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Springtime for Moscow-Seoul Relations?
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18008 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1990 |
1,543 Words |
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Daryl M. Plunk
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The historic March 1990 visit of South Korean political leader Kim Young Sam to Moscow and his cordial, one-on-one meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev received surprisingly little coverage in the American press.
Like so many other events of recent months, Kim's warm welcome by the Soviets caught observers by surprise and retired yet another Cold War relic to the pages of history. But since the Korean peninsula today represents one of the world's few remaining hotspots where hostilities could quickly escalate into superpower confrontation, the Soviet-South Korean thaw is an enormously significant trend.
In the four decades since the division of the Korean peninsula, Seoul and Moscow have had no official relations and the Soviets have refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea (ROK), instead fostering close ties with the hated communist regime in Pyongyang and supplying North Korea with an ample war chest of sophisticate weaponry.
Profound changes in relations among the Koreas, China, and the Soviet Union did not occur until the early 1980s. Around 1983, Beijing began to urge Pyongyang to consider more flexible bargaining positions in its negotiations with Seoul. Concentrating on its own economic modernization, China had few resources to commit to the continuing North Korean military buildup and, furthermore, worried that an outbreak of hostilities on the peninsula might drag China into a conflict that would undermine its economic development. Beijing also urged the skeptical Kim II Sung to consider similar reforms.
With the advent of the Gorbachev era, the Soviets quickly began to alter their policy toward the Korean peninsula with the effect of allowing for growing contact between the USSR and South Korea. In keeping with the tenets of perestroika, which have so profoundly influenced internal Soviet affairs and, to a great extent. Political, economic, and security structures throughout Eastern Europe, Gorbachev's desire to improve relations with Seoul was driven by pragmatism.
Most apparent was Moscow's hope to bolster its economy through trade with one of Asia's most prosperous nations. The Soviets were particularly interested in enlisting South Korean investment in the development of much needed infrastructure projects in Siberia.
North Korea, after all, offers little benefit to Soviet planners desperate to jump-start their stalled economy. At the time of the division of the peninsula over four decades ago, the North was left with practically all of Korea's major industrial facilities while the South was predominantly agricultural. Yet, solidly based upon free-market capitalism, the South's economic development since that time far outshines that of the North. Pyongyang implemented a rigid, state-controlled economy whose performance over the lat several decades has been lackluster at best.
With a population of around 20 million (half the size of the ROD), North Korea's annual GNP is about $25 billion; the South's GNP last year exceeded $140 billion. Annual per capita income in the North is $1,200, about one quarter of the South's. While the ROK has rapidly industrialized and currently excels in such sophisticated economic sectors as shipbuilding, electronics, and automobile
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