While the Berlin Wall comes tumbling down and the two Germanys rush to unite, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) still separates North and South Korea and the heaviest concentration of military forces in the world.
Forty years after the start of the Korean War, and 37 years after the shooting stopped, there is still no peace treaty. A cold war of suspicion and hostility persists between the governments and peoples of Seoul and Pyongyang.
Everything seems to be changing in Eastern Europe, from leaders to governments to economic systems. Little seems to have changed between North and South Korea save the faces of the negotiators who meet once or twice a month.
But appearances can sometimes be deceiving. There are increasing efforts by all the nations involved to deal with the one remaining "hot spot" of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union establishes economic ties with South Korea and explores diplomatic relations. China's trade with Seoul tops $3 billion annually. The United States announces it will reduce its military presence in the South. South Korea proposes a commonwealth as a transitional step toward reunification. To all of which North Korea has so far turned a deaf ear and a cold eye.
Can mutual trust be established between the two Koreas? Is there the necessary political will on both sides to break the Korean impasse? How many more years will Korea remain divided?
Allen Whiting of the University of Arizona believes that the two societies have moved so far apart, economically and politically, that a coming together is not possible for at least another decade. In the meantime, Korea's neighbors, including Japan, should improve their relations with both North and South to "enhance their economic growth and strengthen regional stability."
One way to speed up the unification process, writer Ed Olsen of the Naval Postgraduate School, would be to hold a superpower summit between the United States and the Soviet Union on the subject. "Waiting for Seoul and Pyongyang to resolve their differences," says Olsen, "and end their portion of the Cold War is no longer an adequate approach." He also suggests that South Korea and the Soviet Union should consider how they might facilitate, either jointly or individually, improved U.S.-North Korea relations.
Vladimir I. Ivanov of the Soviet Institute for World Economic and International Relations also proposes U.S.-Soviet efforts, but at a less elevated level, to reduce military tensions on the peninsula through "a moratorium on arms sales" and the removal of "combat forces away from the DMZ." He, too, believes that the situation could be eased if Washington increased its humanitarian, academic, and economic links with Pyongyang.
Change in North Korea will come, in the opinion of James Cotton of Australian National University, only after the death of Kim II Sung. "Though the country is short of capital and desperately in need of advanced technology," says Cotton, any major initiative to secure such things from market economies, let alone South Korea, "would be a potent political admission that
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