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Two days after a 43-hour marathon negotiation ended in an inter-Korean agreement being reached on Aug. 25, details started leaking from the South Korean military about “decapitation operations” and Operational Plan 5015, which had to do with preparations for an unexpected “upheaval” in North Korea. This was a major disaster, one that called into question the very genuineness of Seoul’s attitude toward inter-Korean relations. Yet the administration took almost no action. Does that mean that the administration and military’s vision right now centers on the idea of an upheaval or collapse in the North?

Predictions of a collapse in Pyongyang first began circulating in the South in the summer of 1994. The sudden death of then-leader Kim Il-sung on July 8 -- just a few weeks before a planned inter-Korean summit on July 25-27 -- led experts to start prophesying a collapse scenario. The predicted dates ranged from three months to three years away; some even predicted less than 30 days. What ensued was a competition to figure out the costs of “unification by absorption.”

After showing zero growth throughout the ’80s, the North Korean economy began registering negative growth the following decade. In purely economic terms, the collapse predictions seemed justified. It made sense that North Korea as a whole might erupt into panic after Kim‘s death. On top of that, there was a food shortage going on. Then-South Korean President Kim Young-sam seemed to take the collapse for granted, frequently likening North Korea to a “broken airplane.” The rest of the administration’s leadership followed suit. As a result, the Kim administration ended up showing no interest at all in improving inter-Korean relations.

But the North Korean government didn’t collapse after Kim Il-sung’s death. Successor and son Kim Jong-il observed a three-year mourning period, during which time he tightened solidarity within the regime with his “Military First” approach -- as if to make a mockery of the collapse predictions. In April 1998, he amended the Constitution and assumed the post of National Defense Commission chairman, taking on far greater authority than his father had had.

The administration of Kim Young-sam’s successor Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) was focused on inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation; the collapse scenario never had a chance to creep its way into North Korea policy. The same situation continued under Kim’s successor Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08). But the next president, Lee Myung-bak (2008-13), stood at the very front of the collapse-predicting contingent. “Unification will come like a thief in the night,” he said one time. “I want to tell you that unification is imminent,” he declared another. His administration also made a “unification fund” after announcing the calculated unification costs, suggesting it had come up with the necessary money. Given the utterly strained state of relations with Pyongyang at the time, the only way to read this was as taking for granted that a collapse was imminent.

This approach gained momentum when Park Geun-hye took office in 2013. At the end of a press conference on Jan. 6, 2014, she exclaimed that unification would “a jackpot.” Her next step was to form a presidential committee to prepare for unification. There was even talk of plans for “handling” North Korea’s elite. Speaking at a July 10 meeting of the committee, Park entreated the members to “prepare well, since unification could happen as soon as next year.” Such actions only make sense if she firmly believed that an upheaval of collapse in Pyongyang was close at hand.

So with all of this presumption about a collapse scenario, why hasn’t the North Korean regime actually collapsed yet? The factors would seem to be there, given the details that refugees have given on the economic situation and the ruthless nature of Pyongyang‘s political approach, with Kim Jong-un having his own uncle shot dead. But regimes also tend to have stabilizing factors alongside the ones that lead to collapse. Think of them as the immune system and the other preventive elements that coexist with pathogens in a person’s body. The same iron-fisted governing approach and “politics of terror” that have been so key to collapse predictions have also had the ironic effect of shoring up the regime. Political theorists have argued that a regime can sustain itself when just ten percent of the population benefits from the regime while keeping the other ninety percent down. In North Korea‘s case, a society of unparalleled controls is sustained by three million Workers’ Party members and 1.15 million troops out of a population of 25 million. Under the circumstances, who would venture to organize against the establishment? We could call this the “North Korean paradox.”

Visions of a North Korean collapse have lingered like a phantom in South Korea for over two decades now. They tend to disappear when a progressive administration takes over, only to strut their way back out into daylight when the conservatives come into power. Yet the predictions still have not become a reality. So what should we do? When we trust in the predictions and focus our energies on preparing for unification, the result is that inter-Korean relations suffer and North Korea can’t be convinced to make even minor changes. If, instead, we worked on improving inter-Korean relations on the assumption that the regime isn’t going anywhere, then we might be able to reduce military tensions -- and coax some real change out of Pyongyang.

By Jeong Se-hyun, former Minister of Unification

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