Reconciliation and Unification, Let’s Make a Fresh Start

The very first day of 2005 has begun.

The year 2005 is the centennial year of the Eulsa Treaty, the 60th year of Independence, the 40th year of 1965 Korea-Japan Agreement, and the fifth year of the South-North Korea summit. The year 2005 has a symbolic meaning that chronologically we have to cut off from the past and begin a new era.

The themes of New Year 2005 are “from division to reconciliation” and “from conflict to unification.” We should stop divisions, antagonism and dividing into parties dichotomically that weighted down our society in 2004, and instead, we should hold the flag of “studying truth based on fact” under unification auspices.

The reason why the Dong-a Ilbo coins “New Start” as the slogan for 2005 is to break away from ideological and combative thought, which is omnipresent in our society and instead emphasize reconciliation and practical values. This implies that we should open the renaissance of the nation’s reconstruction under which the political arena seeks efficiency and unification, labor and management issues go to the roundtable, and the economy spares the vitality of production subjects.

The national competitiveness of Korea ranked in the 30-39th range last year according to the World Economic Form (WEF) and the International Institute of Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland. The worried voice comes out that Korea may be left out of endless competition in the globalization wave if we squander time again. The competition for survival in the height of the wave of Neo-Liberalism now becomes a dominant rule of the world community.

The recent ideological conflict and struggle for moral justification, which drove our society into a whirlpool are the old trends of thought that make the reality of the cold international community flow backward. True reconciliation and coexistence between influential parties of industrialization and democratization are now a premise of a refreshed start for the focus of national capacity.

The results of the survey of the ideological propensity of the people that the Dong-a Ilbo requested from the Korea Research Center at the end of last year also supports this. 84.7 percent of respondents diagnosed that “ideological divisions in our society have reached a dangerous level.” This is why the “New Light” campaign to open a new prospect of conservatives has quickened.

The looks of making a refreshed start for the future are exactly the marks of progress of a new face and conservation.

Young-Chan Yoon yyc11@donga.com