ABSTRACT Due to an armistice that stopped the violence but not the war, North and South Korea have been separated by a heavily militarized border since the early 1950s. With the election of President Moon Jaein of South Korea, whose main platform is normalization and cultural exchange with the North, and President Trump’s communication with the North Korean dictator, the two nations have moved into an era of possible normalization that could lead to a peace treaty. Though there are many steps that must be taken before the war can end, looking at past examples of states in similar situations could give world leaders ideas of how they can help create this important relationship to benefit East Asia and the entire world.
Normalization on the Korean Peninsula – Ashton Mitchell
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW The two counties that currently take up the Korean Peninsula, North Korea and South Korea, have historically been a single Korea. The origins of the split began in 1910, when Korea became a colony of the Japanese Empire immediately following the collapse of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. Korea was not free until the Japanese lost World War II in 1945.1 It was then that Korea found itself split in half and occupied by democratic American troops in the south and communist Russian troops in the north. Because Korea had not governed itself in decades, up and coming leaders were influenced by these forces and adopted their viewpoints. Each side elected their own leaders- Kim Il-sung in the north and Syngman Rhee in the south- and because Korea had never been separated, each leader wanted a unification of the peninsula under their own control. When the two leaders could not agree on a peaceful solution, tensions escalated until shots were fired over the border in 1950, 1
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Buzo, Adrian. The Making of Modern Korea. Third ed. Asia’s Transformations. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. 46-70.
JOURNAL of the MARTIN INSTITUTE | INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
