Koreaforschung

INHALT VI Viennese Contributions to Korean Studies Special issue on ‘North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ and the Unintended Consequences of Engagement’ Youngmi Kim North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ and the Unin- tended Consequences of Engagement Wiener Beiträge Hyug-Baeg Im Exceptional Difficulties of Peace Building in Korean Peninsula: An Eclectic Approach zur Robert Winstanley-Chesters Examining Emergent Environmental Strategies in the Era of Kim Jong Un Gianluca Spezza Education, International Cooperation and Future Chal- lenges for the DPRK Koreaforschung Valentina Marinescu & Kim Jong Il’s death and legacy: Media Frames Ecaterina Balica and Myths in Romanian Media Matteo Fumagalli Regime Survival, Societal Resilience and Koreanologie • Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften Change in North Korea Universität Wien Articles (Hrsg.) Rainer Dormels The Impact of Democratization Processes on the Re- cruitment of Cabinet Ministers in South Korea Jeongim Hyun What Makes A Social Movement Possible? A Case Study of Korea’s 2012 Candlelight Movement Soyoung Kim & A Disparity between Faith and Actu- John Harbord ality: A Story of North Korean Political Defectors in Bul- garia Reviews “Nation Building in South Korea Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy”; Re- viewer: Alexander Akbik Wiener Beiträge zur Koreaforschung “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism”; Reviewer: Alexis Clifford “Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism”; Reviewer: Archana Chaturvedi “Monetary and Financial Integration in East Asia: The Relevance of European Experience”; VI Reviewer: Alfredo Hernandez “Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future”; Reviewer: Derek Boshkov 2014 www.praesens.at issn 1998-989X isbn 978-3-7069-0822-1 Wiener Beiträge zur Koreaforschung VI Viennese Contributions to Korean Studies Wiener Beiträge zur Koreaforschung Koreanologie / Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften Universität Wien (Hrsg.) VI 2014 Herausgeber: Koreanologie am Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften der Universität Wien Leitung: Rainer Dormels Redaktion: Youngmi Kim Redaktionelle Mitarbeit: Alexander Akbik Redaktionsadresse: Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften / Koreanologie Universität Wien Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 5 A-1090 Wien Bibliographische Information Der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN: 978-3-7069-0802-3 ISSN: 1998-989X Gedruckt mir Förderung des Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung in Wien sowie der Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Wien © Praesens Verlag http://www.praesens.at Wien 2014 Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Rechtsinhaber, die nicht ermittelt werden konnten, werden gebeten, sich an den Verlag zu wenden. Table of Contents Special issue on ‘North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ and the Unintended Consequences of Engagement’ Youngmi Kim 07 North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ and the Unintended Consequences of Engagement Hyug-Baeg Im 16 Exceptional Difficulties of Peace Building in Korean Peninsula: An Eclectic Approach Robert Winstanley-Chesters 40 Examining Emergent Environmental Strategies in the Era of Kim Jong Un Gianluca Spezza 53 Education, International Cooperation and Future Challenges for the DPRK Valentina Marinescu & 75 Kim Jong Il’s death and legacy: Media Frames Ecaterina Balica and Myths in Romanian Media Matteo Fumagalli 96 Regime Survival, Societal Resilience and Change in North Korea Articles Rainer Dormels 108 The Impact of Democratization Processes on the Recruitment of Cabinet Ministers in South Korea Jeongim Hyun 136 What Makes A Social Movement Possible? A Case Study of Korea’s 2012 Candlelight Movement Soyoung Kim & 150 A Disparity between Faith and Actuality: A John Harbord Story of North Korean Political Defectors in Bulgaria Reviews “Nation Building in South Korea Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy”; Reviewer: Alexander Akbik 161 “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism”; Reviewer: Alexis Clifford 164 “Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism”; Reviewer: Archana Chaturvedi 166 “Monetary and Financial Integration in East Asia: The Relevance of European Experience”; Reviewer: Alfredo Hernandez 169 “Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future”; Reviewer: Derek Boshkov 172 Special issue on ‘North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ and the Unintended Consequences of Engagement’i i This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2010-BAA-2105). North Korea: ‘Crisis as an Opportunity’ North Korea: ‘Crisis as an opportunity’ and the unintended consequences of engagement Youngmi Kim* Widely regarded as an anachronism in the current international system, and having surprised observers for the longevity of its regime, North Korea has carved out for itself a seemingly durable niche. To do so it has vehemently resisted any pressure for reform, Chinese-style or otherwise. Placing politics above economics (through the Songun/military-first policy) Pyongyang’s leadership has ‘stayed the course’ on the path of economic bankruptcy. Repression is relentless inside the country, and isolation-plus-sanctions have contributed to create and maintain a surreal micro- climate in which North Korea operates and survives. At the same time, as Kwon and Chung note (2013), North Korea is not really a mystery. Much is known about the country, especially about the regime and the political and economic system. Less so about what its citizens think, although the firewall of information isolation is gradually breaking down, and also reducing the country’s isolation from the world. This special issue investigates how Pyongyang has turned a crisis, or indeed a series of crises, into an opportunity not for renewal but for survival. Paradoxically, the capacity-building efforts, designed with an eye to a future post-Kim era, have also served to boost regime capacity and legitimacy. This is the first way in which the policy of international engagement has led to unintended consequences. Reluctantly replacing the Soviet Union as one of North Korea’s main sources of financial support, the international community offered a policy of ‘aid with no strings attached’ (no conditionality). This international aid has provided the North Korean regime with both an alternative life-line and an instrument for its authoritarian survival. Longevity is not, however, coterminous with being ‘frozen in time’. Instead, as the contributions to this journal show, educational exchanges, environmental cooperation and cross-border economic interaction with China are yielding profound changes in North Korean society. While international aid and the informal economy serve as both safety nets and valves for an otherwise moribund economy, they are critically altering the domestic information environment. North Korean citizens are no longer as cut off from the rest of the world as they once were. This special issue consists of five papers which set out to examine the ways in which North Korea has changed in recent years. And change it has indeed, and just not in the ways the international community often hoped. Quite the contrary, some of the international efforts to open up the country, rescue it from its self-inflicted predicament, and build capacity have resulted, paradoxically, in enhancing state capacity and regime legitimacy. The root causes of this lie partly in the ‘law of unintended consequences’ – extending the rule of the Kim dynasty is most likely not a policy priority of the international community when it comes to the Korean peninsula – and partly, as Im Hyug-Baeg notes in his contribution, in the mixed – * Associate Professor, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. 7 Youngmi KIM indeed conflicting – signals coming out of Washington and Seoul. The papers are quite diverse in nature, being written by political scientists, sociologists, geographers, and area studies specialists, thereby contributing to a nuanced and multifaceted picture of the North Korean state and society. Im’s paper on the ‘Exceptional difficulties of peace building in Korean Peninsula: an Eclectic approach’ asks why peace building in the Korean Peninsula has failed to create the foundation for the reunification of the two Koreas, in contrast to what the West experienced at the end of Cold War, with the political re-unification of Germany (Im, 2014, p. 16). Since the launch of the Sunshine Policy by former President Kim Dae-Jung, the two Koreas have undertaken mutual exchanges, and economic cooperation, including large cash inflows and investment in the North from the South (Kim, 2011). At the same time, there was no spillover into the political realm, and politically inter-Korean relations never took off (in fact since there was no peace treaty at the end of the Korea War, the two countries remain technically at war). In his search for the factors accounting for North Korea’s longevity despite all odds, Im looks at both domestic and external factors as sources of (in)stability. He downplays the importance of the possession of nuclear weapons by the North. While it does indeed add to Pyongyang’s blackmailing power, owning – or suspicion of ownership - of weapons of mass destruction did not prevent Saddam Hussein’s demise, he notes. Neither did giving up the Soviet era-inherited

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