Understanding North Korea

How do you explain the surprising resilience of the North Korean regime? How did it manage to survive when similarly repressive regimes collapsed throughout eastern Europe?

The North Korean regime was both more repressive and more nationalist than its Eastern European counterparts. Before the Korean War, during it, and in the immediate aftermath, the regime successfully eliminated all potential critics of the regime (by exiling them or killing them). It also wiped out all vestiges of a critical intelligentsia. There were no links that survived to independent culture in the way that such culture managed to hang on, tenuously, in the Soviet Union, Poland, even Romania or Albania. North Korea has no Vaclav Havel much less a more ambiguous figure like Ismail Kadare.

North Korea’s first leader Kim Il Sung was particularly ruthless toward the left—the far larger and more popular factions of Korean communists or socialists that had operated in the south or in China. These factions might have created a more diverse political space in North Korea; their removal allowed Kim Il Sung’s faction, which had decamped to the Soviet Union during most of World War II, to create perhaps the most monolithic political culture of any 20th century country.

At the same time, the North Korean regime relied on Korean nationalism, rather than communist internationalism, for its legitimacy. Kim Il Sung emphasized that North Korea was the true heir of an ethnically homogeneous tradition. He wrapped his policies in the language and ideology of self-reliance. He denied all contributions other countries made to North Korea—Chinese support during the Korean War, East European contributions to rebuilding afterwards, Western European loans even later—and emphasized the threats North Korea faced from outside aggressors. He created a personality cult that relied heavily on nationalist and chauvinist themes.

So, the absence of other political traditions and the metastasis of Korean nationalism has enabled the North Korean regime to survive (so far) economic disaster, the disaffection of key allies, and international encirclement.

Fascinating interview with John Feffer of Foreign Policy in Focus over at New Left Project.

(via Instapaper)