A reader in Glasgow, Scotland sends in the following questions:

1. What do you think the feeling is of the younger generation within South Korea to North Korea?
2. What do you think the general feeling amongst younger South Koreans towards reunification?

The short answer is that young South Koreans appear to regard the North Korean regime as less evil than the Korean War generation does, but they also do not admire it as many 386ers seem to. Most youth seem apathetic when it comes to reunification, accepting the status quo for an indeterminate amount of time. A caveat; I haven’t been to Korea for a couple of years (though will this Fall), so haven’t spoken to younger Koreans, except a few in the DC Metro area.

I do have a convoluted, longer answer and I’ll attempt to briefly touch on what I think are some of the major issues related to these questions. Probably there are many more reasons, and commenters are encouraged to point out any mistakes or omissions as appropriate.

To better gauge how younger South Koreans view the conjoined issues of North Korea and Korean reunification (조국통일 / choguk t’ongil), it’s useful to discuss how the quickly dwindling Korean War generation and the so-called “386 generation” (thirty-somethings when the term was coined who attended university in the 80s and were born in the 60s) view the issues. There are other generations within South Korea, but these two are well defined and have contrasting views that help with a comparison of contemporary youth. As with much of Korea’s modern history, the role of the United States figures prominently in the answers. I’ll be broadly generalizing when speaking of the views of generations and Korean society as a whole.

The Korean War generation was born under Japanese colonial rule or in the few short years between the end of World War II and the Korean War in 1951. After the war, they had to deal with a national division that separated many families, as well as crushing poverty and authoritarian rule.

This generation has remained aware and largely thankful that American military intervention was the only thing that prevented Soviet and Chinese-backed Korean communists from seizing control of the entire peninsula. They are conservative, viewing the North Korean regime as a bitter enemy while at the same deeply longing for reunification of both the nation separated families. They hate the communist ideology, but, I think, have concern and compassion for the North Korean people.

The 386 generation, however, grew up with much less poverty and no memory of the Korean War. Although plied with anti-communist propaganda in the South Korean education system and exposed to the stories of the older generation, a different worldview began to form. There will be some irony in this, later.

They were not content under authoritarian rule, which their parents tolerated more easily, and were more sympathetic to the North Korean regime, and ultimately Marxist ideology. As they were growing up in the 1970s, living standards in North Korea were at least equal to those in the South, and the perception of a more independent North Korea also had appeal when compared to South Korea having foreign forces stationed in Seoul.

Though based on conspiracy theories and, in cases, verifiably false information, the perception of U.S. involvement in events such as the 1980 Kwangju Uprising have fueled anti-Americanism for decades and worked its way into the ethos of the 386ers and other anti-U.S. elements in South Korea. Some American journalists and Korea scholars who play fast and loose with facts have, unfortunately, added fuel to that conspiratorial fire.

While not everyone falls into the two groups defined here, and large numbers in those groups subscribe to varying views, for the purposes of this comparison the groups are representative enough of the major views on North Korea, until the 1990s and early 2000s.

It should be noted that, for many Koreans, there is a love/hate element to the relationship with the U.S. For example, on one hand, the U.S. prevented a takeover of South Korea. There is no question that the South has benefited enormously from the relationship over the decades, and much of South Korea’s economic success is directly related to that tie. On the other hand, the U.S. is blamed for dividing the peninsula in a haphazard manner (partially true, though the role of the former Soviet Union and the larger geo-political issuers are almost never realistically considered in that view), is perceived as being hegemonic, and interactions with U.S. soldiers have long caused social tensions.

For Koreans there has also been a great collective sense of shame that the problem of reunification could not be solved by themselves; outside powers intervened. While many blame the outside powers – the U.S. or the Soviet Union and China, depending on one’s generation and ideology – there is also the latent realization that two Korean leaders (Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee) engaged in the conflict and didn’t solve it afterwards. Koreans were not powerless to prevent the war, but actually started it, then lost control, and finally have not solved it on their own. Over three decades of humiliating Japanese colonial rule prior to the divide only amplifies the frustration and shame.

This makes for a complicated, emotional picture, but it sets the stage for where things are today. Many if not most South Koreans wanted to believe that they could solve this issue, without the interference of external powers, i.e., the U.S. and China, perhaps including Japan and Russia. Part nationalism, part shame, part the simple desire to reunite long separated families and land once and for all. (See 한 / han)

Things began to change with former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy,” and optimism exploded with the June 2000 summit between North Korean Leader Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung.

What seemed to be genuine cooperation from Pyongyang, initiated from Seoul, saw a sea of change in public opinion in South Korea. The Sunshine Policy, it seemed, could erase some of those reasons for shame; the problem of reunification could be solved by Koreans, outside powers need not interfere.

A direct consequence of that was the much wider perception, now outside the 386ers, that the presence of U.S. forces on South Korean soil had become more of a hindrance to peaceful reunification than preventing a hostile one from a now cooperative North Korea. Several key events, including an unfortunate accident that resulted in the deaths of two Korean schoolgirls in June 2002, and a confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang in October 2002, saw levels of anti-Americanism peak in 2002 and 2003.

This had been primed by more than a decade of official education that had slowly been eradicating the anti-communist message and replacing it with an anti-American one, and portraying North Korean leadership in an almost heroic light at times. A lot of 386ers became educators, after all, and their work is recently apparent. The result, at least for Americans aware of the security siltation in South Korea, has been chilling:

Kim Choong-bae, president of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, disclosed a past survey of 250 KMA entrants to single out “the country’s main enemy” while serving as the military academy’s superintendent in 2004.

Kim was quoted by a newspaper as saying, “While the majority ― or 34 percent ― picked the U.S., 33 percent said they regarded North Korea as the main enemy.”

He said the result was unbelievable, stressing the respondents were those who were supposed to be military officers. The KMA did not make the result public during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, which ended last February.

Kim hinted that he had been forced not to notify the public of the result, expressing uneasiness about contents of some high and middle schools textbooks. (emphasis added)

However, by October 2002 it was clear that North Korea was not interested in genuine engagement. While some South Koreans still blame the U.S. for the breakdown of the 1994 Agreed Framework, many others began to realize the Sunshine Policy could not persuade North Korea to peacefully reunify.

This realization, however, came late enough that Roh Moo-hyun was elected. Roh continued to pursue the Sunshine Policy with North Korea until it degenerated into a humiliating policy of appeasement, and also threatened the U.S.-ROK alliance. Roh ultimately became something of an advocate for Kim Jong-il, and almost seemed to want to pay a sort of tribute to North Korea. Towards the end of his term it was not uncommon for approval ratings to be in the single digits.

The Korean War generation was horrified by Roh, though they are now becoming a much smaller cohort. The 386ers were deeply disappointed. But the younger generation, as Andri Lankov notes, seems to have been pushed to the right of the political spectrum by ten years of leftist rule in South Korea:

To the great surprise of the 386ers, neither their younger siblings nor their growing children embraced their worldview. The campus politics _ to an extent it still exists _ moved rightward, and nowadays young Koreans are as likely to vote for the right-wing parties like their grandparents. For them, the Marxian worldview of the 386 generation appears ridiculously anachronistic, and if they still care about fighting dictatorships (few do), their most likely target is the Kim’s dictatorship in the North, long a darling of the 386ers’ activists.

This was no doubt in part due to North Korea’s repeated confirmation that the policies pursued by Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun were so fundamentally flawed. Polls have marked some of this:

According to a recent poll conducted by seven of the top universities in S.Korea, 40 percent of college students identify as politically “conservative” and are likely to vote for a conservative presidential candidate in the upcoming election.

That’s twice as many as two years ago. This refers to political and perhaps fiscal conservatism, as South Korea’s youth have become unquestioningly much more liberal in social terms.

Still, it was little over two and a half years ago that approximately 48 percent of South Korean youth said that if the U.S. attacked North Korean nuclear facilities, South Korea should ally with North Korea against the U.S. Only about 11 percent said they should side with the U.S., the rest choosing neutrality. At the same time, just over half said they hoped for peaceful reunification, while 35 percent would be content with a divided Korea as long as peace was maintained.

While some of their answer to ally with North Korea against the U.S. is certainly tied to years of indoctrination by 386er designed education, 40 percent selecting neutrality and the fact that over a third would be happy with the status quo if peaceful points in a direction the 386ers could not have anticipated; Korean youth appear to becoming apathetic to reunification.

While the signal coming from South Korean youth is somewhat mixed, they clearly do not want war or greatly desire reunification; they’ve generally taken a position that other generations may have a difficult time understanding.