Posts Tagged ‘reunification’
[DM] “On North Korea becoming a place where people are from”
I’ve a post up at Demography Matters wherein I argue that while South Korea is becoming a place people are moving to, North Korea’s fate in the 21st century is to be the place (country, region, whatever) where people around the world will be from.
[LINK] “North Korea a culture of warriors”
An interesting Asia Times article by one Tatiana Gabroussenko makes the case that North Korean popular culture over the past sixty years has diverged strongly from the south, with the hard-edged militarism and lack of sentimentality cultivated by the north strongly contrasting with the South’s norms.
A comparison of North and South Korean paradigms demonstrates that the major rupture between two halves of a once homogeneous culture which has been occurring over the last 60 years lies not in their respective attitudes to communism. In many aspects, purely communist messages of North Korean discourse are congruent with communal values of patriarchal Korea and may be quite appealing to a regular South Korean.
What in fact differentiates the North Korean spiritual world from the South Korean one is it’s radical departure from civil traditions of the Confucian learned gentlemen, which traditionally despise brute force and military violence.
North Korean ideology has significantly redefined Korea’s past, present and future. When depicting traditional Korea, North Korean media tend to downplay its Confucian legacy and falsely represent old Korea as an essentially martial state. According to a popular ideological myth, obligatory military service allegedly enjoyed such a high prestige in old Korea that it was widely considered a kind of initiation process for young men, without passing of which they were not allowed to marry.
[. . .]
A consistent injection of this idea into generations cannot pass without consequences. Warriors who are trained to fight against named enemies, the South Korean president among them, will search for their battlefield and are likely eventually to find it.
Meanwhile, South Korean upbringing is rapidly moving towards the opposite direction. On the one hand, it largely continues Confucian traditions of the prevalence of intellectual development over the body. On the other hand, this Confucian legacy has been augmented by the educational trend of contemporary Western democracies, with their emphasis on pacifism, tolerance and leniency to human weaknesses.
One of the recent mantras of South Korean pedagogy is curbing children’s aggression and discouraging violent games and toys. A range of parental books on the shelves of the largest Seoul bookshop, Kyobomungo, calls on South Korean fathers to refrain from any aggression, both physical and verbal, when dealing with their children and to inspire their offspring to do the same at schools and playgrounds.
[. . .]
In a prosperous, humane and caring world of South Korean children, everyday violence is hidden from the public eye; this is a world with an increasing number of vegans, animal shelters, and a thriving pet industry. For a young South Korean child today, a rabbit, for instance, is associated with a fluffy toy or a cute domestic companion. In the harsh reality of North Korean children, rabbits are domestic animals that are valued for their skin, meat and fur.
Nation-wide campaigns encourage North Korean kindergarteners to raise rabbits and children “to make food and clothes for the brave uncle soldiers of the Korean People’s Army”.
Are South Koreans prepared to deal with their brothers in the North?
The popularity of the ideal of reunification in South Korea has been dropping for some time, driven substantially on the economic and financial costs of reunification. If South Koreans come to feel that they don’t share that many cultural traits in common with North Koreans–if, in fact, the emerging norms of South Korean culture are held in contempt by North Koreans–what incentive, exactly, to South Koreans have to reunify? What is there to reunify at all? I wonder.
[LINK] “Merkel leaving east Germany in cold”
This Reuters article taking a look at life in the East German border city of Eisenhüttenstadt, besides making the point that Germany’s not a homogeneous country in the sense that all Germans are winners from European integration, takes a look at the ways in which East Germany remains a peripheral area of unified Germany. Even two decades after reunification, East Germany is less prosperous than the former West, and East Germany’s demographic considerably less promising–birth rates aside, it sounds like Eisenhüttenstadt, at least, is a place that people come from.
This fading industrial city, like many in Angela Merkel’s former East German home, is stony ground for the chancellor’s message of European integration and fertile soil for opponents trying to stop her winning a third term next September.
[. . .]
Originally called “Stalinstadt”, it was built in the 1950s as an industrial complex and “the first Socialist city in Germany”. The pride of the GDR, it was renamed in 1961 and had 50,000 inhabitants in its heyday.
In a familiar story across east Germany, reunification meant mass unemployment as communist-run industry failed to compete on the free market. About 40 percent of the town’s population went west and much of the housing for GDR workers stands empty.
In a country whose conservative chancellor dedicates a lot of time to blue-sky thinking about the future and demographic change, the most demographically-challenged areas of Germany do not feel their plight is a political priority.
“Future? We have no future,” said Suzanne, wheeling her bicycle past an abandoned prefab tower block with broken windows on the banks of a canal. She would not give her surname, like many people in a country with historic sensitivities about privacy.
Merkel’s plans for a third term, if she wins, are typically undramatic and give the impression of fine-tuning a well-oiled machine. The Christian Democrats (CDU) will make her the focus of a personality-based campaign which will be new for Germany.
“The election will be won by whoever is most convincing that our currency and jobs are safe,” said one senior Merkel ally.
Judging by what people in Eisenhuettenstadt would like to see discussed – a legal minimum wage and greater job security – there is still a lot of work to be done convincing people in the east, where unemployment is way over the 6.9 percent national rate and incomes are a fifth lower than the average in the west.
[FORUM] What are some politically delicate group identities?
In the comments to my post about the East German flag-waving by the side of the luge track during the Vancouver Olympics, kentrosaurus linked in my comments to an interesting discussion over at dict.leo.org surrounding the proprieties of waving the East German flag at all.
Was waving the East German flag as offensive an act as waving the Confederate flag is commonly taken to be? By extension, if the East German flag is as fundamentally unacceptable an emblem as the Confederate, what else could be used to represent the collectivity of East Germans? Or does the very creation of East Germany by totalitarian tyranny invalidate the idea of being East German at all, or at least the idea of expressing it publicly for the world to see?
What do you think? Are there any group identities, or collective nostalgias, like the East German or the Confederate, that strike you as politically delicate?
Discuss.
[LINK] “The last man in East Germany”
Alex Harrowell has a post up at A Fistful of Euros describing the last odd convulsions of East Germany’s state police as the East German state slowly came apart in late 1989.
Uwe Hädrich had been arrested for attempting to emigrate on the 13th of September, 1989. The TV could only be tuned from outside the cell, so he could only watch official TV; of course, the famous press conference with Günther Schabowski was very official indeed. But that didn’t affect the charges against him. The wall gone and the borders open, he remained detained, accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border, subject to constant interrogation and solitary confinement. (Hädrich was an executive with the DDR’s consumer goods system, and therefore presumably a show-trial candidate.) Eventually, on the 7th of December, the new Modrow government announced that there were no political prisoners in East Germany.
Except for Herr Hädrich, of course. He was suddenly released that afternoon, as if he’d been forgotten about in all the excitement and only now remembered. According to the files, he was the last political prisoner. He went home; back in jail, the Minister of Security himself, General Erich Mielke, had just been booked in and assigned the very cell Hädrich had left.
But the revolution, the emptying of the jails, and the mere arrest of its chief didn’t stop normal operations at the Stasi. At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, a Stasi case officer called on Hädrich to ask him questions about whether he had contacted the Federal German embassy in Hungary. Every day, the case officer arrived to quiz Hädrich, and presumably wrote up his findings back at the office.
[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On East Germany’s luge performance in Vancouver 2010
Over at Facebook, aisb23 reminded me of something odd that Jerry and I caught briefly on the Canadian broadcast of the men’s singles luge at the ongoing Vancouver Olympics.
Silver medalist David Moeller from Germany, when he came to a stop, and they showed the crowd, there was an old East German flag being waved. For Loch, also German, and the gold medal winner the flags were all the regular German/West German flag. This was on CTV, the Canadian network covering the Olympics. No link yet.
I have no idea what it means, but there it was.
What did it mean? While I do own pieces of the Berlin Wall, I was only 10 when Germany reunified and so barely noticed the fact that the two Germanies dominated luge.
Armin Zöggeler of Italy may be attempting to win his third consecutive luge gold medal and his fifth consecutive Winter Olympics medal; Canada may have made its mark in skeleton since the sport was welcomed back into the Olympic family in 2002; and the U.S. Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project, backed by NASCAR’s Geoff Bodinev, is threatening German hegemony. But the numbers don’t lie.
Germany has won 118 Winter Olympics gold medals, and 50 of them have come in luge and bobsleigh. They have won 11 medals in the sliding sports in each of the past two Olympics, including four gold in Turin and four in Salt Lake City. In luge, their women had a 99-race World Cup win streak ended in the final race of last season; this year, the German women were prevented from sweeping the podium in every World Cup race by three third-place finishes by competitors from other countries. Toss in the fact that Zoeggeler is a sweet, gentlemanly guy and that the men’s overall World Cup champion and medal threat Steven Holcomb of the U.S. is almost equally popular among bobsledders, and it all comes back to the Germans.
“German sliders are developed the way hockey players are developed in Canada – which isn’t surprising because for us, these sports are our version of hockey,” says Wolfgang Staudingerv, the native of the Berchtesgaden region of Bavaria who is the Canadian luge coach and was a bronze medalist in doubles at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. “It’s a mill system. You look at my sport and we’ve had a club system in place for 50-60 years. Where I’m from? Every child has gone down a track and every club or track or town wants its sliders to do well. It’s a pride thing. The top three keep moving on and moving on and so forth and before you know it, only the best are left.”
The well-chronicled internecine rivalries in bobsleigh and skeleton are exacerbated during the year leading up to the Olympics because of the battle for limited spots and resources. But Robert Storey, the Ottawa-based president of skeleton and bobsleigh’s governing body (FIBT), says these rivalries dissipate during the Games. As Pierre Lueders, the veteran Canadian driver, said at Lake Placid when he grew frustrated at questions about his reputation as a difficult teammate: “Look, I’d rather have another Canadian on the podium … than a German.”
It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is a theme of German-speaking Europe generally: Switzerland and Austria are also powers, while the prominent Italian lugers like Armin Zöggeler all seem to be South Tyroleans. For that matter, isn’t “Lueders” a very German name?
Regardless, luge was a major theme in East/West sports rivalries: “The “Germany versus the world” tone to the sport is a carryover from the days of rivalries between Communist and non-Communist countries, especially East Germany, West Germany and Switzerland. Staudinger, who raced for West Germany, remembers the East Germans forcing him and his teammates to stay in Dresden for races at the Stasi sports headquarters in Altenberg – a 160-mile round trip. Staudinger and his teammates would make the trip back and forth Dresden for practice, curtains pulled down over the windows and Stasi “handlers” riding with them. When Germany was reunified, the East German program quietly swallowed the West German in temperament, technology and success.” Germany, including both of its component states, dominated luge, but pre-war Germany’s luge training facilities ended up in East Germany, in the Thuringian community of Oberhof. East Germany’s famed devotion to sports seems to have paid off, and to have continued to pay off, since gold medalist Felix Loch and silver medalist David Möller both seem to be East German by birth. Loch is even the son of Norbert Loch, the East German luge coach and himself a luge competitor in the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics. It looks like, at least in luge, it’s the East that swallowed up the West.
The East German flag was waving, yes, but so was the Bavarian flag and the flags of any number of other regions, German and likely otherwise, in the crowd huddled around the end of that luge track, and all those flags combined were easily outnumbered by the number of simple German flags being waved around. Still, it’s interesting how a regionalism–perhaps this particular regionalism–insinuates itself everywhere, even into areas and times where one might have thought it wouldn’t have had a chance. Whatever else the East German flag may represent, it still represents something decidedly positive for at least a few people.
[LINK] “S[outh] Ossetia ‘will become Russian'”
The Ossetians are going to be reunified within Russia, or at least their leaders expect such to come about as reported by the Associated Press.
The breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia has predicted it would become part of Russia.
Three days after Moscow recognised it as independent, parliamentary speaker Znaur Gassiyev, said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the region’s leader, Eduard Kokoity, discussed the idea earlier this week.
They agreed Russia would absorb South Ossetia “in several years” or earlier, he said.
Meanwhile, Georgia announced it would recall all diplomatic staff from its embassy in Moscow in protest at the presence of Russian troops on its territory.
Georgia’s parliament had urged the government to sever diplomatic ties, calling Russia an “aggressor country” and a Georgian MP said his country will eventually regain control of South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia.
“The separatist regimes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the Russian authorities are cut off from reality,” Gigi Tsereteli said. “The world has already become different and Russia will not long be able to occupy sovereign Georgian territory.”
The crisis has prompted an emergency EU summit on Monday with some countries pressing for sanctions against Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia and South Ossetia plan to sign an agreement on the placement of Russian military bases in South Ossetia.
The province’s deputy parliamentary speaker Tarzan Kokoiti said South Ossetians have the right to reunite with North Ossetia, which is part of Russia.
“Soon there will be no North or South Ossetia — there will be a united Alania as part of Russia,” he said, using another name for Ossetia. We will live in one united Russian state.”
A Bit More Detail 