According to the Irishtimes (October 11, 2012):
A DELEGATION from Ireland will travel to Seoul next week to meet senior Korean officials as hopes grow that Ireland’s experience of resolving cross-border conflicts could provide a model for peace in the bitterly divided Korean peninsula.
The five-person delegation arrives in Seoul this week to meet with senior officials from South Korea’s unification ministry, and they will share lessons on North-South Border co-operation under the project Building Bridges.
What kind of plan you ask?
The successful resolution of the Northern Irish conflict in the 1990s has been mooted as a possible blueprint for bringing peace to the Korean peninsula.
The North Koreans are worried about the German unification model, which saw west and east Germany united but the communist east subsequently subsumed into the west German model.
The Irish peace agreement leaves scope for North Korea to continue to exist, which would be a key positive factor in the thinking of the government of Kim Jong-un, the North’s recently installed young leader, who is the third of the Kim family to run the world’s only communist dynasty.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
This should be interesting, although I wish north would dissolve.
yeah!! Lets join South and North Korea together, but keep the government of South Korea is place in the South and the “Kim” dynasty government in place in the North, and forever after the people of the South can work hard to send all their money North to feed the people living in the north of their now “re-united” country.
Other than the fact that they are both hard problems to solve, the situations are so dissimilar the idea that you could transplant the blueprint is laughable.
You mean next week there will be some “weeeee little leprechauns” passed out hither, thither, and yon on the streets of Seoul. Keep your eyes open boys and stick em in a cab if you see any.
As if the Irish didn’t have enough problems of their own.
Though I guess it’s a nice distraction to ditch your own situation and try to solve some other country’s problems.
BTW — anyone else notice the size of Ireland’s GDP? Positively diminutive compared to South Korea’s.
Aww. Ireland. The little country that could.
Such comedy!
I suspect that this delegation from Ireland is going to quickly realize — if they haven’t already — that they have embarked on something of a fool’s errand.
And yet, and yet….
I can see one immediate benefit of this visit, and that is broaching the very delicate subject of at least discussing to possibility of recognizing something of a semi-autonomous region in a post-unification north (small “n”) Korea.
Regional autonomy is a real “no-no” in conventional discussions on what a post-unified Korea might look like, and Korean security types pretty much avoid it like the plague, but there are precedents around the globe for such an arrangement that merit at least some consideration.
And if the visit by this Ireland delegation gets the ball rolling in this direction, that can’t be an altogether bad thing.
DLB
Why would anyone be interested in a “deal” that would recognize North Korea’s brutal government as legitimate?
Reconciliation. The Irish situation does have some similarities. surrounded by big powers. the idea of being one people? They drink a lot there…
Anyway yeah everyone wants the north to just dissolve but really that is not going to happen. If you put yourself into the northern Kim’s shoes, he would lose too much face to better to go out with a bang so hmm hard to imagine.
Maybe a system like Canada’s or England’s.
Have the the Kims as a royal family with imaginary symbolic power and elect Prime ministers through the new Kingdom of Unified Korea to govern the boring day to day real affairs.
It will never work, sorry. Koreans want a reunified Korea under one government.
Morley Safer on Ireland:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrG1uG3pSJc
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