6
Like his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, however, President Roh faced massive political
challenges from hawkish veto groups within South Korean society when he attempted
to implement the items to which both sides agreed in the Declaration. Stressing that
President Roh’s policy of the rapprochement would only feed the North, the Hannarah
6. For an explanation of the details on the 2007 10.4 Joint Declaration, visit http://nkinfo.unikorea.go.kr/nkp/term/
viewKnwldgDicary.do?pageIndex=1&dicaryId=72.
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 263
Year Name of Diplomatic Initiative
Hardline Veto Players Outcome
1972 July 4th Declaration Workers’ Party of Korea in the North/Republican Party in the South
Failure of Implementation
1991 Agreement on Reconciliation & Nonaggression
Military Officials in the WPK of the North/Minjung Faction in the South's Ruling Minja Party
Failure of Implementation
2000 Joint Declaration on Peace & Cooperation
WPK in the North/Hannarah Party in the South
Failure of Implementation
2007 Joint Declaration on Peace & Prosperity
Hannarah Party in the South Failure of Implementation
Source: Moon 2012, 61-70; Han 2002, 37-41; Oberdorfer 1997, 23-26.
Table 3. Failed Negotiations and IKR Maintenance, 1954-2007
Party and many other anti-North Korean societal actors coalesced into an anti-North
Korea camp and started portraying Roh’s effort as premature and counterproductive
(Moon 2012). The hardline veto groups’ challenges were especially focused on three
issues. First, they pointed out that the 2007 Summit completely failed to bring the
issues of humanitarian crisis in the North to the negotiation table (Moon 2012, 63).
The accusation that the South would be involved in unconditional giving of aid was
also reiterated. Some of the hardline opponents contended that President Roh just
appeased his counterpart Kim Jung-Il by not linking inter-Korean rapprochement to
the North’s 2006 nuclear provocation. Such a challenge from the hardline camp
provoked President Roh’s fear that the presidential candidate of his party would not
be elected in the upcoming presidential election, so he was self-restrained in moving
the policy of reconciliation and rapprochement forward. Thus, the IKR still remained,
due to the failure of the 2007 Joint Declaration. Table 2 presents a list of all Korean
diplomatic initiatives to end the IKR through negotiation, the presence/absence of the
intervention of hardline veto players on either side, and the outcomes of the initiatives.
As listed in Table 2, it is not surprising that the two Koreas’ diplomatic efforts
to resolve the differences on all fronts have been sporadic as well as rare. While
maintaining their hostile relations for more than 50 years, the leaders have attempted
four different agreements to achieve IKR rapprochement. However, the agreements have
unraveled primarily because the leaders were systematically prevented from implementing
them by the hardline veto players at home. These veto players have whipped the
sentiment either at the elite or public level into such a frenzy that the confrontational
relations between the two Koreas could be overcome only by realpolitik tools. Keenly
aware of the negative impact of the implementation on their political standing at home,
the leaders on both sides have systematically shied away from their stated commitments
264 Chaekwang You, Kiho Hahn
to carrying out the agreements, thereby forcing the IKR to persist through the continual
failure of negotiated solutions.
VIII. Conclusion
Our research began with the simple question of why do international rivalries persist
across time? To answer the question, I developed a novel theory of multiple veto players
to account for rivalry maintenance and test the hypotheses drawn from the theory on
the case of the IKR from 1954-2007. Central to the theory is that the maintenance
of international rivalries is the result of rival leaders’ efforts to maximize the national
interest of their countries and their personal interest of staying in power, subject to
both external and internal constraints.
The major contribution of this paper to extant scholarship on the maintenance of
international rivalries is two-fold. First, I developed a more nuanced but comprehensive
theoretical framework for understanding the rivalry maintenance process by paying
balanced attention to both external and internal factors that had been examined
separately. These two factors are carefully intertwined to explain why the rival leaders
seeking both national and personal interests decide to maintain a costly rivalry over
time. Second, I demonstrated the utility of the theory by conducting an in-depth historical
examination of the persistence of the IKR from 1954 to 2007.
Specifically, the results show that Korean leaders who have been concerned about
national interests of their countries and about their personal interests have been forced
to maintain the IKR through the failures of both military and diplomatic solutions,
largely because of both an external constraint—US military intervention—and an internal
constraint—resistance from hardline veto players.
Despite such interesting findings, however, this research is only the initial step toward
the complete understanding of the dynamics of the IKR maintenance. Since my research
primarily focuses on the role of the US and the South’s hardline veto players, it gives
relatively scant attention to the impact of China and the North’s hardliners on the
maintenance of the IKR. This is primarily because of the lack of credible data on China
and North Korea. Therefore, future research must examine how China and North Korea’s
hardliners contribute to consolidation of the hostility between the two Koreas through
careful archival research. It also should be noted that the paper utilizes a single case
study—the IKR from 1954-2007—to prove the relevance of the theory of multilevel
veto players. To increase the external validity of the theory, therefore, future studies
The Perpetuated Hostility in the Inter-Korean Rivalry 265
need to test it against a larger number of rivalry-maintenance cases.
While much work remains to be completed, there are clear lessons to be drawn
from this research. In the context of an entrenched rivalry like the IKR, the leaders
seeking to end the rivalry need to develop a strategy that will be comprehensive enough
to overcome both external and internal constraints simultaneously. The strategy designed
to overcome only one of the two constraints will be destined to fail. Given the decreasing
utility of war as a solution to rivalries, the only remaining option may be the negotiated
termination of rivalries. Thus, the leaders seeking rivalry termination should devise a
strategy that will encourage their great power patrons to be honest and impartial brokers
and push their hardline veto players into joining a stable coalition for a rapprochement.
Without the strategy, rivals will be constantly caught in the vicious cycle of
confrontation-negotiation-confrontation.
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Received 29 May 2017
Received in revised form 6 December 2017
Accepted 10 February 2018