민주화 선호경향과 통일의식 간의 관계 분석 : 통일정책에 대한 한 제언

Abstract

In these days South Korea has faced some difficulties in pursuing the unification policy effectively. The civil society groups divided into left and right to the political orientation. And this causes serious south-south conflicts to the unification policy. Additionally among the Koreans, the desires and wishes toward unification have diminishing sharply. There seems no main group who devotes eagerly or sincerely to the unification problem. At this moment, I have recalled the democratization process of Korea which was once regarded as impossible or unrealistic to achieve. I assumed that the democratization could be finally accomplished owing to the existence of extensive ordinary peoples who hoped and preferred democracy. If reviewing the recent Korean history, it might be concluded that democratization activated and progressed the unification circumstances. Only after the democratization, the Korean government set up more positive declarations and plans about the unification and even reached basic agreements between North and South from the end of 1980 to the early of 1990, For the analysis, using the national survey datum which were initiated by IPUS(Institute for Peace and Unifications Studies), I classified the people along the opinions to the democracy. First, I extracted the democracy inclination variable by factor analysis. Then, I grouped the people into three according to democratic preference score. I named the three groups, as strong democracy inclination group(SDIG), medium democracy inclination group(MDIG), and weak democracy inclination group(WDIG). Next, I examined the relationship between democratic inclination and unification perception. The main findings are as follows. First, in the unification perceptions, SDIG has more desire and wish to the unification comparing to MDIG and WDIG. SDIG has positive and future-oriented perspective to the unification. SDIG might become main supporter to carrying future unification policy. Second, to the perception of North Korea, though the SDIG has different perceptions in some area, SDIG often shows similar perceptions with other groups. This means that, in contrast to left and right demarcation, groups divided by democratic inclination might not initiate south-south conflicts to the unification policy. Third, SDIG strongly supports government unification policies which shares democratic values. But government drives a policy which is not in line with democratic values, SDIG not only withdraws support but blames the policy and government. So I suggest that government should pursue democratic unification policy to form the civil society governance in the realm of unification.