[KS] Re: literature types on NK perspectives

[Balazs Szalontai]

Some comments on the issue of North Korean resilience:

1) The fact that the economic embargo in general and the famine in 
particular did not bring the regime down is not as surprising as one 
may think. Neither Stalin's USSR nor the PRC collapsed as a result of 
the famines of 1932-33 and 1959-60 respectively. By contrast, a 
much less serious economic crisis was well enough to undermine and 
bring down a series of regimes from Berlin to Ulaan Baatar in 1989-
91. A really hard-line dictatorship, and the NK regime certainly belongs 
to this category, can overcome enormous difficulties which would 
topple a softer one. See also Iraq in 1991-2003. (I hope no one in 
Washington will conclude on the basis of this last comparison that 
the only way of solving the "NK problem" is to invade the country and 
occupy every square inch of it...) The East European events of 
1953-56 demonstrated that intense anti-regime protests usually took 
place only in those countries where the regimes showed clear signs 
of weakness and publicly practised self-criticism for their previous 
policies, thus encouraging the population.   

2) By the 1960s, the DPRK had become very much independent from 
both the Soviets and the Chinese (a process that had begun at least 
a decade earlier), which made the regime much more stable than the 
Soviet "satellites" in Eastern Europe. From 1958 on, the Soviets could 
not interfere in North Korean intra-party affairs, and from 1965 on 
they found it advisable not to make any comments on NK domestic 
policies.     

3) There was a clear geographical pattern in the collapse of Communist 
regimes in 1989-91. In Eastern Europe, even fiercely independent 
Albania and Yugoslavia was brought down by the shock of the Soviet 
and East European earthquake, since these countries geographically 
and culturally belong to the same region. No one could really believe 
that socialism could survive in Albania after it had collapsed in the 
whole of Eastern Europe: the APL leaders themselves also became 
demoralized. By contrast, in East and Southeast Asia it was only 
Mongolia and Kampuchea, that is, two regimes strongly dominated by 
some powerful neighbor and lacking a substantial domestic legitimacy, 
that experienced such developments. Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea 
is still there. For these countries, China is more important, either in a 
geographical or a cultural sense, than Russia, and the PRC is not likely 
to collapse soon. The mere existence of a (more or less friendly) 
Communist party-state in China gives a strong psychological support 
to the NK leaders, though they do not really want to imitate Chinese 
reformist policies. Significantly, the Castro regime, another nationalist 
dictatorship that does not belong to the East European geographical 
and cultural region, is also still in power.         

4) Succession crises often proved dangerous for dictatorships, facilitating 
either a reformist course (as it happened in the USSR and China after 
the death of Stalin and Mao) or a collapse of the regime. By contrast, 
Kim Il-sung began to deal with that problem as early as the 1960s, and 
by the time he died, Kim Chong-il had been more or less firmly entrenched. 
On the other hand, Kim Chong-il may not be similarly successful. By the 
1990s, a high number of Kim relatives (incomparably more than in the 
1960s and 1970s) had been placed into political positions, and it is well-
known from the history of the Yi dynasty that such a situation often 
provokes conflicts between the potential successors as soon as the king 
is likely to die soon. Such a family squabble may destabilize the NK regime 
in the same way as it happened several times in old Choson.

5) Concentrated American pressure will, in all probability, harden, rather 
than undermine, the resilience of the NK leaders and cadres in the 
same way as it happened in North Vietnam and Iran in 1964-73 and 
in the 1980s respectively. Such a war psychosis makes any concession 
look extremely dangerous. In 1989, most East European leaders and 
cadres could feel that if they stepped down peacefully, they would not 
be lynched on the street or sent to the Guantanamo basis for 
interrogation. (In fact, many of them became as capitalist as one 
can get.) By contrast, the men in P'yongyang intensely distrust 
both the United States (South Korea, Japan, etc.) and the population 
they rule, and they are very much afraid of the consequences of a 
regime collapse. After the labor camps, the downed South Korean 
airliner and other incidents, this is somewhat understandable... In 
any case, US saber-rattling is probably as counter-productive in the 
NK case as in Cuba. Many Cubans joke that if the U.S. embargo 
ceased, Fidel would fall the next day. 

Balazs Szalontai
Central European University
History Department
e-mail: hphszb01 at phd.ceu.hu (temporary)
           aoverl53 at yahoo.co.uk
 
  

Even literature types like me get asked about what's going on in Korea; and
especially, what's up with the North; etc.

In desperation, I ask those who want to know, what do you think is going
on?  And my interlocutors wonder, why hasn't the regime collapsed?  W and
his crowd seem to assume that it will, they add.

Well, there you have it!  What more needs to be said, either way?  The W
House either knows or doesn't.  Who are we to be perplexed by difficult
amiguities?

It could be added that people have been assuming the very same thing for
fifty years, ever since economic and political embargos were put in place
against North Korea at the end of the Korean War.  That's what such
embargos are designed to do; starve a regime into collapse. Or maybe as a
literature type I don't understand what an embargo is really meant to
accomplish.

Observers held their collective breath when Kim Il Sung died.  Gotta happen
now, they seemed to be thinking.  If Poindexter's little parlor had been
operating then, what a spike in the betting we would have seen!
Predictably.
And just a short while ago, during a 'state' visit to Seoul, one of the
White House terriers was barking about the North Korean regime .

So?  If the Washington types think the collapse is going to happen,
prompted perhaps by the yapping of some minor official, and the think tank
types do too, why not?  Here's where the literature type wanders off into
reflections on, of all things, history.

The later kings of Choson:  we have forgotten their example.  Regime
collapse was constantly just around the corner, what with military
ineptitude, fiscal chaos, and the debilitating factional wars.  But with a
deep and wide bureaucratic state apparatus, and an officialdom trained and
indoctrinated to see state service as the highest good, there were none of
the internal structural contradictions that would lead to a collapse of the
regime.

It all ended remarkably quietly when Japan started pushing from outside, in
the last decade of the nineteenth century.  We recall, though, that the US
failed to make good on  promises to come to Korea's aid when Japan began to
pursue its colonial ambitions on the peninsula in earnest.

Ah well, now I am in a muddle.  But I wonder if there are historical
examples, with a longer more complex narrative that might help to explain
either the puzzling resilience of the North Korean state, or the failure of
outside observers and policy-makers to frame their questions and plans in a
meaningful or productive way.

Regime collapse?  That's what some dictionaries would define as
apocalyptic; an apocalyptic vision imposed from the outside.  It seems to
be, If the North Korean state collapses, then the US will lift its
embargos, and health will return to the body of the population.  One
contradictory aspect of the idea is that it provides a very handy cause to
blame for all the internal difficulties in the DPRK--  namely, the United
States.  It is contradictory because it helps to support the very regime,
in terms of North Korean public opinion, that it is intended to hamper and
weaken.

What sort of response follows from the North?  Apocalyptic, but in terms of
nuclear weapons.

Are the W House pronouncements, locally or abroad, just rhetoric?  Might
there be efforts underway to avoid Armageddon?  One hopes so, encouraged at
the moment by North Korean willingness to dismiss the barking dog and get
back to discussions of multilateral talks.