When the Berlin Wall came down, South Koreans were filled with envy, followed by hope for Korea’s own unification. But now, that hope is fading. Seoul correspondent vicjkim with the full story:
Office workers, delivery boys and teenagers in school uniforms hurried through the rain, past the battered concrete slab without giving it a second glance.The panel —12 feet wide, about as tall and 15 inches thick — is a piece of the Berlin Wall. It has been on display in downtown Seoul since 2005, when Germany gifted it to South Korea as a “symbol of hope for the peaceful unification of the Korean peninsula.
how he could easily pick out the Koreans among the Asian students at his university the next morning because they were all teary-eyed.“In some ways, South Koreans are more interested in German unification than Germans themselves are,” he said last month at a forum in Seoul about the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of myriad events marking the 30th anniversary.
The lessons drawn have been a sobering reality check on what Koreans could expect from their own unification. In 1990, per-capita GDP was about 1.5 times higher in West Germany than in the East, whereas the average South Korean today makes at least 25 times as much as the average North Korean. More than anything, South Koreans today worry about how much unification with North Korea would cost their already flagging economy.
South and North Korean officials attend at an opening ceremony for two nations’ first liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, in 2018. There are few other precedents for reunification. Saying the German example had limitations because it was rapid and abrupt, the South Korean government recently put out a call for researchers to work on a study looking at the European Union as a blueprint.
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