07.09.09
Our Crazy Northern Neighbors
The endless swirl of words and ideas that orbit the issue of North Korea consistently fail to give either policy makers or laymen any sense of how to make progress. We are always told to examine the issue from the perspective of the North Korean leadership. However, what is consistently misrepresented is exactly where the North korean leadership gets that perspective from. Experts don’t know much about North Korea, and they mask that ignorance under a vast store of historical precedents that don’t exactly add to a coherent foreign policy.
North Korea faces a very unique set of problems, and is unlike any regime in history. It is natural to compare it to Stalinist states like East Germany or Romania under Ceausescu. These closed societies, based nominally on the political system invented by Lenin and Stalin, and inspired by the writings of Karl Marx were ostensibly international and the promise of material improvement that Communist ideology was intended to promote. When this improvement failed to manifest and the undeniable wealth of the western world became clear, the systems lost their basic source of legitimacy: the idea that things were getting better. Communism came apart in Europe because it was unable to make good on its promises.
Enter North Korea. Like the states of Eastern Europe, North Korea used the appellation “communist” to describe its political and economic system. To some extent, there is no denying that an effort has been made to communize certain elements of their society. However, given the absence of a national program to collectivize agriculture (a staple of most communist regimes), and the state’s encouragement of private markets in the countryside, the genuineness of the DPRK’s ideological commitment is dubious at best. North Korea is promising something else to its people, and it isn’t economic progress and equality for all.
Instead, we might do better to understand North Korea as a closed nationalist/fascist state dedicated to a unique ideological and racial identity - one that is applicable only to their special circumstances. The North Korean leadership has worked very hard to paint itself as the defenders of pure Korean-ness. South Korea, they would argue has been corrupted by outside influences. Instead theirs is a system that takes it’s cue from a highly volatile history, and a sense of helplessness at the hands of outside forces. The fragility of their self-perception helps to keep them as closed a society as they are. The South isn’t free. They have become corrupted. They yearn to be more Korean. North Korea believes itself to be the last bastion of the real Korean identity.
One major problem exists for North Korea. The existence of South Korea. South Korea is bigger, far wealthier, and more militarily sophisticated than the North, and North Korea’s leadership and population knows it. The image of the South’s government as little more than a puppet of the west, and its population as pinned under the imperialist heel of the west is losing traction. The development of North Korea’s “military first” policy is the last gasp of a political system seeking to justify its existence to its own people. This is why North Korea proceeds with its nuclear program regardless of the threats of further isolation from the international community, and invests ever more in the military despite the horrendous cost to her people. Every “victory” no matter how narrow, gives the leadership some small success to help the appearance of legitimacy at home. Apparently this strategy is working, as there is little evidence of serious internal unrest in the North despite the ongoing crisis in the production of food and other essentials.
I don’t think that North Korea expects to win their 60 year struggle with the South. But as more and more of its ideological foundation falls apart,it is likely to become increasingly erratic and unstable. Worse, the nation is now facing a leadership crisis as Kim Jong Il becomes increasingly sickly and unable to head up his government. The system has demonstrated that it is economically unsustainable. How much longer can it maintain itself on increasingly rocky ideological footing? In other words, the DPRK is under incredible internal pressure to deal with its problems. The reactions of western governments thousands of miles away aren’t their most pressing concern. The much harder question for the rest of the world to answer is how best to approach North Korea in order to keep this situation from boiling over into a wider war. So long as we continue to make the mistake that the North is either approaching the world as a Communist state, and that internal pressures are somehow less important than external, there is no way we can understand what is happening.