From ‘Marching North’ to ‘De Facto Absorption’: An Interpretive Historiography of South Korea’s Unification Policies from 1948 until 2013

This thesis presents an interpretive historiography of South Korea's unification policy and elite decision-making from 1948 until the present day, with a focus on the democratic post- Cold War period (1988 – present). Using a historical institutionalist approach, I clarify the process by which unification policies developed in early periods have consistently been reproduced by administrations on both sides of South Korea’s ideological political divide, leading to much less change in unification policy than conventional wisdom about political polarisation influencing decision-making suggests.

The interpretive historiography I craft is based on three areas of analysis identified from a close reading of primary sources: foundational principles, issues of concern, and unification strategies. I argue that foundational principles are shared among most South Korean elites when they develop unification policy. These principles include: unification must occur under peaceful circumstances; unification with North Korea can only occur if it reforms politically; unification should occur in stages; and that ethnic nationalism will provide a foundation on which to rebuild a Korean community.

Issues of concern, such as economic engagement with North Korea; addressing North Korea’s denuclearisation; seeking to improve North Korean human rights and humanitarian issues; and the timeline for unification, are topics that are always addressed by elites, but the varying and malleable ways that each administration responds to these issues appear on a continuum that run from prioritising an issue as an immediate concern, to being an issue that requires resolving in the future. The differing ways administrations have prioritised the issues of concern has given rise to three unification strategies which I term comprehensive, engagement-focused, and reciprocation-focused.

By investigating continuity in policymaking over time, I challenge assumptions that unification policy is determined by either political ideology or other single variables, such as ethnic nationalism or elite understandings of the international system. The empirical findings of this thesis demonstrate that unification policy under all leaders since the late 1980s has shared the end goal of creating a unified democratic republic that would erode North Korean values and result in the ‘de facto’ absorption of the north.