51¹ú²úÊÓƵ

Academics come to their subjects for a variety of reasons. For Don Malatesta of Norwich 51¹ú²úÊÓƵ, Vermont, the stimulus came from five years of service as a United States air force pilot in Korea during the 1970s and 1980s, flying surveillance missions over the Communist North.

This left a particular interest in how long the most important surviving cold war partition would last. Professor Malatesta sought answers to the question of reunification in a series of interviews with leading scholars.

He emphasises that the findings, discussed in San Francisco last week, are still preliminary. The majority of the interviews have still to be fully analysed, but he has already located some trends.

Experts are neutral as to whether reunification is becoming more or less likely at the moment: "They would all like to see it, but they think the process is pretty much in neutral at the moment."

Different factors are pulling in different directions. Economic forces are providing a considerable push towards unification: "Only one of the interviews didn't think this was happening. North Korea may be getting into serious difficulties and could want to open up more as a consequence, while both countries recognise external pressures on their economies pushing them this way."

One speaker noted that the South's economy is 20 times as large as the North's. Pushing the other way are security and military factors, which most interviewees saw as exerting a strong negative effect on the prospects for reunification.

Research Opportunities, pages i-xxxii