GUNS, GUERILLAS, AND THE GREAT LEADER: North Korea and the Third World | By Benjamin R. Young
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. x, 218 pp. (figures.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503627635.
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세진님, 요청하신 벤자민 R. 영의 저서 <총, 게릴라, 그리고 수령: 북한과 제3세계>에 대한 요약과 평론을 작성해 드립니다.
<총, 게릴라, 그리고 수령: 북한과 제3세계> 요약 및 평론
요약: 북한의 외교적 확장과 제3세계주의의 흥망성쇠
벤자민 R. 영의 저서 <총, 게릴라, 그리고 수령: 북한과 제3세계>는 냉전 시기 북한이 아시아, 아프리카, 라틴아메리카의 신생 독립국들과 맺었던 역동적인 관계를 추적한다. 저자는 북한이 단순히 소련이나 중국의 위성국에 머물지 않고, 스스로를 탈식민주의 세계의 진정한 지도자로 설정하려 했던 야심 찬 외교 전략을 분석한다.
북한의 정체성 구축과 주체사상 북한은 1960년대와 70년대에 걸쳐 자신들을 제국주의에 맞서 승리한 모범적인 사회주의 국가로 홍보했다. 특히 <주체사상>을 마르크스-레닌주의를 넘어서는 보편적 혁명 이론으로 제시하며, 제3세계 국가들이 강대국의 간섭 없이 자립할 수 있는 모델을 제공하고자 했다. 이는 북한이 국제 사회에서 정통성을 확보하고 남한과의 체제 경쟁에서 우위를 점하기 위한 필수적인 전략이었다.
군사적 지원과 게릴라 외교 북한은 이른바 <총과 게릴라>를 앞세운 실용적인 지원을 아끼지 않았다. 짐바브웨, 앙골라, 베트남 등지의 혁명 세력에게 무기를 공급하고 군사 고문단을 파견했다. 특히 1970년대 북한은 세계 곳곳의 무장 투쟁 단체들을 평양으로 불러 군사 훈련을 시켰으며, 이는 북한이 전 세계적 반제국주의 투쟁의 병기창 역할을 자임했음을 보여준다.
소프트 파워와 문화 교류 북한은 군사력뿐만 아니라 교육, 농업 기술, 건축 등 다양한 분야에서 제3세계를 지원했다. 아프리카의 여러 국가에 기념비적 건축물을 세워주거나 농업 실험장을 운영하며 북한식 근대화 모델을 이식하려 노력했다. 이러한 활동은 북한이 국제 사회에서 고립된 국가가 아니라, 광범위한 연대망을 가진 매력적인 파트너로 인식되게 하는 효과를 거두었다.
쇠퇴와 고립의 길 1980년대 후반 냉전의 종식과 함께 북한의 제3세계 외교는 한계에 봉착한다. 남한의 경제적 부상과 북한의 경제난, 그리고 테러 지원국 지정 등은 북한의 국제적 입지를 좁혔다. 과거의 혁명적 동지들은 실리적인 이유로 북한을 떠나 남한과 수교하기 시작했고, 북한은 결국 세계 혁명의 중심지에서 고립된 은둔의 왕국으로 전락하게 된다.
평론: 글로벌 북한이라는 새로운 시각
이 책은 북한 현대사를 바라보는 기존의 시각에 중요한 균열을 낸다. 대개 북한을 폐쇄적이고 수동적인 존재로 보던 통념과 달리, 영은 북한을 매우 능동적이고 확장주의적인 국제 정치의 행위자로 묘사한다.
첫째, 북한의 세계관을 <탈식민주의> 맥락에서 재해석했다는 점이 돋보인다. 북한이 제3세계에 쏟아부은 공세적인 지원은 단순한 낭비가 아니라, 제국주의라는 공통의 적을 둔 국가들 사이의 진지한 연대 시도였다는 점을 설득력 있게 제시한다. 이는 북한 외교의 핵심 동력이 단순한 생존 본능을 넘어선 이데올로기적 사명감에 있었음을 시사한다.
둘째, 북한과 남한의 체제 경쟁이 한반도 내부가 아닌 전 지구적 전선에서 전개되었음을 명확히 보여준다. 유엔 가입을 둘러싼 표 대결이나 제3세계 국가들의 지지 확보를 위한 치열한 외교전은 냉전기 한반도 문제가 곧 세계사의 흐름과 맞닿아 있었음을 증명한다. 특히 북한이 제공한 군사 교육이 제3세계 지도자들의 성향에 미친 영향력에 대한 분석은 매우 흥미롭다.
셋째, 북한의 실패 원인을 경제적 요인뿐만 아니라 <주체사상>의 경직성에서 찾는다. 북한은 자신들의 모델을 강요하려 했으나, 제3세계 국가들은 점차 이념보다 경제적 실리를 택했다. 영은 북한이 변화하는 국제 질서에 적응하지 못하고 과거의 혁명적 영광에 매몰된 과정을 냉철하게 비판한다.
결론적으로 <총, 게릴라, 그리고 수령>은 북한의 과거를 통해 현재의 고립을 이해하게 만드는 수작이다. 북한이 한때 꿈꿨던 <글로벌 혁명의 중심>이라는 야심이 어떻게 사그라졌는지를 추적함으로써, 독자는 북한이라는 국가의 복합적인 정체성을 깊이 있게 통찰할 수 있다. 이 책은 북한학뿐만 아니라 냉전사, 그리고 제3세계 연구에 있어 필수적인 학술적 성취라고 평가할 수 있다.
벤자민 영의 이 저작은 북한이 어떻게 국제 무대에서 자신의 자리를 찾으려 했는지에 대한 아주 흥미로운 통찰을 제공합니다. 더 궁금하신 점이 있으신가요?
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Introduction
IF SOMEONE WALKS into the Mamelles district of Senegal’s capital city Dakar, they will quickly be confronted by a large monument depicting a large, bare-chested, muscular African man looking into the beyond while holding a baby in one arm and guiding a virtuous woman in the other. This socialist-realist monument is anything but African in aesthetics. Built in 2011, Dakar’s African Renaissance Monument is just one of the many commemorative projects built by North Korea’s state-run construction company, Mansudae Overseas Projects, in Africa.1 Known for their relatively cheap price tag and artistic achievements, Mansudae construction projects have left a quintessentially North Korean architectural footprint in at least fifteen African nations. As a Mansudae promotional booklet proclaims, the company “helped to splendidly build many statues, monuments, and other structures of lasting value, demonstrating the vitality of ever-developing Juche-based fine arts.”2 These projects are only one part of a long and complex history of North Korea–Third World relations. This book investigates this history and North Korea’s place within the Third World.
First coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, the term Third World referred to nonaligned countries and was analogous to the Third Estate, the common people, of the French ancien régime.3 In 1955, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia brought together for the first time heads of state from the decolonizing Afro-Asian world.4 With this historic event, the Third World started to take shape as a real political force, and the term was further plunged into global revolutionary discourse with the 1961 publication of Frantz Fanon’s famous book, The Wretched of the Earth.5 As Vijay Prashad explains, the Third World was not a geographic area but a global project or movement that prioritized anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.6 As a postcolonial Communist state, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK; the official title of North Korea) used the term “Third World peoples” (che3segye inmindŭl) or “emerging countries” (shinhŭngseryŏng naradŭl) in its own propaganda as it had one foot in the anti-colonial Third World and the other in the socialist Soviet-led Second World.7
Third Worldism was a reaction to Cold War bipolarity, the rise of revolutionary nationalisms, and the sudden overthrow of imperialist regimes by national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Unlike the negative connotation associated with the term Third World today, those in the decolonizing world that sought an alternative system different from U.S.-style liberal democracy and Soviet-style socialism used the word proudly during the Cold War era. The contemporary Western imagination of the “Third World” as a mass of nonwhite nations suffering from immense poverty is in steep contrast to the radical vision of the Third World that the North Korean leadership held during the Cold War era. Third Worldism was a global movement that opposed white supremacy, capitalism, and Western cultural domination. It promoted national sovereignty, popular revolution, and transnational solidarity. To borrow Lenin’s phrasing, Third Worldism was the amalgamation of all anti-colonial nations in the higher unity of global revolution.8
North Korea’s Third Worldist sensibilities originated during the Japanese colonial period. Under the leadership of Korean nationalist Kim Il Sung, a band of revolutionary guerillas fought Japanese colonialists in Manchuria during the 1930s. In his autobiography, Reminiscences: With the Century, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, recalls the early days of his life fighting Japanese colonialists in the rough-and-tumble Manchurian landscape. Born and raised in a time of great turmoil on the Korean peninsula, Kim Il Sung endured hardships and struggles that few twentieth-century leaders could relate to. He said, “I was born at an uneasy time of upheaval and passed my boyhood in unfortunate circumstances. This situation naturally influenced my development.”9 While With the Century remains a highly propagandized work published by the North Korean state apparatus, it nonetheless provides a window into Kim’s early life and signifies the importance of the anti-colonial struggle to North Korean political culture. These early anti-colonial fighting experiences undeniably molded the later North Korean regime’s worldview since Kim Il Sung’s band of Manchurian partisans later became the political elite of the DPRK.10 This Manchurian tradition fashioned North Korea into a staunchly anti-colonial state that sympathized with the national liberation struggles of many Third World peoples. As former guerillas themselves, the North Korean leadership understood the heroism and sacrifice required for anti-colonial rebellions and thus later did their part to further global decolonization during the Cold War era.
The anti-colonial legacy of the Manchurian generation is encapsulated in North Korea’s concept of Juche (also transliterated as chuch’e), which was expressed as national autonomy during the Cold War era. North Korea expert B. C. Koh’s foundational 1965 article on Juche explains, “If there is a single Korean word which sums up North Korea’s national preoccupation today, it is probably chuch’e—a word which has been variously translated as ‘autonomy,’ ‘independence,’ ‘theme,’ and ‘subjective entity.’”11 Etymologically, ju refers to “master,” and che means “body.” Thus, Juche can be directly translated as “master of one’s body.” Scholar Jiyoung Song explains that it can be interpreted as “sovereign autonomy,” “self-determination,” or “self-reliance.”12 Juche, with its emphasis on national independence and sovereignty, was Kim Il Sung’s theoretical contribution to the international revolutionary movement. As the classic texts of Communism were minimally read in the DPRK, Kim Il Sung essentially owned the Marxist intellectual universe within the country.13 In other words, with the promotion of Juche, Kim Il Sung did not merely join the pantheon of Communist heroes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He supplanted them. Juche allowed the North Korean regime to claim Kim Il Sung as a world revolutionary leader and thus reinforced his absolute power domestically.
Kim Il Sung’s personality cult went beyond North Korean borders as the regime disseminated Juche throughout the Third World. By funding and sponsoring conferences, study groups, and books, the North Korean government represented Juche as a viable path to rapid postcolonial development. As a developmental guide, the Juche idea advocated national independence and self-sufficiency. North Korea’s autonomous stance in foreign affairs under the rubric of the Juche idea appealed to a wide range of decolonizing nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The DPRK’s independent streak naturally meshed with the anti-colonial rebellions of the Third World and the various liberation philosophies that circulated throughout the decolonizing world. There was a tension within North Korea’s exportation of Juche. On the one hand, it genuinely represented a socialist modernity rooted in autonomy and anti-colonialism, but on the other hand it was a pragmatic strategy used by the North Korean leadership to bolster its international status and prestige.
Due to their anti-colonial mentality and commitment to autonomy, the North Korean leadership tended to view the international community as being divided between big and small countries. According to this worldview, big countries (especially Western capitalist ones) naturally tended to dominate small countries. Thus, the DPRK treated small Third World nations with a spirit of friendliness and solidarity. On the other hand, the leadership in Pyongyang treated large nations, especially those with colonialist pasts such as Britain and Japan, with suspicion and distrust. To put this into international relations terminology, the North Koreans were and still remain classical realists who believe “international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”14 North Korea adhered to a foreign policy of anti–Great Powerism. In 2014, North Korea expert Rudiger Frank explained, “The desire to be regarded as an equal is still a driving force of North Korea’s foreign policy. . . . In its international relations, behind a smokescreen of bellicose rhetoric, a thoroughly pragmatic North Korea focuses on interest and power.”15
The size difference between North Korea and the two Communist superpowers mattered a great deal to newly independent governments that worried about neo-colonialism.16 North Korea’s small geographic size and inability to dominate a foreign country’s socioeconomic life earned it support in the Third World. Juche influenced North Korea’s foreign policy since it functioned as a way to distance Pyongyang from the Soviet or Chinese brands of communism, which earned the Kim family regime a status in the Third World as a great defender of national autonomy. The North Korean leadership viewed the world spatially and prescribed “national autonomy” under the rubric of Juche to decolonizing nations as a solution to the international problem of domineering superpowers. These two strains of radical thought, autonomy and anti-colonialism, undergirded Pyongyang’s diplomatic efforts in the Third World.
In this book, I argue that Third Worldism formed a fundamental part of North Korea’s national identity during the Cold War era. In defining Third Worldism as a global commitment to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, I examine North Korea’s internationalism and broad engagement with the decolonizing world. I borrow the concept of “national identity” from political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment: “National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system, whether that system is democratic or not. . . . But national identity also extends into the realm of culture and values. It consists of the stories that people tell about themselves: where they came from, what they celebrate, their shared historical memories, what it takes to be a genuine member of the community.”17 In establishing close ties with the Third World, North Korea forged a national identity as a member of a global community of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Resistance to imperialism worked across national borders, and these hardships created a sense of transnational solidarity and comradeship. Additionally, the North Korean regime exported its value system, centered on the principle of national autonomy, to the Third World as a way to enhance its international prestige and recognition. Engagement with the Third World not only bolstered the global status of the Kim family regime but also boosted the DPRK’s internal legitimacy as the truly sovereign Korean government.
The autonomous anti-colonial features of North Korea’s national identity resulted in a foreign policy that irritated superpowers in both the Western and Eastern blocs during the Cold War era. Pyongyang’s stubbornly independent stance and flexible take on Marxism-Leninism meant the DPRK was an outlier in the Communist world. Although Kim Il Sung was just one person in a large political apparatus, his domination in the North Korean system is obvious and his influence on North Korean policymaking carried far more weight than that of any other Politburo member.18 Kim Il Sung was a charismatic and brutal leader that used Marxism-Leninism as a vehicle for his anti-colonial agenda. Autonomous anti-colonialism was at the core of Kim Il Sung’s foreign policymaking decisions. While China’s anti-colonial agenda was full of contradictions due to its internal suppression of ethnic minorities and Soviet anti-colonialism was steeped in a historical tradition of Russian chauvinism, Kim Il Sung’s brand of anti-colonialism fiercely promoted self-determination and armed struggle. “The oppressed peoples can liberate themselves only through struggle,” he wrote in a 1967 treatise for the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. “This is a simple and clear truth confirmed by history.”19
The conceptualization of North Korea’s national identity as autonomous anti-colonialism is the analytical framework running throughout this book. According to the Korean-language scholarship of historian Wada Haruki and the English-language scholarship of linguist Adrian Buzo, North Korea was a “guerilla state” during the Cold War era as Kim Il Sung’s band of Manchurian partisans became his closest allies within the North Korean government.20 Both scholars neglect the more malleable category of national identity and how the leadership’s anti-colonial heritage shaped the regime’s Third World diplomacy. The North Korean leadership, which understood the rigors and sacrifices of guerilla warfare, never abandoned its revolutionary duty and continued to support other anti-colonial rebellions during the Cold War era. Economic incentives did not drive North Korea’s Third World policy. Rather, inter-Korean competition with Seoul for international legitimacy and a desire to rid the world of imperialist forces, most importantly the U.S. military presence in South Korea, was at the heart of Pyongyang’s Third World policy. These dual factors, which often reinforced one another, shaped and molded North Korea’s Third World diplomacy.
In this book, I investigate the four main themes of North Korea’s Third World policy. First, I examine the idea of North Korea as a developmental model. Today, the DPRK is a poor country struggling in the face of international sanctions. During the Cold War era, North Korea was a wealthier country as its economy quickly recovered after the Korean War. New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury said in 1973 that the DPRK had accomplished “tremendous technical and industrial achievement” and that the country was “on a per capita basis . . . the most intensively industrialized country in Asia, with the exception of Japan.”21 Historian Jon Halliday said in 1981 that the DPRK “has achieved remarkable economic growth and advances in social services. It raises important issues concerning industrialization and self-reliant high growth for a medium-sized Third World country.”22 Contrary to the contemporary notion of the DPRK as impoverished, North Korea during the Cold War era was regarded by some Western scholars and Third World leaders as a developmental model worthy of emulation and adoration. This book attempts to place the DPRK within its proper historical context and resists the urge to rip the regime from its spatial and temporal Cold War world.
Notes
1. United Nations Panel of Experts, Report of the Panel of Experts Established Pursuant to Resolution 1874 (2009), S/2017/150. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/861367/files/S_2017_150-EN.pdf, 44.
2. Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies Promotional Booklet, 2014, found at University of North Korean Studies Library, Seoul, South Korea.
3. Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur, August 14, 1952.
4. Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2014), 225–52.
5. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero éditeur, 1961).
6. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).
8. The founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, defined socialist internationalism as “the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity.” See V. I. Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question: 4. ‘Cultural-National Autonomy,’” Prosveshcheniye (1913), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/4.htm#v20pp72–033.
9. Kim Il Sung, Reminiscences: With the Century (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1992), 4.
10. For more on the “guerilla state” thesis, see Wada Haruki, Kim Il Sung gwa Manju Hangil Chŏnjaeng (Seoul: Changbi, 1992); Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018).
11. B. C. Koh, “North Korea and Its Quest for Autonomy,” Pacific Affairs 38, no. 3/4 (Autumn-Winter 1965–1966), 294.
12. Jiyoung Song, Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist, and Confucian Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2011), 123.
13. “Far East Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘The Domestic Situation and the Foreign Policy of the Korean People’s Democratic Republic,’” March 28, 1969, WCDA, RGANI, fond 5, opis 61, delo 466, listy 71–81, obtained by Sergey Radchenko, trans. Gary Goldberg, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/134226.
14. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948), 25.
15. Rudiger Frank, “North Korea’s Autonomy 1965–2015,” Pacific Affairs 87, no. 4 (December 2014), 792.
16. For more on China’s presence in the Third World during the Cold War era, see Gregg Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
17. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 126.
18. Andre Schmid contends that too much scholarship on North Korea takes Kim Il Sung as the starting point. Domestically, that may be true but in terms of foreign policymaking decisions, Kim Il Sung was the central player. Andre Schmid, “Historicizing North Korea: State Socialism, Population Mobility, and Cold War Historiography,” American Historical Review 123, no. 2 (April 2018), 439–62.
19. Kim Il Sung, Let Us Intensify the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-U.S. Struggle (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1968), 2.
20. Wada, Kim Il Sung gwa Manju Hangil Chŏnjaeng; Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty, 2nd ed.
21. Harrison E. Salisbury, To Peking and Beyond: A Report on the New Asia (New York: New York Times Book Company, 1973), 199.
22. Jon Halliday, “North Korean Enigma,” New Left Review 1, no. 127 (May-June 1981), 18.
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Introduction
The introduction provides a historiographicaloverview of the topic and explains that North Korea's national identity is linked to the Third World.In establishing close ties with the Third World, North Korea forged a national identity as a member of a global community of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Resistance to imperialism worked across national borders and these hardships created a sense of transnational solidarity and comradeship. Additionally, the North Korean regime exported their value system, centered on the principle of national autonomy, to the Third World as a way to enhance their international prestige and recognition. Engagement with the Third World not only bolstered the global status of the Kim family regime but also boosted the DPRK's internal legitimacy as the truly sovereign Korean government.
1.Building a Reputation, 1956–1967
Chapter One investigates the start of North Korea's Third World policy from 1956 to 1967, which began with Kim Il Sung's domestic power consolidation and subsequent purges. As the DPRK reached out to the world and advocated a self-reliant path to socialist modernity, Pyongyang found natural allies in Jakarta, Havana, and Hanoi. These alliances were based on a shared militant stand towards Western imperialism and a belief in revolutionary socialism. Since all four Third world nations recently defended themselves against imperialist forces, the DPRK, Indonesia, Cuba, and Vietnam found much in common ideologically, militarily, and politically. North Korea demonstrated its material commitment to Third Worldism by assisting the Vietnamese Communists during the Vietnam War.
2.Kimilsungism beyond North Korean Borders, 1968–1971
Chapter Two investigates the globalization of Kim Il Sung's personality cult and the quixotic dissemination of his sycophantic ideology, Kimilsungism, throughout the Third World during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union's role in fomenting world revolution are well known, North Korea's assistance is lesser known. As a former anti-colonial guerilla fighter himself, Kim Il Sung assisted Third World rebels and insurgents as a way to advance the cause of world revolution. In an attempt to bolster the personality cult of Kim Il Sung, North Korea invested heavily in a public diplomacy campaign during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pyongyang disseminated Kimilsungism throughout the Third World in the form of newspaper advertisements, photo exhibits, film screenings, free trips to the DPRK, and the establishment of friendship societies.
3.Kim Il Sung's "Korea First" Policy, 1972–1979
Chapter Three focuses on one of the most successful periods of North Korea's Third World policy from 1972 to 1979. Rather than focus on disseminating its propaganda of Kim Il Sung as a world revolutionary leader, North Korea exported its value system of Juche to the Third World in order to improve the image of the DPRK abroad and promote its version of socialist modernity. When the North Korean government focused on disseminating its core values of national autonomy and anti-colonialism, the image of the DPRK in the Third World improved. North Korea used its improved international status to enter the Non-Aligned Movement, an international body that sought to represent the political interests of the Third World.
4.Kim Jong Il's World and Revolutionary Violence, 1980–1983
Chapter Four largely deals with the emergence of Kim Jong Il as the central player in the North Korean leadership during the early 1980s. Kim Jong Il's rise gave Pyongyang's Third World policy a more violent character. Rather than foster transnational solidarity, Kim Jong Il used the Third World as a space to undermine his South Korean and American enemies. He also advanced his father's long sought after goal of reunification under the DPRK's terms. North Korea's 1983 assassination attempt on South Korean President Chun-Doo Hwan in Burma devastated the DPRK's reputation in the Third World. As a result, some Third World governments cut all diplomatic ties with Pyongyang. The DPRK increasingly looked at the Third World as a relatively easy place to sell weapons, test its military capabilities, and engage in other nefarious activities.
5.Survival by Any Means Necessary, 1984–1989
Chapter Five examines North Korea's Africa policy in the 1980s and Pyongyang's hosting of the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students. As North Korea's economy stagnated, the need for hard currency increased and the façade of self-reliant development was quickly falling apart in this supposed "socialist paradise." As newly established governments in postcolonial Africa looked for arms dealers, cash-hungry Pyongyang was all too willing to send weapons, ammunition, and military equipment to these nations. As a weakening and divided nation that claimed the other half, the North Koreans made one last-ditch effort to gain legitimacy by hosting the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students. This festival ultimately cost the North Korean government millions of dollars, which may have hastened the downfall of the DPRK economy from modern and industrialized to impoverished and crumbling.
Conclusion
My conclusion looks at the post-Cold War period and North Korea's legacy in the Third World. The perception of the DPRK as an economic basket case has replaced its once vaunted status in the Third World as modern and industrialized. Recently, North Korea's few remaining allies in the Third World have come under fire from the United Nations and the U.S government for continuing to trade and interact with Pyongyang.
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Book Reviews, Northeast Asia
Volume 95 – No. 2
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This is the first academic monograph that provides a comprehensive overview of North Korea’s activities in the Third World during the Cold War, and as such, it makes a major contribution to North Korean studies. Earlier publications were either limited to the DPRK’s bilateral interactions with selected individual states (e.g., Zimbabwe or Guyana) or to its presence in a specific region (e.g., Latin America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Persian Gulf), or they treated Pyongyang’s Third World diplomacy only as a subtopic of the global competition between the two Koreas. In contrast, Young’s book seeks to cover each main geographical region of the Third World, and each region is represented by several in-depth case studies (e.g., Southeast Asia by Indonesia and Vietnam, and Sub-Saharan Africa by Angola, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe). This balanced approach enables the author to avoid the pitfalls of focusing on a few states at the expense of the global context or concentrating on the global diplomatic stage and making only passing references to the individual countries. Still, certain regions receive considerably more attention than others. For instance, North Korea’s relations with India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are described far less extensively than its interactions with the South Pacific microstates.
The book’s scope is panoramic not only in a geographical but also in a chronological and thematic sense. It investigates North Korea’s Third World diplomacy from the Bandung Conference (1955) to the end of the Cold War, with a brief outlook into the post-Cold War era. Each chapter describes a phase in Pyongyang’s Third World policy, linking its distinctive features to the dominant elements of the regime’s domestic and unification policies in that specific period. This structural concept helps to ensure focus and coherence (see the interesting parallels between North Korea’s relations with Indonesia, Cuba, and Vietnam in the 1960s), but it occasionally induces the author to over-state a single factor at the expense of others. For instance, the Rangoon bombing (October 9, 1983) is attributed near-exclusively to Kim Jong Il’s penchant for revolutionary violence. This interpretation overlooks the fact that Chun Doo Hwan’s trip to Burma was to be followed by a visit in India—a visit that the DPRK had every reason to prevent, as it would have granted Chun legitimacy in the eyes of many non-aligned countries. As early as March 1983, the Indian hosts of the seventh non-aligned summit (to which the book makes only a single indirect reference) rebuffed Pyongyang’s insistent requests to place the Korean question on the agenda.
Unlike earlier studies on North Korea’s Third World policy, the examined dimensions of interaction are not confined to the diplomatic and military spheres but include economic aid programs, sports training, and propaganda. The author offers a colourful description of the less-than-favourable impression that the DPRK’s heavy-handed methods made on the citizens of the Third World countries that Pyongyang sought to win over. The massive factual evidence the author presents in chapters 2 and 4 about these negative impressions is partly at odds with the tone of chapter 1, which places the main emphasis on North Korea’s favourable reputation in the Third World.
The book’s source base is of a similarly panoramic nature. By amalgamating the reports of US, British, ROK, and Soviet bloc diplomats with North Korean media sources and a wide range of secondary sources, the author is usually able to overcome the inherent limitations peculiar to one or another specific type of source. A particularly successful example of this multilateral approach is the book’s description of North Korea’s relations with Uganda under Idi Amin, Milton Obote, and Yoweri Museveni.
In some other cases, the author reaches his conclusions on the basis of less solid evidence, with occasional inaccuracies. For instance, he concludes that “the South Pacific remained dominated by North Korean influence and became one of the few spaces where Pyongyang exerted greater influence than Seoul. It was North Korea’s financial assistance … that South Pacific island nations most welcomed” (123). Of the eight relevant South Pacific states, Kiribati, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu established diplomatic relations only with South Korea, while Fiji, Nauru, and Vanuatu, anxious as they were to appear even-handed, established relations first with Seoul and later with Pyongyang. Their attitude toward the DPRK showed little correlation with the extent of their aid dependency: Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Solomon Islands were desperately poor and highly aid-dependent, whereas Nauru had an extremely high per capita GDP until the depletion of its phosphate mines in the 1990s.
By emphasizing Kim Il Sung’s efforts to pursue a course independent from the Communist Great Powers, the author develops a more nuanced narrative than those scholars who presented North Korea’s activities in the developing world as mere proxy operations carried out on behalf of the USSR. Actually, the analytical method of placing Pyongyang’s Third World diplomacy into the global context of communist foreign policies might have been utilized in some other case studies as well. For example, the author describes initial Indonesian-DPRK relations as follows: “As a developing Asian leftist state that struggled to affirm its nonalignment in international affairs, the Indonesian government gravitated to the proudly independent and socialist North Koreans” (20). In reality, Indonesia, having forged ambassadorial relations with the PRC as early as 1950, established consular-general relations with the DRV in 1955, with Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1960, and with North Korea as late as 1961.
All in all, this monograph is a valuable contribution to North Korean, Cold War, and Third World studies, as it provides detailed factual information on Pyongyang’s interactions with over twenty Third World states. Its colourful description of the heavy-handed methods of North Korean diplomacy makes it easier to understand why many non-aligned countries, having initially embraced the DPRK, soon became disillusioned with its behaviour. At the same time, the author also demonstrates that North Korea did manage to retain a foothold in certain developing countries even after a series of regime changes, precisely because of the same opportunistic pragmatism that repulsed some other Third World leaders.
Balázs Szalontai
Korea University Sejong Campus, Sejong
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