You’d think that, after watching so many communist regimes collapse, all of us would be better equipped to anticipate what will happen in a small Orwellian state. Especially in a country that chooses to build missiles and maintain one of the world’s largest armed forces, with 1.1 million men, while famine has taken hundreds of thousands of lives since 1995 and energy shortages abound. The strongest temptation is to see what is happening in North Korea as a replay of earlier events elsewhere. But which is the right elsewhere?
Consider the possibilities:
Romania. Watching TV images of North Koreans paying homage to the “Great Leader,” I find myself thinking back to Nicolae Ceausescu’s last Communist Party Congress in 1987. I was standing with other foreign correspondents observing the proceedings, accompanied by our Foreign Ministry “minder.” When Ceausescu spoke, the delegates jumped up every couple of minutes to applaud and chant his praises–all in zombielike, rhythmic fashion. Our minder, who was trying to exude sophistication, would bolt up on cue with everyone else, perform the same ritual and sit down with a slightly sheepish smile. Two years later this Great Leader and his wife were dead, riddled with bullets by their own people. Could this be Kim’s fate? Maybe. But the North Koreans appear to take the cult of the leader much more seriously than the Romanians ever did.
Germany. In theory, a perfect analogy: two countries divided by history, but one people destined for reunification. The problem is that everything else is different. Compared with North Korea, East Germany was an open, prosperous society. East Germans watched West German TV and maintained contacts with their relatives in the West, even if travel there was largely restricted to pensioners and party hacks. None of those conditions applies in North Korea. As difficult and costly as the West Germans have found unification to be, they are coping. The South Koreans are in no position to do so. “Having to carry the burden of the whole North Korean economy would be catastrophic for South Korea,” says James Laney, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul. Given the enormous disparity of incomes between North and South Koreans–far greater than between East and West Germans–and the estimated price tag of up to $1 trillion for bailing out North Korea, the South Koreans are quietly praying that unification won’t happen virtually overnight the way it did in Germany. For them, a Berlin wall-type scene with North Koreans dancing their way across the famed DMZ as Kim’s regime collapses would be a nightmare.
The Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev truly believed he could reform communism in order to save it. He still clings to this belief, charging that Boris Yeltsin undercut his efforts. The paradox is that Gorbachev is a great historical figure because he never understood his role in destroying the system he wanted to save; if he had, he wouldn’t have done what he did. Could Kim Jong Il unwittingly play the same kind of role? He is attracted to the idea of allowing South Korean companies in tightly guarded industrial zones, which could prove to be a wedge into a closed system. But Kim as the author of a Korean version of glasnost and perestroika? The mind boggles.
China. The parallels look a little more convincing. Before Richard Nixon made his historic visit in 1972, the Middle Kingdom had experienced devastating famines, fanatical ideological campaigns and rampant paranoia about the outside world. China would take more than a decade to begin reforms in earnest, and even then they would be accompanied by painful setbacks–a colossal understatement, of course, in the case of the Tiananmen Square massacre. But China is huge, and North Korea is small. And, Taiwan notwithstanding, China doesn’t have another “half” to serve as an unnerving mirror image of what could be. My guess–and it’s only that–is that it’ll be hard for North Korea to resist the pressure by example from the South in the long run, even if Seoul is deliberately trying to keep the pressure in check. And what about the urge Pyongyang Kim may feel to stage a dramatic military confrontation to salvage his regime if he senses he’s about to be swept away? At that point, all bets are off.
All of which is a long way of saying that predicting what will happen to North Korea–how its communist regime may collapse or mutate–is a dangerous exercise. During my time in Moscow in the early 1980s, people joked about the Soviet penchant for rewriting history, excising purged or discredited leaders from the history books. This prompted the warning that it was best not to try to predict the future in a country with an unpredictable past. Who knows what history books in Pyongyang’s schools will say about the Great Leader 5, 10 or 50 years from now? I certainly don’t, and the one thing I’ve learned is not to pretend I do.
