How about a long shot: the reunification of the Korean peninsula. At first blush it seems fanciful, but in South Korea an eventual union has been the received wisdom for a long time.
When I first visited South Korea around 15 years ago (I was then loans editor of this publication) I met up with an array of bankers who forecast that the two Koreas would unite within a decade.
It would involve vast sums of money and the epic merging of apparently antithetical cultures – the whip-smart, rich, worldly South, with the brainwashed, naive and backward North.
But recent developments suggest that perhaps the received wisdom was bang on the nail. North Korea’s state media outlet, the KNCA, last week made an explicit plea for the unification of the peninsula, stating that all Koreans should “promote contact, travel, cooperation between North and South Korea,” and that the North would “smash” any obstacles to that end.
The announcement came as the North prepares to send a team of athletes to next month’s Winter Olympic games in the South. And in a move that fuels the optimism of unification bulls, the Korean teams competing in the games – the North is sending its women’s hockey team – will do so under a united Korean peninsula flag. Alright, teams from both countries have done so before, last at the 2006 Asian Games, but not amid such a highly charged backdrop as currently prevails.
SO MUCH FOR the symbolism, but what’s behind it? I would hazard a guess that it’s a combination of factors, rooted in the paranoia of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the deepening bite of economic sanctions in the North’s stunted economy.
The Olympics were long touted as likely to produce a period of rapprochement between North and South, so perhaps the call for unification is simply a set piece, after which the North will return to its ballistic missiles and sabre-rattling.
Reading North Korea’s intentions has long proved to be a mug’s game, as a string of US presidents and secretaries of state have discovered. But things are a little different these days.
For example, there’s the sudden sartorial shift of the supreme leader from Mao-style boiler suit to a shiny get-up that wouldn’t look amiss in the boardroom of Goldman Sachs.
Then there are the tactics of Donald Trump, who has boasted about the size of his nuclear button and threatened to rain “fire and fury” down onto the North. A pre-emptive strike by the US and its allies using conventional weapons would be calamitous in terms of casualties, as all military commentators agree, but that threat might just have resonated with Mr Kim. He might have an image of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein lying in a hole in the ground and breathing through a straw in a futile attempt to elude his captors as an unpleasant precedent to go to sleep on.
And then as the economy of his country implodes he might have been inspired by the example of former Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe – a man no less despotic or bloodthirsty than he – who recently cut a deal to live out the remainder of his life in safety and comfort in the country he ruled for 37 years.
Kim could keep a palace or two in the North and retire into obscurity, spending his days horse riding and gorging on fine cheese and wine, while the real business of unification got underway elsewhere.
Stranger things have happened in Asia under the communist banner. One thinks of the last emperor of China, Puyi, who worked as a gardener and was forced to sweep the streets after the Chinese Communist Party came into power in 1949.
THE UNIFICATION OF the Korean peninsula would be the most iconic moment in Asian history since the Communists seized power in China and bring to a definitive close the unfinished business of the Korean war, which has been officially ongoing since 1953.
Were it to occur, it would have the world’s project finance bankers apoplectic with excitement. A concerted funding effort by the world’s multilateral lenders – China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would surely lead the charge – would fuel an unprecedented boom for the global construction industry.
Korean unification might be thought of as finding its blueprint in the unification of West and East Germany, but the comparison is disingenuous. Whereas the Treuhand – an agency set up to privatise East German state-owned businesses – had a welter of profitable businesses under its remit, North Korean industry is far smaller.
The country’s infrastructure, while not inconsiderable, is crumbling and in urgent need of modernisation, from the road and railway systems, to airports, power plants and telecommunications. Hence, a unification bonanza.
At odds with the general perception of North Korea as a dyed-in-the-wool command economy where the state owns everything, there have been instances of privatisation in North Korean industry, including the country’s oil and gas facilities. Unification bulls view such phenomena as bolstering their case: the North has already got the joke.
They may well be right, and the received wisdom recited to me 15 years ago in the offices of the Korean Development Bank, among other places, could yet come to pass as the endgame unfolds.
