North Korea drops reunification from constitution

North Korea has removed references to reunification with South Korea from its constitution, South Korean officials said on Tuesday, a textual change that formalises Pyongyang’s recent “two hostile states” line. Euronews reports the revision deletes language about “reunification of the motherland,” a phrase long used to justify the North’s claim to speak for the whole peninsula. The Korea Herald describes the change as part of a broader doctrinal shift in which the South is no longer treated as a counterpart to absorb or negotiate with, but as a permanent adversary.

For decades, reunification language served multiple purposes at once: it framed the armistice as temporary, gave the regime a nationalist story that outlived economic failure, and provided a diplomatic escape hatch whenever Pyongyang wanted aid or sanctions relief. Removing it narrows the set of bargains North Korea can plausibly sell to its own elites. If the constitution now treats division as settled, then summits, hotlines and “family reunion” gestures become discretionary tools rather than steps in an advertised historical project.

The timing also fits a North Korea that has been investing in hard alignments rather than symbolic rapprochement. Seoul has been pointing to deeper North Korea–Russia military cooperation, while Kim Jong Un has publicly sharpened language about the South; Aftonbladet notes Kim previously called South Korea “the most hostile country.” In practice, a constitution matters less than artillery and fuel, but constitutional wording is how the state signals which conflicts are meant to be managed and which are meant to endure.

For South Korea, the move complicates an already awkward policy architecture. The government department tasked with inter-Korean relations is still called the Ministry of Unification, even as Pyongyang’s official text moves in the opposite direction. That leaves Seoul facing a choice between keeping reunification as a long-term national narrative—useful domestically but increasingly detached from North Korean policy—or shifting to a containment-and-deterrence posture that treats the border as permanent while still trying to prevent accidents from escalating.

The revision also changes how outside powers read the peninsula. A North Korea that no longer needs to pretend it is pursuing a shared national destiny can lean more openly on external patrons and transactional security arrangements. That makes the peninsula less a frozen civil conflict with occasional thaws, and more a conventional front line embedded in wider great-power competition.

South Korea learned about the change by reading North Korea’s revised text, not by being told. The ministry in Seoul is still called “Unification,” while the constitution in Pyongyang no longer is.