North Korea's state-loyalty advantage.

• Author: Myers, B.R.
• Position: Inside the Authoritarian State - Report

Although North Korea's northern border remains easy to cross, and North Koreans are now well aware of the prosperity enjoyed south of the demilitarized zone, Kim Long Il continues to rule over a stable and supportive population. Kim enjoys mass support due to his perceived success in strengthening the race and humiliating its enemies. Thanks in part to decades of skillful propaganda, North Koreans generally equate the race with their state, so that ethno-nationalism and state-loyalty are mutually enforcing. In this respect North Korea enjoys an important advantage over its rival, for in the Republic of Korea ethnonationalism militates against support for a state that is perceived as having betrayed the race. South Koreans' "good race, bad state" attitude is reflected in widespread sympathy for the people of the North and in ambivalent feelings toward the United States and Japan, which are regarded as friends of the republic but enemies of the race. But North Korea cannot survive forever on the public perception of state legitimacy alone. The more it loses its economic distinctiveness vis-a-vis the rival state, the more the Kim regime must compensate with triumphs on the military and nuclear fronts. Another act of aggression against the Republic of Korea may well take place in the months ahead, not only to divert North Korean public attention from the failures of the consumer-oriented "Strong and Prosperous Country" campaign, but also to strengthen the appeasement-minded South Korean opposition in the run-up to the presidential election in 2012.

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For all its problems, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) enjoys one significant advantage over its rival to the south. North Koreans identify strongly with their nation (race) and their state, between which they appear to make little distinction, while in South Korea loyalty to the race militates against state-loyalty. (1) Awareness of the difference between the two Koreas can help us understand not only the overbearing confidence that Pyongyang displays when dealing with Seoul, even when requesting aid, but also the apathy with which the South Korean public has responded to acts of North Korean aggression in recent years.

In South Korea, citizens' reluctance to identify with the state is a common topic of discussion among conservatives. (2) In the United States, however, even Korea watchers tend to overlook it entirely. The general assumption in Washington is that if one of the two Koreas can count on its people in a crunch, it is the Republic of Korea (ROK). This assumption rests on a misperception of North Korea as a communist state that has failed even on its own terms. Also at work is a confusion of South Korean nationalism with patriotism, as evidenced in international press references to the ROK's "patriotic" sports fans. (3) This derives from the common tendency of native English speakers, including many political scientists, to use the words "state" and "nation" interchangeably--as Koreans do not. (4) We must therefore distinguish clearly between Korean nationalism, which is a sense of proud identification with the Korean race, and South or North Korean patriotism, i.e., loyalty to the respective state as a political entity. For clarity's sake I will resort to a redundant but common prefix and discuss ethno-nationalism. First, however,

I must take issue with the current consensus in regard to North Korea's longevity.

The perception of the DPRK as a Stalinist or hard-line communist holdout surviving by dint of exceptional totalitarianism still features in some journalism and Western conservative scholarship, but it seems to be waning, not least because it is now so easy (if still illegal) for North Koreans to cross the border or to telephone outsiders. (5) Far more popular nowadays is the notion that the DPRK owes much of its stability and longevity to its popular success in adapting communism to indigenous Korean traditions. Much is made of the Confucian tradition in particular; even such things as "respect for hierarchy and the elevated status of the ruler" are confidently attributed to it, as if they were not common to all dictatorships. (6) But if indigenousness were the key to state longevity on the peninsula, the Japanese would not have taken Korea so easily in 1910. Take it they did, of course, and their propaganda soon reached far more Koreans than had ever heard of the ancient sages. Even if the avowedly anti-Confucian Kim Il Sung had revived this pre-colonial tradition when launching the DPRK in 1948, there is no reason why it should have won him the support of the North Korean masses.

Like the Stalinist model, the indigenization model takes too little account of the DPRK's ruling ideology, according to which Koreans are a uniquely virtuous race that needs a parental leader's protection to survive in an evil world. (7) This race theory is at variance with all Korean traditions; not for nothing did the national language lack a word for race until modern times. Nor is there anything distinctly Confucian about the North Korean personality cult. Revered as a motherly, nurturing figure on the side of "pure" racial instincts, Kim II Sung was always a less Confucian dictator than his didactic, parochial counterparts in Eastern Europe. The likeliest source for North Korea's ideology is the Japanese fascism that most of Kim Il Sung's cultural officials had been propagating before the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, and to a more receptive audience than Koreans now admit. Less important than its origins, however, is the fact that it anchors the DPRK on the far right of the ideological spectrum. I do not make this distinction for its own sake. Far-right states derive mass support from the perception of their success in dealing with internal or external enemies; economic matters, though certainly important, do not bear directly on state legitimacy as they do in far-left states. To misperceive the DPRK as a communist state--either of the Stalinist or indigenized kind--is therefore to misunderstand and miscalculate its behavior.

I often encounter resistance to this point when lecturing to American audiences. Conservatives do not want communism let off the hook for creating this state, and liberals do not want Washington let off the hook for bullying it. Politically correct college students object to the attribution of racism to non-whites. State Department officials, for their part, know that the perception of North Korea as a country much like our Eastern European adversaries in the late Cold War will better sustain public faith in a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis.

So it is that I can talk for an hour on North Korean race propaganda, only to be chided during the question-and-answer session for overlooking the "nationalism" inherent in Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" policy. This is a prime example of the terminological confusion discussed above. Putting one's multiethnic state first is not the same as propagating a race theory. My work has been faulted by one reviewer for downplaying the fact that "there was plenty of xenophobia and racism in Mao's China." (8) Let me highlight the fact, then, that a mistrust of outsiders--as manifested by and in states for thousands of years--is very different from an ideology asserting that one uniquely pure race is morally superior to all others. Such thinking was by no means the norm even in European fascism. It runs directly counter to Marx. In any case, the regime excised the last mention of communism from its constitution in 2009 and enshrined "military-first thought" there instead. The burden of proof now rests with those who attribute to the DPRK an ideology to which it no longer even pays lip service.

Not all far-right states are alike any more than all far-left ones are, and to apply the fascist or Hitlerian label to North Korea would be grossly misleading. Nevertheless, the examples of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany offer insight into the DPRK's longevity. They attest to how well an ethno-nationalist state can link itself in the public mind with the race and thereby maintain class-transcending support even through difficult times.

NORTH KOREA: KIM IL SUNG COUNTRY

The DPRK derives its legitimacy from the myth that the anti-Japanese hero Kim Il Sung was all right-thinking citizens' choice as the man to found and lead the new Korea after liberation in 1945. (9) Until the mid-1960s the USSR was credited with defeating Japan, but since then propaganda has claimed that Kim and his guerillas freed the race on their own. That this is known to be untrue by those who lived through the time is of minor importance. The painful historical reality of mass collaboration (and the military insignificance of all armed Korean resistance to colonial rule) is precisely what made the Kim myth so attractive. It has been reinforced for decades by a propaganda apparatus that is now one of the most experienced in world history. Small wonder that even today North Koreans blink back tears--as my driver did on my last trip to the DPRK in June 2011--when speaking...