Choe Wan-gyu, Professor, University of North Korean Studies, and Visiting Professor, Keio University

The weather forecast has been off a lot these days, whereas forecasts I wished were going to be wrong are right on the spot. I’m talking about the way incoming administrations try to discriminate themselves from the previous administration in the presidential transition that takes place every five years.

Granted, control of the country is moving from one political camp to another, so there are surely a lot of things that need to be abandoned or changed. However, the method should not involve denouncing the predecessor administration or emphasizing the differences and discontinuity. There are not going to be any special new schemes for North Korea policy, for example, so there is no need to completely sever your policies from those of the previous administration in that regard. For now, the administration of Lee Myung-bak can be judged by his campaign promises on North Korea policy. But while the means and conditions it may employ could be different, there is not going to be a substantial difference between the Pyongyang policy goals of Lee Myung-bak and current president, Roh Moo-hyun.

Are we all to believe that Lee has some new North Korea policy that requires him to integrate the Unification Ministry into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade? His presidential transition team’s official statement was that linking unification and foreign policies would promote a “synergy effect.” However, a lot of this has to do with a distrust and negative view of the Sunshine policy and the ministry that pursued it.

We in the South still have a dualistic view of North Korea. On the one hand, we view it from the perspective of national security, in which the North is the object of discord and confrontation instead of engagement and cooperation. From an ethnocentric perspective, it is an object of engagement and cooperation, instead of conflict. The recent situation with inter-Korean relations does not allow one to look at the North from just one of either of these perspectives, or to force a compromise between the two and judge the North in that way.

Over the past decade, the administrations of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun pursued something called the Sunshine policy and treated issues that needed to be dealt with with the state in mind, or from a national security perspective, from an ethnocentric one. The incoming administration of Lee Myung-bak should be trying to correct that mistake, instead of dismantling the Unification Ministry.

Lee’s administration should set a precedent in which a new administration recognizes continuity in relation to the predecessor administration, instead of trying to separate the two. If the new administration is overly critical of the old one and presents a new North Korea policy for political, instead of substantial, reasons, then the results will be clear. For the whole of its five years in office, it will be faced with the same difficulties the past two administrations have had for the past ten years. It might also have to watch its policy be denied by the administration that follows it. Also, North Korea surely does not want to have serious discussion with a South Korea that changes its policy every five years.

Lee and his administration need to do two things if they want to pursue a North Korea policy that has continuity. For starters, it should accept the inheritance of the basic framework of reconciliation and cooperation that the administrations of South Korea have pursued since the late 1970s. Then, based on that, it should make modifications in the directions and means of policy so as to adjust to changes in the domestic and international arena. Secondly, it should promote a public discussion process regarding the establishment of the direction, methods and tools for carrying out reconciliation and cooperation policy. Before Lee pushes forward with the policies he pledged to pursue during his campaign, there needs to be an examination of the legitimacy of each.

The “armistice regime” that has defined the question of the Korean Peninsula since 1953 is changing in the wake of the 1991 Basic Agreement and the 2000 inter-Korean summit. Insisting on the traditional South Korea-U.S. alliance, based on the 1953 armistice and on a North Korea policy that places top priority on the alliance, is not realistically appropriate. Ironically, it would be as anachronistic as obsessing with reunification through a resolution of the contradictions of the Korean people.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.