The division of Korea was always understood to be temporary. In its early decades, that presumption was based on the armistice itself, which called for a ceasefire to suspend conflict, not resolve it. Later, after the Cold War, it rested on another belief: that growing globalization and the universalization of liberal political and economic norms would erase the intra-Korean border, as they had erased Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe. For decades, this expectation, mostly unspoken but always there, was plausible.
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