Much has been written about the West’s failure to anticipate the demise of the East Bloc. In his introduction to Rethinking the Soviet Collapse (London, 1998), the book’s editor Michael Cox says that like academics in general, Sovietologists were too reluctant to ask big questions. Other shortcomings, as Peter Rutland explains in his contribution, were more specific to the field: political bias from left and right, the diversion of scholars into media punditry, isolation from core social sciences, a lack of relevant language skills, the difficulty of conducting research in country, and dependence on funding from external agenda-setters. North Korean studies manifests the same compound of problems — and many of the same errors.
The central blunder, according to various contributors to Cox’s book, was the misperception of the USSR as a budding pluralist or institutionally pluralist order, in which diverse groups were lobbying behind the facade of a one-party state. Such talk is said to have confounded Soviet intellectuals when they heard about it. When I was doing Slavic Studies in West Germany, however, the “pluralist” scholars had the upper hand over the “totalitarians.” I too used to imagine Gorbachev locked in fierce struggle with old-school communists and hawkish generals. We now know that he experienced no challenge to his one-man rule until 1990. Of the two academic camps the “totalitarians” were closer to the mark, although only a few ideology-centric ones like Alexander Shtromas saw the end coming.
In view of this history, you’d think Washington would have reacted skeptically to 21st-century claims that North Korea is a pluralist country, in other words, a less tight ship than the USSR turned out to have been in the 1980s. But “a pleasing error is not willingly detected,” as Samuel Johnson said. Patrick McEachern’s assertion of North Korea’s robust institutional pluralism was found very compelling when Inside the Red Box appeared in 2010.
Not long afterwards Kim Jong Un took over, squashed Pyongyang watchers’ prediction of sweeping reforms, executed a bloody purge, ramped up the nuclearization drive, tightened the country’s borders — and the Western model of a pluralist state gained ground. This suggests that just as in détente-era Sovietology, it hasn’t thrived purely on its merits, but has been promoted in order to encourage public and elite support for arms talks. (It’s perhaps relevant that McEachern is a State Department employee.)
Although I haven’t read every contribution to this school of thought, I’m confident of having addressed the basic arguments in my Acta Koreana review of Inside the Red Box. An excerpt:
Much is made [in the book] of apparent policy shifts on various fronts under Kim Jong Il’s rule, the idea being that these reflect a leader trying to drive the coach of state while his horses strain in different directions. KPA statements are held up here and there as evidence of serious military opposition to the foreign ministry’s professed readiness to compromise, despite the fact that our source for most of these statements is the Korean Central News Agency, that rigorously party-censored government mouthpiece. McEachern will need much stronger evidence than that if he is to get away with startling assertions that Kim Jong Il “cannot rule by fiat,” and that in North Korea, “Bureaucratic losers … continue to voice opposition publicly to the chosen policy direction.” Yet again, it seems, we are dealing with a North Korea watcher who refuses to take the personality cult seriously. I defy McEachern to find a single example of public bureaucratic opposition to any genuine regime policy…. Statements made during negotiations purely for the benefit of Americans do not constitute a “chosen policy direction.”
Please don’t take this to mean that I want more attention paid to the ruling family. (I wrote the first English-language book on a North Korean not named Kim.) We should keep in mind, however, that study of the second echelon of power is less useful when no distinct views can be attributed to anyone in it. As for the resurgent “Kremlinogical” preoccupation with podium line-ups and the like, even in the Cold War it yielded remarkably little fruit. The study of event photographs is especially perilous when a leader has good reason to conceal the real power structure from a drone-equipped enemy.
Like the “pluralist” Sovietologists before them, their Pyongyang-watching counterparts seem to have over-reacted against the totalitarian model. In my experience they’re often economically-minded people, thus perhaps more alive to the black-market, back-alley, freewheeling side of dictatorships than to the state of political-scientific discussion. (Remember Rutland’s point about isolation from the social sciences.)
In an article entitled “The Myth of Kim Jong Un’s Absolute Power,” Peter Ward, who along with Andrei Lankov and Rüdiger Frank is one of my three go-to authorities on North Korea’s economy, writes:
No political leader, however powerful, is completely in charge of their country. When Kim Jong Un is declared an ‘autocrat’ and the country over which he presides a ‘one-man dictatorship’, remember that this is a moral, not a factual statement….[for] one man cannot govern alone.
There may be some innocents out there who still imagine a singlehandedly micro-managed DPRK running like a Swiss watch. I’m all for enlightening them, as Ward does in his article, about the ramshackleness of the place. Perhaps some also need to be told that even in the most repressive country, “an administrative apparatus… makes most of the decisions,” including some “the top leader might not be all that pleased about.” My problem is with the assumption that these truths belie the designation of North Korea as a one-man dictatorship.
Mindful of the kind of stuff I’d probably write if I were to venture into economic matters, and of how gentlemanly Peter would be about it, I refrained from commenting on the piece when it appeared. I didn’t expect NK News to keep recurring to this theme, albeit behind a paywall which the headlines don’t quite entice me to sneak around. So I’d like to get a few things straight right now, for the record.
As defined on Wikipedia, autocracy is
a system of government in which absolute power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject neither to external legal restraints nor to regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup d’état or other forms of rebellion).
I like that. It can do service for “one-man dictatorship” too. Keep in mind that absolute power has never meant omnipotence; it means power “unrestrained by institutions.” The application of this label to North Korea is therefore perfectly apt. Surely no one’s going to try telling me the state is run by committee, with Kim functioning as a mere primus inter pares. Or that it shouldn’t be called a dictatorship at all.
We who apply terms like autocracy, absolute rule, one-man dictatorship or totalitarianism to North Korea have always been aware that no leader dictates everything. We’re no less conscious of the enormous gap between intention and execution. My first encounter with the political sense of absolute was in my early teens, when I learned what a mess France was under Louis XVI.
Here’s Vladimir Shlapentokh:
Those who advocated the totalitarian model of Soviet society understood that inefficiency loomed decisively over many sectors of the country, particularly the economy. Elements of disorganization were, in fact, “normal” aspects of the system. This is not to say, however, that inefficiency undermined the totalitarian nature of the society. The Kremlin’s monopoly on power persisted throughout the course of Soviet history, and no other center of power imposed its will on it. (A Normal Totalitarian Society, 2001, page 71.)
The key question, then, isn’t “How efficiently is the state operating?” but rather: “Does the leader face domestic opposition?” And: “Is the length of his rule, the exercise of his will, his choice of a successor curtailed by the state, by government or party procedures, by domestic laws and regulations?” If not, it’s an autocracy or one-man dictatorship; it’s absolute rule. That North Korea fits this bill more than the USSR at any time after 1953 goes without saying. Certainly Brezhnev could neither execute people on a whim nor claim whatever real estate struck his fancy, as Kim Jong Un so pre-Magna-Carta-ishly can.
One reason the pluralism myth thrived in late-period Soviet studies (1970-90) was because it appealed to hardliners and apologists alike. The former rubbed their hands at the thought of elite disunity, and the latter pleaded for American concessions to help Soviet “reformers” palliate the “hawks.” No doubt comparable conditions in our field (and the Beltway) will nurture this sort of talk for as long as the Kim regime survives. When the next autocracy points a missile at us, in whatever part of the world, the fallacy will spring to life again.
In the meantime I’ll keep saying “one-man dictatorship,” just as I’ll keep saying “a corporation run by an individual” to distinguish Samsung from companies whose CEO is at the mercy of a board of directors. Such terms may mislead the literal-minded, but that’s life. As Borges makes clear in his wonderful tale of the 1:1 scale map, some measure of simplification is needed if we’re to communicate at all.
