The Koreas | Diplomacy | East Asia

South Korean Unification Minister Uses North Korea’s Formal Name

Seoul’s use of Pyongyang’s formal state title signals a historic policy shift, but the Lee administration’s two-state vision is constrained by the constitution, Washington’s nuclear red lines, and its own unification mandate.

South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young referred to North Korea by its official state name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, at a public academic forum in Seoul on March 25. It is a deliberate signal that the Lee Jae-myung administration is moving toward treating the peninsula’s division as something more durable than a temporary political condition to be reversed.

“Both sides need a responsible decision oriented toward the future – the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea alike,” Chung said in his opening remarks at a symposium co-hosted by the Ministry of Unification and the Korea Institute for National Unification at the Plaza Hotel in Seoul. The conference was titled “Paradigm Shift in Korean Peninsula Policy: Ending Hostility and Achieving Peaceful Coexistence.”

Chung also referred to inter-Korean relations as a “Han-Jo relationship” – a phrase that implies the existence of two separate states. In that sense, Chung’s speech mirrored Pyongyang’s own terminology for inter-Korean relations since Kim Jong Un, the autocratic leader of North Korea, formally codified his “two hostile states” doctrine. It was the first time a senior Seoul official had used either expression at an open and on-the-record public forum.

The remarks were not improvised. They are the clearest articulation yet of what Chung calls a “peaceful two-state framework,” a doctrine that positions the two Koreas not as two halves awaiting eventual reunion but as distinct political entities that must first learn to coexist. However, just two days earlier, Kim called South Korea as the North’s “most hostile state,” vowing to thoroughly repudiate and ignore it.

In his debut address before the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, 2025, Lee unveiled the END Initiative for the Korean Peninsula – a sequenced framework built around Exchange, Normalization, and Denuclearization – and pledged to bring an end to the era of hostility and confrontation on the Korean Peninsula. Crucially, Lee framed denuclearization not as a precondition for engagement but as its ultimate destination.

On March 1 of this year, Lee reinforced this message that his government will not engage in any hostile acts or pursue unification by absorption in his speech commemorating the 107th anniversary of Korea’s Independence Movement.

In light of Lee and Chung’s remarks, the Lee administration may have prepared to engage Pyongyang as a sovereign political entity, not a rogue sub-state to be eventually reintegrated. However, the question remains whether the architecture required to formalize that posture can actually be built.

South Korea’s Constitution

The first obstacle is domestic and fundamental. Under Article 3 of South Korea’s constitution, the territory of South Korea encompasses the entire Korean Peninsula – meaning, under South Korean law, the Kim regime constitutes an illegal occupation of South Korean sovereign territory and the 25 million people living in the North are technically South Korean citizens.

Formally recognizing North Korea as a separate sovereign state would require not a policy update but a constitutional amendment, which is a threshold no South Korean president has openly approached. Lee, despite his pragmatism, has given no indication he plans to cross it. 

That restraint creates a structural contradiction at the heart of his North Korea policy: Seoul cannot simultaneously declare its respect for the North as a sovereign state and maintain a constitution that treats it as an unlawful occupier of the South’s territory.

Even if Seoul resolved that internal contradiction through a constitutional amendment, the international landscape presents its own formidable obstacle.

North Korea has been a de facto nuclear power for years but the United States has never formally recognized that reality. Also, Washington’s overtures to Pyongyang have consistently maintained denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as a core objective across successive administrations. A two-state system on the Korean Peninsula and the idea of recognizing North Korea as a sovereign state may confer legitimacy on the Kim regime, an actor that possesses........

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