The Legal and Institutional Approach to Inter-Korean Relations

Abstract

The year 2003 was notable for marking the fiftieth anniversary of the “end” of the Korean War. An end to war would generally imply the presence or creation of certain instruments or institutional mechanisms, formal or otherwise, which serve as the basis upon which to preserve a permanent state of peace following military conflict between belligerent parties. In the case of Korea, however, reliance on this assumption as the point of departure for analyzing inter-Korean relations raises more questions than it answers; not so much due to a lack of such mechanisms, but more so because of the tentative nature of the legal foundation upon which the state of peace has been preserved. In this instance, the 50-year old state of “peace” is for the most part based on a tenuous document known as the Military Armistice Agreement.1 The purpose of this agreement was to achieve a temporary cessation of military hostilities until a permanent political agreement could be reached to formally end the war. Such a political agreement did not ever materialize. As a consequence, the year 2003 could more accurately be described as marking the fiftieth anniversary of the continuation of the temporary cease-fire on the Korean peninsula rather than of an end to the war. While there is no active state of war in Korea, by the same token, nor does there exist a recognized—an institutionalized and legal—state of peace between the two Koreas. Hence the often used phrase of describing the two Koreas to be “technically still at war”—an odd sort of fictional twilight zone of neither war nor peace, with the two Koreas having been locked in time for 50 years to an arrangement that had been intended to be of a temporary nature.KeywordsInternational Atomic Energy AgencyKorean PeninsulaAgree FrameworkNuclear IssueFiftieth AnniversaryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.