초록

Abstract ▼

In the present volume, we analyze the dramatic escalation of tensions that accompanied the North Korean nuclear tests of January and September 2016 and that now threatens to trigger a new war on the Korean peninsula. We discuss the driving forces of the Korean nuclear crisis, review the soundness of

In the present volume, we analyze the dramatic escalation of tensions that accompanied the North Korean nuclear tests of January and September 2016 and that now threatens to trigger a new war on the Korean peninsula. We discuss the driving forces of the Korean nuclear crisis, review the soundness of current policies to solve it, and propose alternative approaches towards achieving durable peace and reconciliation. This volume represents the fourth installment in a five-year joint project between the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) and the Center for Korean Legal Studies (CKLS) at Columbia Law School in New York. The project aims to provide an ongoing legal and policy forum for advancing the causes of peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula. In previous years, it broadly addressed foundational and contextual issues such as the roots and legal consequences of the Korean division, the implications of the geopolitical tensions pervading the peninsula, and the interaction of the North with global governance institutions and the global economy. The rapidity of the escalation in 2016, however, brought us to focus in this volume a much more targeted and concrete manner on appropriate policy responses.

Hostilities rose to such levels in 2016 that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon lamented that he had “never... seen such kind of heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula.” The escalation is certainly unprecedented when measured by the frequency of North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile tests, the growth of the South Korean military budget, and the severity of sanctions against the North. Unsurprisingly, there are contradictory narratives about the responsibility for this situation. One end of the spectrum puts it squarely on North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK). In this view, it is the DPRK that triggered the crisis by conducting a string of illegal nuclear and missile tests that threatened the national security of its neighbors and ultimately forced them to respond by shows of strength and sanctions. The other end of the spectrum suggests that the United States and South Korea (the Republic of Korea, or ROK) provoked the crisis by continuously dismissing the DPRK’s peace advances and by threatening its national security to the point where it felt compelled to develop a nuclear deterrent. Of course, there may be myriad more nuanced narratives between these black-and-white representations.
In the end, though, what matters from a policy perspective is not so much the question of responsibility as that of efficiency in promoting national interests. Accordingly, the question at the heart of this volume is to identify what sort of crisis response would best further the interests of the ROK and the United States.

It goes without saying that both countries would be more secure if the North Korean nuclear program did not exist. What remains subject to debate is whether the ROK and the US are really made safer by pressuring the DPRK with sanctions and diplomatic isolation until it denuclearizes or collapses. This coercive approach lowers the national security risk only if it succeeds in wrestling the DPRK into submission; in all other cases it actually pours oil on the fire of an already tense stand-off, raising the risk of war. Whether this approach serves ROK and US interests depends on the likelihood of a North Korean submission or collapse. In the 1990s, collapse appeared imminent indeed. The North reeled under a political crisis caused by the death of its leader, Kim Il-sung, a security crisis caused by the collapse of its Soviet ally, and an economic crisis caused by the crumbling of most of its socialist trade partners. Time seemed to run against the DPRK. Today, however, the picture is much less clear-cut. Is the North Korean economy stagnating, as estimated by the ROK’s Bank of Korea, or is it growing rapidly, as suggested by Chinese reports on trade with the North? Do repeated purges of high-level officials mean that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has trouble asserting his authority, or that, on the contrary, he has successfully eliminated all his potential rivals? Do the dwindling numxi bers of refugees mean that the government is engaging in a last-ditch crackdown on dissent or that economic recovery has made life more bearable for average people in the North? The opacity and secrecy of the North Korean state make it difficult to determine how fragile or solid the country really is. There is one game-changing aspect we are relatively certain about, though: the DPRK has now developed nuclear bombs of roughly the same strength as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it has enough fissile material to develop dozens of those bombs through 2020. In effect, for every year that coercion fails to achieve a North Korean submission or collapse, there will be more bombs and an accordingly greater threat to ROK and US national security. Time cannot simply be assumed to run against the DPRK anymore.

In light of the stark differences between the circumstances at the end of the Cold War and those that prevail today, we propose in the present volume to carry out a general review of the situation and of the policy options available. We chart here a road map toward a peaceful Korean Peninsula through a three-pronged analysis of the Korean question, covering past, present, and future. In the first part, we look back at the path followed up to this day, asking in particular why peace has eluded us for decades, what various carrot-and-stick approaches have achieved in a quarter century of nuclear standoff, and whether policy objectives have or have not followed the changing circumstances on the ground. Answering these questions gives us a clear idea of where we came from, so that we may better appreciate the direction we now need to take. We then follow up in a second part by discussing where the confrontational path we are on is leading us, what the “end game” would look like, how North Koreans are faring from a humanitarian perspective, and whether harsher sanctions could end up violating the limits set by international law. The conclusions we draw from these inquiries then allow us to better compare the current coercive path with potential cooperative alternatives. We accordingly address, in the third and final part of our inquiry, how ripe the conditions are for an economic rapprochement and how a reunification could fit into a plan to end tensions on the Korean Peninsula. A more detailed description of each chapter now follows.

The first part of this volume is entitled “Reflecting on Seventy Years of Diplomacy.” It sets the foundation by reviewing the reasons for unending conflict in Korea, the various diplomatic means used up to now in pursuit of denuclearization, and the evolution of policy objectives regarding the North. The fundamental paradox of the “Korean Question” is that the Peninsula has remained divided for seventy years despite both Koreas, the United States and China claiming for decades to wish for its reunification. It is therefore necessary, in order to achieve peace, to identify the geopolitical tensions that have perpetuated the forcible division of Korea.
Similarly, we need to discuss why a quarter century of denuclearization efforts have failed to prevent the development of North Korean nuclear arsenal. Both cooperative and coercive approaches have now been tried, with ample time to show effects, and so it is appropriate to draw a verdict regarding their respective potency.
Finally, it is also necessary to evaluate to what extent objectives that were valid or realistic twenty-five years ago may have been affected by the changing conditions on the ground. Although the passage of time has not fundamentally altered the basic interests of the involved countries, it has shifted their respective bargaining power. As suggested above, we cannot simply assume anymore that time is running against the DPRK.

In the first chapter, entitled “The Legal Framework of Diplomacy Under the San Francisco System: Korea and Formation of a New Legal Order,” Jeong-Ho Roh sheds light on legal and historical factors that have made it particularly difficult to achieve peace in Korea. He points out that the way wars are ended often becomes the catalyst for future conflict, and argues that the treatment of Korea after the end of the Second World War, more as a part of defeated Japan than as a sovereign liberated country, ultimately sowed the seeds of Korean division and its ensuing complications. Roh argues that the uncertain legal status of Korea upon its initial division in 1945 and the uncertainties surrounding the outcome of the Korean War were major factors for the exclusion of Korea from negotiations for the San Francisco Treaty of 1952, which marked the formal and legal end of World War II for Japan. Roh shows through an analysis that goes back to Japan’s rise and the Treaty of Portsmouth that conflict on the Korean Peninsula has always been inextricably linked to the secondary treatment of Korean sovereignty in dealings between great powers. The so-called “San Francisco System,” he argues, is not much different in this respect; it translated into an American vision of post-war order that focused on making Japan the cornerstone of US policy in East Asia. He argues that the Korean question is an integral part of this system and not a separate matter, as the San Francisco System and the division of Korea are intricately intertwined.
Roh concludes with the observation that relations between the major actors in the region have changed considerably since 1945 and that attempts to accomplish a peace regime will need to take into account the current balance of power. The starting point, he argues, must be through a reevaluation and reassessment of the effects of the San Francisco System on the continued division of the two Koreas.

After this foundational analysis of the question of peace in Korea, we turn to a more practical one on denuclearization in the second chapter, “What Have Twenty-Five Years of Nuclear Diplomacy Achieved?” Author Leon Sigal reviews the respective achievements of negotiations and sanctions in resolving the Korean nuclear crisis.
On the basis of a detailed examination of the diplomacy surrounding the US-DPRK Agreed Framework of 1994, the Six-Party Joint Statement of 2005, and the so-called “Leap Day” deal, Sigal argues that the record of negotiations, though mixed, has remained overall far superior to that of sanctions and pressure without negotiations.
Diplomacy, he says, kept the North Korean nuclear program in check for a decade during the 1990s. Sigal points out that at the beginning of the Bush presidency, the DPRK had stopped testing longer-range missiles, had less than a bomb’s worth of plutonium, and was verifiably not making more. Yet the Bush administration’s belief that the DPRK could be pressured into submission or collapse, he says, led to a string of broken promises and financial sanctions against the country. Six years later the DPRK had seven to nine bombs’ worth of plutonium, had resumed longer-range test-launches, and felt free to test nuclear weapons. Upon what Sigal sees as the failure of pressure followed two years of diplomatic give-and-take in 2007 and 2008, which he credits with once more stopping the DPRK’s production of fissile material as well as its nuclear and missile testing.
With the arrival in 2008 of the Lee Myung-bak government at the helm of the ROK, however, Washington once again started pressuring Pyongyang. This, in Sigal’s view, predictably led to the collapse of talks and the resumption of the North Korean nuclear program.
He concedes that diplomacy failed in the case of the Leap Day deal in 2012, when the DPRK unilaterally pulled the plug, even though it had every reason to believe that the Obama administration was negotiating in earnest. Nevertheless, Sigal concludes that the record of negotiations and pressure remains clearly in favor of the former, and that pressure without negotiations remains a certain recipe for failure. He sees little chance of success in an approach that consists of coercing Pyongyang into submission by burying it in sanctions without engaging with core North Korean security concerns, such as the US-ROK joint military exercises. US and ROK interests will only be harmed, he warns, by the DPRK’s unfettered weapons development in the meantime.

Following Sigal’s inquiry into the diplomatic means employed to deal with the Korean nuclear crisis, Joel Wit discusses in Chapter 3 how changing circumstances on the Korean peninsula have affected objectives. He focuses on a US perspective, and hence his analysis is entitled “The Future of US Policy toward North Korea and the Role of South Korea.” Wit notes that North Korean weapons development is progressing much faster than anticipated. The DPRK’s nuclear stockpile, he says, is expected to grow from an estimated baseline of ten to sixteen nuclear weapons in 2015 to anywhere from fifty to a hundred by 2020. The country could have hydrogen bombs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) ready by 2020 or sooner, depending on the rate of tests. These developments, he says, pose a significant threat to US national security, not only because North Korean nuclear weapons could strike US troops and the US mainland, but also because they could provoke US allies in the region into a potentially nuclear arms race, undermining the stability of alliances and US interests in nonproliferation. Wit strongly insists that Beijing cannot be counted upon to solve the problem for Washington, given the fundamentally different interests of the United States and the PRC in the region. He calls for a US-led initiative that does not just rely on sanctions but also on principled diplomacy with Pyongyang. Wit believes the United States should not abandon its ultimate goal of denuclearizing the DPRK, but it should be open to initially discussing only a freeze, if only to stall the rapid North Korean progress in weapons development.

After looking back upon the path taken until now, we turn to assessing where our steps are leading us today. In the second part of this volume, “Assessing the Current Spiral of Escalation,” we consider the confrontational approach adopted by the United States and the ROK against the DPRK—where it is leading us, how severe the North Korean humanitarian situation is as a result, and what limits international law puts on the use of sanctions. As we noted above, coercion serves ROK and US national security interests to the extent that it succeeds in achieving a North Korean submission or collapse.
If it fails to do so, it may actually harm those security interests by gratuitously raising military tensions and allowing the growth of the North Korean nuclear arsenal. Therefore, in order to evaluate the worth of the confrontational approach, what really matters is the “end game” question: where all parties are left standing if the confrontational logic is followed to the end without any party budging from its position. Another question that deserves consideration is the severity of the North Korean humanitarian situation, for two reasons. First, it serves as an indicator of how much the pressure of sanctions is felt in the DPRK, and hence it suggests how likely or unlikely the coercive approach is to change North Korean policies on nuclear weapons. Second, it helps us determine the human cost of sanctions. The first to suffer from the sanctions are ordinary North Koreans without obvious means to affect their government’s nuclear armament policies, given the DPRK’s dictatorial political system. This poses an ethical dilemma: are innocent people being subjected to economic violence for naught? In this context it will be useful to determine to what extent international law regulates the severity of sanctions.

In Chapter 4, entitled “The Endgame Question: Where Is Escalation Leading Us, and Is It Worth It?,” Alexandre Mansourov discusses what is at stake in the current spiral of escalation. He notes that there is no sign that North Korean nuclear and missile tests are slowing under sanctions. On the contrary, Pyongyang openly mocks attempts to pressure it into submission and continues its weapons development at great speed. Mansourov warns that the growth of North Korean nuclear capabilities may eventually change its strategic calculus to the point that it would be tempted to make the first move and open military confrontation with the South. In his eyes, the factors that would drive this new strategic calculus are: (1) the increasing obsolescence of North Korean conventional forces, (2) the growing fear of being attacked like Serbia, Iraq, or Libya, and (3) Pyongyang’s misguided but self-confident belief that its new nuclear capabilities would open a window of opportunity to achieve its strategic objectives on acceptable terms. Mansourov notably points out in this context the increasing references in the DPRK to the “spirit of offense” (konggyeok jeongsin) as a key concept in North Korean military doctrine. Accordingly, while prospects for negotiations appear remote, he warns that escalation may lead us into a “game of chicken” with potentially catastrophic consequences. It increasingly seems like nothing short of regime change could coerce the DPRK into abandoning its nuclear weapons, he says, and given Pyongyang’s hubris, this path has a high risk of provoking nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. The hope that the DPRK would crumble like a house of cards if only something happened to Kim Jong-un, for instance through a well-placed missile, is in Mansourov’s view misplaced. He argues that the DPRK is relatively resilient to such shocks, given a highly atomized, disconnected, and compartmentalized governance structure that is used to running on autopilot for extended periods of time. In the event of Kim’s disappearance, Mansourov says, a troika of senior leaders representing the central party apparatus, the state, and the military would take on interim leadership responsibilities, and the dilution of power would prevent any force from challenging the troika’s authority or dominating its decision-making on its own. In the end then, Mansourov warns us that trying to coerce the DPRK into submission is a risky path that increasingly threatens to lead us into the worst-case scenario of nuclear war.

Following this exposition of the likely endgame scenario to coercion, we turn to Chapter 5 and Hazel Smith’s evaluation of the humanitarian situation in the DPRK (“Sanctions and North Korea: The Absence of a Humanitarian Emergency and the Crisis of Development”). As suggested above, this question matters to determine how likely the DPRK is to submit to sanctions, and how ethical it is to maintain them, given their impact on average North Koreans.
In Smith’s analysis there is no humanitarian emergency in the sense in which international agencies use the term. According to Smith, indicators of humanitarian conditions—such as child and infant mortality, malnutrition and disease incidence—show that the North Korean population is not any worse off than populations living in countries of the same income category that do not suffer from sanctions. Smith demonstrates that in some cases humanitarian conditions continued to improve after 2006, despite the start of UN sanctions against the DPRK. Sanctions do have an impact in terms of development, though, insofar as they deter foreign investment in the DPRK. By reference to component variables of the Human Development Index, namely life expectancy, literacy, and GDP per capita, Smith finds evidence that the DPRK is struggling to develop economically. While the DPRK has had virtually 100 percent literacy since the 1960s, the North Korean life expectancy of seventy has remained lower than the East Asian average of seventy-five (though it is certainly better than countries in the DPRK’s income category). And while GDP per capita estimates by the ROK’s Bank of Korea show that the DPRK has overcome the economic freefall of the 1990s, levels of economic activity remain comparatively low. Ultimately, Smith’s analysis makes clear that sanctions are not currently causing a humanitarian crisis in the DPRK, but they do have a human cost insofar as they inhibit the country’s economic development and hence the improvement of the North Korean population’s well-being.

Smith’s evaluation of the human cost of coercion leads into Kyung-ok Do’s discussion of their legality in Chapter 6, “Sanctions against North Korea: An Analysis from an International Human Rights Law Perspective.” Sanctions are by their very nature designed to cause harm, and they therefore pose a human rights dilemma. Generally speaking, Do notes that comprehensive sanctions, whether imposed by the UN Security Council (UNSC) or by individual states, have been accused of having a negative impact on economic and social rights, notably the rights to food, health, and an adequate standard of living. The primary victims tend to be the most vulnerable segments of a targeted population: children, women, the infirm, the elderly, and the poor. Yet some argue that a key difficulty with raising human rights objections against sanctions is that international human rights treaties are generally concerned with the relationship between a state and individuals within its territory. In this regard, Do suggests that the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) may bind member states to respect the rights of the populations of other member states on the basis of the Covenant’s “international assistance and cooperation” clause. The ability of an ICESCR member state to inflict sanctions upon another would therefore be limited by the former’s extraterritorial ICESCR obligations. Yet would those obligations also limit the ability of the UNSC to inflict comprehensive sanctions upon a targeted country? While the UN itself is not a party to the ICESCR, says Do, the UNSC may still be bound to respect the human rights of populations it targets for sanctions, owing to its obligation to respect the “purpose and principles of the United Nations,” which include human rights, as well as relevant jus cogens. In relation to sanctions against North Korea, Do expresses concern that recent sanctions measures, particularly measures taken by individual states, are highly suggestive of comprehensive sanctions. She accordingly warns that such sanctions measures may detract from North Koreans’ enjoyment of human rights, and hence calls for a proper balancing of objectives, severity, and human impact.

After considering the coercive path we are on today, we discuss cooperative alternatives that could be taken in the future. While the logic of coercion is that US and ROK interests are best served by threatening DPRK interests, that of cooperation is that the United States and ROK would be better served by accommodating them.
Both the United States and ROK have determined that aggressively pursuing the nuclear disarmament of the DPRK serves their interests, and indeed the successful removal of North Korean nuclear capabilities would strengthen US and ROK national security. Yet as suggested above, their national security is only weakened if the coercive strategy serves only to raise military tensions and accelerate the North Korean nuclear program and not to effect the submission or collapse of the DPRK. The key question then is as follows: At what point does the chance that coercive strategies will stop the North Korean nuclear program become so low that it becomes more reasonable to limit the damage by engaging North Korean demands? Pyongyang has notably proposed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for a suspension of US-ROK joint military exercises. It’s a possible starting point for negotiations, and indeed the exercises could be resumed if Pyongyang does not hold to its part of the bargain.
In effect, Pyongyang is demanding recognition and accommodation of its own national security interests in exchange for abandoning its main deterrent against the much stronger conventional forces of the United States and the ROK.

If at some point Washington and Seoul do determine that it is more in their respective long-term interests to cooperate with Pyongyang than to continue trying to coerce it, a key issue will be to find a trust-building vehicle that is stable enough not to tip over at the first change of political winds. This is the subject of the third part of this volume, “Proposing a De-escalation.” Economic rapprochement remains a solution of choice, because it creates win-win dynamics with a much more continuous and comprehensive momentum than initiatives based purely on the political goodwill of both sides. Of course, economic structures are not immune to politicization, as the case of the Kaesong Industrial Complex shows. What should be clear though is that economically isolating the DPRK by sanctions reduces its stakes in the international order and thus its incentives to consider the interests of other countries. A successful economic integration in the regional and global economy would exert a strong pull in the right direction. The success of the European Union in ensuring decades of peace in Europe is just the most famous example of the pacifying effects of economic integration. Of course, economic cooperation cannot happen in a vacuum, and so there will need to be a clear understanding of how willing the DPRK is to open up economically, and how the cooperation can be structured to fit ROK and US interests.
Negotiators will also need to be attentive to how economic cooperation would fit into long-term plans for reunification, as the model of reunification that the two Koreas ultimately aim for will affect the form of economic cooperation that is desirable between them.

Rüdiger Frank probes the willingness of Pyongyang to voluntarily open up and liberalize its economy in Chapter 7, “Internal Conditions for Rapprochement: What Kind of Economic Opening Is Feasible?” Drawing on lessons from Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam, Frank identifies the ideological and practical considerations that would guide the economic liberalization attempts of a socialist government such as that of the DPRK. Pyongyang, he finds, will be mindful of the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European countries and will therefore want a gradual transformation that does not threaten its political stability. Yet to be economically efficient, says Frank, Pyongyang’s reform objectives should be to move away from the bureaucratic sluggishness of a purely planned economy through the introduction of a form of decentralization and an alternative incentive system. In this context, he explains, Pyongyang’s instrument of predilection will be special economic zones, as they provide safe laboratories to experiment with reforms before they are extended to the rest of the country. In a general sense, however, Pyongyang will likely aim for a hybrid system between a planned and a market economy, mainly by setting more modest production quotas and allowing production units to operate autonomously once that quota has been met. Frank then analyzes the reforms that Pyongyang has attempted in that direction, and finds that under Kim Jong-un there have been experiments and cautious, limited changes, but no full-fledged ecoxxi nomic reform. Reforms up to now have been undertaken more in the spirit of perfecting the socialist planned economy than with the idea of effecting something equivalent to the PRC’s “reform and opening” or Vietnam’s “doi moi” movements. While Frank notes that it is not entirely clear whether Pyongyang needs more time or whether this is as far as it will go, he suggests that Pyongyang eventually will be driven to more reform by sheer economic necessity and by the growth of a middle class. Ultimately, then, he recommends actively supporting the forces of change in the DPRK by engaging economically with the country, for instance through its special economic zones.

Following this inquiry into the North Korean perspective on economic liberalization and opening up, Chang-seok Yang examines the potential of economic rapprochement from a ROK and US perspective. This is the subject of Chapter 8, entitled “External Conditions for Rapprochement: What Avenues and Opportunities Would a North Korean Opening-Up Present for the United States and Korea?” Yang underlines that economic rapprochement could pacify the DPRK and thereby serve US and ROK interests.
He argues that economic rapprochement encourages reformist elements in the DPRK, while military confrontation strengthens conservative ones. The light-water reactor (LWR) project pursued under the US-DPRK Agreed Framework of 1994, Yang notes, offered Washington opportunities to engage at all levels of state affairs with Pyongyang, thereby creating important cracks in the latter’s isolationism.
Later, the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) provided the ROK with a bastion of influence in the DPRK, offering for instance a space where North Korean officials and workers could come into contact with Southerners in a manner unadulterated by propaganda. Overall, Yang suggests that the breakdown of trust has precluded many opportunities for additional rapprochement, and as a result the situation has deteriorated more than it needed to. Today, in his eyes, coercion on its own will not work due to the PRC’s noncooperation with the sanctions regime, so engagement remains indispensable for safeguarding ROK and US interests. He therefore recommends, beyond sanctions, an economic rapprochement to encourage market forces as agents of change in the DPRK.

The smaller details of an engagement plan with the DPRK ultimately depend on the big picture of what is aimed for on the Korean Peninsula. In other words, there cannot be an effective process of reconciliation without clarity and consensus on the form and substance that a Korean reunification would eventually take. Two key issues arise in this respect. The first concerns the legal “engineering” of reunification, that is to say, the way in which international law structures the process of state merger or incorporation. Would a united Korea inherit all the treaties, assets, debts, and international legal responsibilities of both the DPRK and ROK, or are these gray areas? The second issue concerns the “design” of reunification—in other words, the constitutional form and geopolitical position that a united Korea would take. Engagement, to be successful, must aim for a form of reunification that is acceptable to both Koreas, and at least tolerated by the great powers involved on the Korean Peninsula.

In Chapter 9, “State Succession in the Context of Korean Unification,” Ye Joon Rim first addresses the international legal issues that would arise from either the merger of the two Koreas into a new state or the incorporation of one Korea into the other. Despite the Koreas not referring to each other as distinct states, Rim argues that their unification would still be governed by international law, given that each Korea is recognized by the international community as having its own distinct legal personality. Rim then notes that state succession is a particularly contentious area of international law, with few established rules even for specific topics such as the succession of treaties, property, debts, and state responsibility. The most authoritative references available are the 1978 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties and the 1983 Vienna Convention on State Succession in Respect of State Property, Archives, and Debts, but even these conventions lack general applicability due to their low rates of ratification. The 1978 Convention basically provides for a continuity rule whereby successor states remain bound by most of the predecessor states’ treaties. The 1983 Convention similarly provides for continuity, providing that the property and debts of predecessor states pass to the successor state, whether in case of merger or incorporation. As for whether a successor state also inherits the responsibility for internationally wrongful acts committed by a predecessor state against a third state, although it has not been codified yet, the draft conclusion drawn by the Institut de Droit International provides that there be succession of state responsibility in the case of unification of states.
Nevertheless, given the inconsistency of precedents in these fields and hence the lack of established customary rules, Rim calls for resolving as many of these questions as possible in the run-up to Korean unification through an ad hoc inter-Korean treaty, as was done in the German case.

Following this review of the rules of state succession applicable to Korean reunification, Henri Féron addresses the geopolitical positioning and constitutional design of a united Korea in Chapter 10, “Proposing a Model of Reunification to Solve the Korean Nuclear Crisis.” Féron argues that the balance-of-power dynamic underlying the Korean division makes it impossible to solve the nuclear crisis by a confrontational approach that threatens the DPRK with collapse.
In his view, Beijing will simply not allow a North Korean collapse insofar as it could tilt the balance of power in Korea against Chinese interests. Accordingly, says Féron, the best hope for solving the nuclear crisis and ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula is to reunify the two Koreas as a nonaligned country. He argues that failure to do so would not only leave the DPRK free to further expand its nuclear arsenal, but would also make Korea a likely battleground for rising Sino-American rivalry. Féron explores the different models of nonalignment the Koreas could pursue, from a simple promise not to side with either power against the other to a full-fledged permanent neutrality like Switzerland or Austria, and also discusses the proper instrument on which to affix it and the appropriate level of militarization for a nonaligned Korea. After that examination of the geopolitical aspect of reunification, he discusses how to make reunification work on the domestic level. He notes that ideological demands have always tended to stall reunification talks, and so argues that it is necessary to hold onto a principle of ideological neutrality for these talks to succeed. Féron then reviews the implications that prioritizing national unity over ideology would have for the distribution of power, the economy and human rights, concluding that the benefits would far outweigh the costs.

Our combined efforts to complete this book would not have been possible without the diligent and tireless efforts of Joan Wargo, Deputy Director of the Center for Korean Legal Studies, whose attention to detail and thoughtful comments were invaluable. We would also like to express our gratitude to Kaylee Eugene Moon for patiently and painstakingly laying out the interior of this volume as well as designing the cover.

(출처 : PREFACE 16p)

목차 Contents

• COVER ... 1
• TABLE OF CONTENTS ... 6
• EDITORS ... 8
• CONTRIBUTORS ... 10
• PREFACE ... 16
• PART I. Reflecting on Seventy Years of Diplomacy ... 32
• CHAPTER 1. The Legal Framework of DiplomacyUnder the San Francisco System: Korea and the Formation of a New Legal Order/Jeong-Ho Roh ... 34
• CHAPTER 2. What Have Twenty-Five Yearsof Nuclear Diplomacy Achieved?/Leon V. Sigal ... 60
• CHAPTER 3. The Future of US Policy toward North Koreaand the Role of South Korea/Joel S. Wit and Sun Young Ahn ... 88
• PART II. Assessing the Current Spiral of Escalation ... 106
• CHAPTER 4. The Endgame Question: Where Is Escalation Leading Us, and Is It Worth It?/Alexandre Y. Mansourov ... 108
• CHAPTER 5. Sanctions and North Korea: The Absence of a Humanitarian Emergency and the Crisis of Development/Hazel Smith ... 150
• CHAPTER 6. Sanctions against North Korea: An Analysis from an International Human Rights Law Perspective/Kyung-ok Do ... 174
• PART III. Proposing a De-Escalation ... 204
• CHAPTER 7. Internal Conditions for Rapprochement: What Kind of Economic Opening Is Feasible?/Rüdiger Frank ... 206
• CHAPTER 8. External Conditions for Rapprochement: What Avenues and Opportunities Would a North Korean Opening Up Present for the United States and Korea?/Chang-Seok Yang ... 234
• CHAPTER 9. State Succession in the Context ofKorean Unification/Ye Joon Rim ... 266
• CHAPTER 10. Proposing a Model of Reunification to Solvethe Korean Nuclear Crisis/Henri Féron ... 294
• INDEX ... 346
• End of Page ... 353