South Korean youth question unification.

Seoul—When the sleepy South Korean town of Pyeongchang was announced as the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics last month, Seoul went to unusual lengths to share the honor with its neighbor to the north. Both major parties vowed to pursue an inter-Korean team, and opposition leaders even spoke of co-hosting the games with North Korea. These overtures might have seemed generous, considering that in the past 15 months North Korea had sunk a South Korean naval vessel, shelled Yeongpyeong Island, and threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.” But, in South Korea, where the president-elect pledges to “pursue the peaceful unification of the homeland” and where children sing “Our Wish is Unification,” the drive to rejoin the two Koreas is ingrained in the national psyche.

As an ailing Kim Jong-il prepares to hand an economically failing state to his son Kim Jong-un, that wish may be closer to fulfillment than ever. Last year, per WikiLeaks, President Lee Myung-bak’s national security adviser, Chun Yung-woo, predicted that North Korea “would collapse politically two to three years after the death of Kim Jong-il.” Park In-ho, president of The Daily NK—a Seoul-based news service that reports on events inside North Korea—told me the regime’s downfall was 70 percent likely within five years and “100 percent” certain within a decade.

There’s one problem, however: As the long-awaited reunion approaches, younger South Koreans are starting to question whether unification is really such a great idea.

FOR THE FIRST three decades after Korea was split along the thirty-eighth parallel, North and South Koreans had far more in common than not. Their political systems were radically different, to be sure, but they spoke the same language and shared 5,000 years of history.Economically, both were struggling—and, as late as the mid-’70s, South Korea’s GNP per capita was lower than that of the resource-rich North.

But, since the ’70s, South Korea has transformed itself from a poor autocracy into a first-world democracy that exports cars, electronics, and “Korean Wave” culture around the globe. Over the same period, North Korea has become more repressive, more impoverished, and more insular. Today, the average South Korean is about three inches taller than his Northern peer and speaks a very different form of Korean, expanded by contact with the wider world. While many parents and grandparents in South Korea still have brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, north of the thirty-eighth parallel, for many in their twenties and thirties, North Korea is simply another foreign country.