OBSERVARE
Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
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YES, REUNIFICATION BY ABSORPTION WOULD BE A
CATASTROPHE FOR KOREA
JONGHO PARK
jong@hufs.ac.kr
Research professor at the Center for International Area Studies (CIAS), Hankuk University of
Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Seoul (Republic of Korea). He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from
Binghamton University (SUNY), United States. Park’s research encompasses the issues of public
choice, specifically federalism and party system. His work has appeared in several journals,
including British Journal of Politics and International Relations
Abstract
This article argues that reunification by absorption would make democratic institutional
transfer in Korea politically unstable. Existing discussions often assume that if North Korea
collapses, South Korea’s democratic institutions can simply be extended to the North. I argue
that this view overlooks a prior condition: brokerage institutions capable of mediating
distributive conflicts across the former divide. In their absence, post-unification democracy
would likely intensify distributive conflict and political outbidding. Yet the survival of such
brokerage institutions depends on the timing of their implementation and on organizational
capacity. Reunification by absorption is precisely a scenario in which both conditions are
structurally absent.
Keywords
Reunification by absorption, Korean unification, democratic institutional transfer, distributive
conflict, political outbidding.
Resumo
Este artigo defende que a reunificação por absorção tornaria a transferência de instituições
democráticas na Coreia politicamente instável. Os debates atuais partem frequentemente do
pressuposto de que, caso a Coreia do Norte entre em colapso, as instituições democráticas
da Coreia do Sul poderão simplesmente ser alargadas ao Norte. Defendo que esta visão ignora
uma condição prévia: a existência de instituições de mediação capazes de arbitrar conflitos
distributivos de ambos os lados da antiga divisão. Na sua ausência, a democracia pós-
reunificação provavelmente intensificaria os conflitos distributivos e a escalada política. No
entanto, a sobrevivência dessas instituições de mediação depende do momento da sua
implementação e da capacidade organizacional. A reunificação por absorção é precisamente
um cenário em que ambas as condições estão estruturalmente ausentes.
Palavras-chave
Reunificação por absorção, unificação coreana, transferência institucional democrática,
conflito distributivo, disputa política.
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116
How to cite this article
Park, Jongho (2026). Yes, Reunification by Absorption Would be a Catastrophe for Korea.
Janus.net, e-journal of international relations VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 1 – Thematic Dossier – The Korean
Peninsula in a Global Context: Security, Culture, and Transnational Perspectives, June 2026, pp.
115-129. DOI https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.DT0426.7
Article submitted on March 14, 2025 and accepted for publication on March 30, 2026.
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117
YES, REUNIFICATION BY ABSORPTION WOULD BE A
CATASTROPHE FOR KOREA
1
JONGHO PARK
Introduction
The literature on Korean unification has generally rested on two assumptions. The first
is that unification remains a desirable national task in the long run. The second is that,
should the North Korean regime collapse or rapidly weaken, South Korea’s liberal
institutions could simply be extended to the North Korea. South Korean reunification
discourse has long framed division as a condition to be overcome through the restoration
of national homogeneity. Foundational works have similarly treated division as a
historical rupture in an otherwise shared national community.
The existing literature may be broadly grouped into four strands. The first consists of
comparative and institutional-design studies that draw on historical cases such as
Germany, Italy, and the United States in order to assess the feasibility and potential
challenges of Korean unification. These works focus on issues such as income gaps,
legitimacy, elite neutralization, administrative integration, and constitutional design
(Brada, 2023; Vogel and Best, 2016; Shin and Jeong, 2020).
The second strand emphasizes transitional arrangements such as confederation,
commonwealth, or gradual coexistence. Rather than viewing immediate absorption as
desirable, this literature highlights the need for an interim framework that stabilizes the
former divide over time (Kwon and Park, 2019; Lee and Lee, 2019)
The third strand examines the democratic adaptation of North Korean defectors. This
body of research focuses on the micro-foundations of democratic incorporation and
suggests that identity, belonging, and civic socialization shape the extent to which North
Korean migrants adapt to democratic norms (Hur 2018).
A fourth strand addresses the problem of transition within North Korea itself. Its central
concern is the durability of authoritarian rule and the prospects for political
transformation inside the North.
These literatures provide important insights, but they share a common limitation. For
instance, comparative studies of unification offer useful discussions of what institutions
might be adopted, yet they say less about why such institutional designs fail to be stable
1
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-
2020S1A6A3A04064633) and supported by the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund.
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118
once implemented (Brada 2023; Anderson 2016; Hartzell and Hoddie, 2015) Studies of
confederation arrangements emphasize the importance of gradualism and coexistence,
but they often leave unspecified the conflicts that such arrangements are expected to
mediate (Kwon and Park, 2019; Lee and Lee, 2019)
The existing literature has asked far less why democracy itself may become unstable
after unification, and still less how distributive conflicts might destabilize democracy in
the absence of mechanisms capable of containing them. I argue that reunification by
absorption should be understood not simply as a problem of regime replacement, but as
a situation in which democratic institutional transfer is attempted in the absence of
institutions capable of mediating distributive conflict.
This article shifts the focus from constitutional design to distributive conflict. The key
institutional condition is the presence of brokerage institutions capable of mediating
distributive conflict (Bormann et al., 2019; Strøm et al., 2017; Hartzell and Hoddie,
2015). Because the survival of such brokerage institutions depends on timing and
organizational capacity, they must emerge before distributive conflict hardens into
communal politics and must possess enough organizational reach to make participation
in the new order credible.
Reunification by absorption is precisely a scenario in which both conditions are
structurally absent. Institutional transfer may occur rapidly, but the organizational
foundations required to mediate conflict cannot be built at the same speed. In this sense,
reunification by absorption is not merely socially disruptive. It is structurally catastrophic
because it attempts to transplant democratic institutions without the prior conditions
necessary for their political stabilization.
This article proceeds as follows. In the second chapter, I explain why democracies in
segmented societies are vulnerable to distributive conflict and political outbidding. In the
third chapter, I turn to the conditions under which such instability may be mitigated,
focusing on organizational capacity and timing as the two key conditions that mediate
distributive conflict. In the fourth chapter, I argue that reunification by absorption
structurally removes those very conditions. In the fifth chapter, I conclude this article
with discussion and implications, referring to the German case.
The Classical Logic of Distributive Conflict
Theoretical Logic
A useful starting point for thinking about Korean reunification is the classic insight that
democratic instability often emerges not from the absence of elections, but from the
political consequences of distributive conflict in a divided society. In such settings, the
transition to a new regime changes the very structure of political life (Rabushka and
Shepsle, 1972; Horowitz 1985; Gerring et al., 2018) Groups that had previously
cooperated under a shared external constraint now face one another as rivals over scarce
political resources. What had once been organized around a broad common purpose—
Korean reunification—becomes a struggle over allocation. In that sense, regime change
is a shift from one political game to another.
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119
This logic is especially relevant to reunification by absorption. Prior to reunification, both
Koreas may speak in the language of national unity, historical continuity, or eventual
integration. Yet once reunification occurs under asymmetric conditions, those themes are
likely to lose their integrative force. More immediate questions will move to the center of
politics. Who bears the fiscal burden of integration? Who controls the security apparatus?
Which actors are punished, excluded, or protected? How is representation redistributed
across the former divide?
These are not secondary issues. Any political organization that attempts to accommodate
divergent distributive preferences across the former divide—hereafter, a coalition—would
struggle to manage these issues under conditions of scarce distributive resources
(Rabushka and Shepsle, 1972). The problem is that such issues constitute the substance
of post-unification politics. Once such issues become salient, democratic competition may
be organized less around abstract constitutional ideals than around distributive demands
(Horowitz, 1985).
These demands are inherently difficult to reconcile. In a newly unified polity, the
resources available for representation are finite. A settlement that satisfies one side will
be read by another side as a direct loss. Under these conditions, broad national agendas
are fragile. They may temporarily coexist with group-specific claims. General appeals to
integration, growth, or democratic reconstruction cannot easily override conflicts rooted
in everyday material interests and collective insecurity.
This creates a second problem. Coalitions formed under one political context tend to
become oversized once that context disappears. (e.g,, Riker, 1962). A broad alliance may
be useful when groups face a common threat or when political legitimacy depends on
maximal inclusion. After regime change, however, such coalitions become harder to
sustain. Political actors now require a coalition large enough to win and govern. Once
that threshold is lowered, the incentives to retain peripheral or costly partners decline
(Dunning and Harrison, 2010; Selway, 2011)
This is one reason why post-transition democracies in divided societies so often struggle
to remain inclusive. This dynamic also creates opportunities for political entrepreneurs.
Even if a temporary compromise exists, actors outside the governing center would have
incentives to magnify the importance of group-specific grievances (Rabushka and
Shepsle, 1972; Bormann et al., 2017)
In the Korean case, this dynamic could emerge on both sides of the former divide. In the
South, political actors may mobilize against perceived concessions to the North. In the
North, actors may frame any asymmetrical settlement as subordination. Once such
outbidding begins, moderate positions become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The central risk of reunification by absorption is that it would politicize distributive conflict
in a setting where electoral competition may reward communal appeals. In this sense,
democratic instability is a structural possibility generated by the interaction of group-
based claims.
Existing theories of ethnic conflict capture this dynamic well (e.g., Horowitz 1985;
Bormann et al., 2017; Gerring et al., 2018). The Korean case is relevant because long-
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term partition has produced distinct political communities across the former divide.
(Kwon and Park, 2019).
Formal Intuition
The same argument may be clarified through a simple spatial and expected-utility
framework. Consider three communities, A, B, and C, each with an ideal outcome that
maximizes its own collective interest The three actors may be understood as representing
hardline and moderate positions across the former divide. The set of possible political
outcomes can then be represented as a triangular strategy space whose vertices denote
the realization of each group’s preference. Intermediate points represent compromise
outcomes.
Figure 1. Strategic Space of Three Communal Actors
Figure 1 illustrates this strategic space. As in the original formulation, the point of the
figure shows that compromise is intrinsically unstable when one group expects that
democratic competition can move outcomes closer to its own ideal point. In the Korean
setting, the intuition is easy to see. South Korean actors may prefer an intermediate
arrangement in the abstract, but if they expect electoral competition to reward a harder
line, they have little reason to remain at the center.
The same applies to North Korean actors who expect their survival or protection to
depend on sharper communal mobilization. Under these conditions, the middle ground
exists conceptually, but it lacks political security.
This instability becomes clearer considering the intensity of preferences. In divided
settings, political actors do not merely rank outcomes differently. They also care about
them with unusual intensity. This is crucial because strong preference intensity is tied to
attitudes toward risk. If South or North Korean actor value distributive outcomes as
matters of collective survival, then uncertain but potentially larger gains may be
preferred to safer but moderate bargains. This logic may be summarized as follow;
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Figure 2. Utility Functions reflecting Risk-Acceptant and Risk-Averse Preferences
In that case, actors become willing to gamble for more extreme outcomes.
Figure 2 captures this intuition through utility curves. When utility is convex, actors
display risk-acceptant behavior and prefer “all-or-nothing” political strategies. When
utility is concave, actors are more risk-averse and willing to accept secure compromise.
The significance of the figure for this article is direct. Reunification by absorption is likely
to generate the first configuration.
Questions of punishment, property, welfare or security are the daily issues that make
collective preferences intense and non-compromising. Finally, electoral politics may
encourage risky escalation rather than moderation.
Once these assumptions are combined, democratic instability follows from the logic of
political competition itself. Suppose a candidate representing either of North or South
Korea proposes a moderate position that includes some concessions to the other side. A
rival from within the same divide may attack that position as insufficiently protective of
the group’s core interests and move closer to the group’s ideal point.
In either of Korea, this harder line may defeat the moderate alternative even when the
latter is more broadly acceptable. The result is a pattern of outbidding. Moderates are
vulnerable as hardline competitors exploit communal fears within majoritarian politics.
This means that even actors who seek gradual accommodation may be punished by those
who promise stronger protection for “their side.”
Democratic procedures can be destabilized when group-based distributive conflicts
become politically salient. This is the political context in which reunification by absorption
must be understood. The Korean problem is the extension of democratic institutions into
an environment already primed for distributive conflict.
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Containing Distributive Conflicts
Distributive conflict becomes politically destabilizing when no institution exists to mediate
it before it hardens into antagonistic politics. Classical pessimism, however, has
important limits. If distributive conflict alone were enough to explain democratic failure,
then all divided post-transition polities would unravel in the same way. However, some
do not. Some of them manage to preserve a larger political framework long enough to
contain those pressures.
Power-sharing institutions such as federalism or consociationalism may be attractive, but
they do not implement themselves (Anderson, 2016; Christin and Hug, 2012; Brancati,
2006) The problem is not only which institutional arrangement would work, but who has
the incentive to establish it before conflict becomes fully polarized (Ordeshook and
Shvetsova, 1994; Kunicová and Rose-Ackerman, 2005). Any institutional reform requires
political actors who expect to benefit from it and who possess the capacity to sideline
both internal outbidders and external entrepreneurs.
An organized coalition of moderate actors across the former divide would be the relevant
carrier of reform (Bormann et al., 2019; Strøm et al., 2017). Such a coalition matters
because it connects northern and southern actors within a larger political framework and
gives them incentives to remain inside the system even when they cannot secure all of
their group-level demands. Democracy remains stable only when political loss does not
become equivalent to collective exclusion (Simonsen, 2005).
Such a coalition does not emerge endogenously. It requires organizational depth,
recognized leadership, routinized coordination, and legitimacy. They require
organizational depth, recognized leadership, routinized coordination, and legitimacy to
persuade actors that future gains inside the system is preferable to immediate exit. That
is why democratic stabilization depends not merely on formal rules, but on the prior
existence of organized coalition committed to a shared political goal.
The problem is as much temporal as it is institutional. The coalition must survive long
enough to contain conflict before it becomes fully polarized. Once that threshold has been
crossed, institutional reform is less likely to restore stability, whichever it takes form of
federalism, consociationalism, or other power-sharing arrangements.
Thus, the functioning of power-sharing institutional reform requires two minimum
conditions. The first condition is timing. Institutional reform led by the coalition needs to
be implemented as early as possible, because reforms are most effective when they are
introduced before political competition has been reorganized around communal demands.
Once communal demands become the dominant political agenda, actors on both sides of
the former divide have less reason to remain within the coalition.
The importance of early conflict-mediating reform can be demonstrated as follows. For
any actor B, remaining within the coalition must be more beneficial than the expected
compensation from leaving it. This can be stated as:
g × δ ≥ (1 − g) × C
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δ denotes the actual share received by the minority within the institution, such as
perceived access to cabinet positions, budgetary resources, or policy influence. C denotes
the cost of acting outside the coalition, such as state enforcement capacity, punishment,
or organizational costs. Finally, g denotes the weight voters place on “our group’s share,”
that is, the relative importance of identity benefits compared to the conservative value
of remaining in power.
In this case, the repeated expected utility of B, given a discount factor for future value
(0<β<1) is,
Here, is the share received within the coalition at time 𝑡 and is the cost of exiting
the coalition.
If power-sharing reform occurs at time τ, then for all t > τ,
permanently change. The present value of the gain in utility generated by reform is
therefore:
=
If we accept the assumption that power-sharing institutional reform is generally
advantageous to minority groups (mostly North Korea actors), then
> 0
is the sum of a geometric series beginning at t=τ, and since β<1, this
expression is maximized when τ takes its minimum value.
However, if the value of at the initial point t < 0 is sufficiently negative, then even
may still remain negative.
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An attempt at power-sharing reform will fail no matter how early it is undertaken. This
provides a clue as to why many coalitions, despite having sufficient incentive to attempt
the reform, nonetheless failed to institutionalize it in time.
Power-sharing institutions created by reform must be able to manage the communal
demands within it until the institutionalization is completed. To do so, the coalition must
be organized to manage that transition. Although the concept of organizational strength
remains theoretically underdeveloped (Borz and Janda, 2018), Olson (1962)
conceptualizes it as a group sustained by successful collective action.
Both northern and southern communities have incentives to free-ride by prioritizing their
own communal agendas, but the extent to which the organization minimizes that
possibility indicates its degree of strength. Rabushka and Shepsle (1972) view that
communal demands as the factor that fatally undermines collective action and causes
the organization to collapse within a short period.
The proof regarding organizational strength is determined by the interaction of the
following three functions. For the organizational strength of the institution; O∈[0,1]
1. k(O) denotes the cost of exiting the coalition, where κ′(O) ≥ 0.
2. denotes the actual share that B receives within the current coalition,
where
3. denotes the incentive offered to B by an alternative coalition, where
The reason the derivative of is negative is that, as O increases, the expected share
that an alternative coalition can offer to B is assumed to decline.
In this case, the retention condition in terms of repeated present value is:
Define
Then its derivative is:
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As a result, G(O) increases as O increases. In other words, the stronger the organizational
capacity of the coalition, the lower the incentive to exit under otherwise identical
conditions. At the same time, this also acts as a factor that reduces the negativity of .
Why Absorption Eliminates These Conditions
The political consequences depend on whether institutional reforms can emerge early
enough and whether they are backed by the organized coalition (Bormann et al., 2019;
Strøm et al., 2017). Reunification by absorption, however, is precisely the process in
which both conditions are structurally undermined. This is not simply because absorption
produces asymmetry between North and South Korea. The danger lies in attempting to
establish a democratic order without the conditions necessary for it to function.
First, absorption eliminates the condition of timing. The institutional reform must be
undertaken before nationwide issues are displaced by communal demands (Horowitz,
1985; 1993). Once distributive conflict has already hardened, the reform no longer works
as a preventive mechanism. The earlier the intervention, the greater its present value
for actors deciding whether to remain within the system. The later it comes, the less
capable it is of altering their incentives.
Reunification by absorption eliminates precisely this condition. It does so because it
presupposes that political incorporation must occur rapidly, often under conditions of
collapse or abrupt institutional vacuum. In such a setting, the extension of South Korean
law would likely be treated as urgent and non-negotiable.
This ensures that the implementation of reform arrives too late. Institutions capable of
translating conflict into manageable bargaining cannot be built at the same speed as the
regime transition by itself. While such institutions require time to organize, absorption
compresses that time. What disappears is, therefore, the temporal window in which
mediation could still function preventively.
That delay directly lowers the expected value of remaining within the new order for every
actor. In the language of the earlier model, the relevant issue is whether the perceived
share of participation exceeds the expected value of acting outside the coalition.
However, that condition becomes harder to satisfy when the benefits of participation
remain uncertain while the costs of exposure are immediate. North Korean actors facing
immediate uncertainty cannot be expected to value a future promise of inclusion as highly
as a present guarantee.
The second problem is the coalition’s organizational capacity. Even a reform introduced
early, it may fail if the coalition is insufficiently organized to lead the process until its
complete implementation. The argument is that strong organizations raise the cost of
exit, increase the benefits of remaining within the coalition, and reduce the attractiveness
of alternative alignments. As organizational capacity rises, actors are less likely to defect
under otherwise identical distributive pressures.
Absorption removes this condition at its source. The coalition would have to connect
actors across the former divide. However, such an organized coalition cannot arise
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spontaneously. It cannot be improvised by constitutional declaration alone, nor can it be
assumed to exist simply because one side already has functioning institutions. South
Korea possesses a democratic state, but that does not mean it possesses a political actor
capable of mediating conflict across the former North–South divide.
Instead, the sudden extension of South Korea’s democratic rules intensifies the risk that
distributive conflict will be interpreted in communal terms. This distinction is essential.
In ordinary discussions of unification, South Korea’s institutional strength is often treated
as an advantage that would smooth the transition. The stronger the preexisting South
Korean state, the easier it becomes to extend democratic rules downward from the top.
South Korean actors may mobilize against perceived privileges granted to northern
communities. On the other hand, North Korean actors may interpret unequal
incorporation as evidence that the new order is a structure of domination.
Such conflict is politically difficult to avoid. This does not necessarily mean that conflict
will always take the form of open violence or regime breakdown. The claim is narrower
but still severe. It is that the issues most likely to define early post-unification politics—
property rights, taxation, security, representation, punishment, and administrative
authority—are all distributive in character, and that absorption deprives the new regime
of the institutions that might otherwise contain them.
Reunification by absorption should be understood as politically catastrophic. It converts
that divide into a new distributive struggle inside a formally democratic order. The result
is the institutionalization of conflict without the prior means to manage it. In that precise
sense, absorption is catastrophic by design.
Why Germany Is Not a Benchmark for Korea
This article argues that reunification by absorption would produce a highly unstable path
to democratic integration in Korea. The main problem is political. Democratic institutions
cannot stabilize themselves where distributive conflict is immediate and institutions of
mediation are absent. This is because post-unification Korea would not be the simple
restoration of a unified nation-state. Under these conditions, the earliest politics of
unification would be distributive.
In this situation, welfare, punishment, representation, taxation, employment, and
security would shape the regime from the start. Elections and party competition would
not moderate these conflicts. Instead, they would be vehicles for mobilizing actors on
both sides of the former divide. The extension of South Korea’s existing institutions would
still be unable to accommodate each community’s interests at once. Given the salience
of institutional rules for distributive resources, the likely result would be political
outbidding and the communalization of distributive claims.
German unification should not be treated as a benchmark for Korea (Shin and Jeong,
2020; Vogel and Best, 2016). This analogy obscures the mechanism at the center of this
article. Emphasizing Germany’s success shifts attention toward institutional superiority,
administrative integration, and fiscal burden, but these are not the core issues. The key
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question is whether democratic institutions remain governable when distributive conflict
becomes salient. I am highly skeptical of the possibility.
An uncritical comparison to Germany hinders productive discussion. It privileges
outcomes over mechanisms. While it highlights successful institutional extension, it
sidelines the question of who would mediate distributive conflict between North and
South Korea. South Korea clearly possesses established democratic institutions and may
be the actor that would extend them to the North. However, those institutions are less
likely to mediate the distributive conflicts that absorption would immediately politicize.
Moreover, Germany itself was not a case of coalition-free success. East Germany
experienced roundtable politics and held elections during the transition. Although West
German parties and administrative institutions quickly entered the East, they also
provided the organizational capacity necessary to sustain coalition-building (Vogel and
Best, 2016), including the incorporation of political moderates on both sides. East
German society likewise contained churches, civic groups, and emerging associations
(Shin and Jeong, 2020). Its unification remained governable in part because brokerage
functions were already present.
Germany was therefore an exceptional case. It cannot serve as a model for Korea. Its
relative stability rested on conditions prior to institutional transfer itself. The scenario of
reunification by absorption lacks the conditions that Germany enjoyed. It would compress
the timing of incorporation, weaken prior mediation, and expose vulnerable actors before
the organized coalition has time to emerge. Given this difference, the German case
reinforces the importance of prior political organization.
The broader implication is conceptual as well as empirical. Korean unification should not
be approached only through the language of national restoration. It should also be
analyzed as a problem of democratic stability under severe distributive conflict. A unified
Korea cannot be presumed politically homogeneous because it remains nationally
continuous. It should instead be examined as a conflictual order in which group-based
claims may acquire a quasi-ethnic character.
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