Acta Kor Ana Vol. 14, No. 1, June 2011: 313–352 Book
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ACTA KOR ANA VOL. 14, NO. 1, JUNE 2011: 313–352 BOOK REVIEWS Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-Totalitarian Politics. By Patrick McEachern. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 320 pages. (ISBN-10: 0231153228; ISBN- 13: 978-0231153225) Patrick McEachern’s book Inside the Red Box begins with an anecdote from the inter-Korean summit of June 2000. Party Secretary Kim Yong-sun of the DPRK told the South Korean president that the US military must remove its troops from the peninsula. Kim Jong Il reportedly interrupted, “What problem would there be if the US military remained?” Seeming surprised, Kim Yong-sun began presenting the party line [that] the United States must withdraw…..Kim Jong Il again interrupted, “Secretary Yong-sun, stop that. Even though I try to do something, people under me oppose it like this. Perhaps the military, too, must have the same view … as Secretary Yong-sun.” (1) Underling contradicts boss in front of important guest, whereupon boss announces that insubordination is common in his organization! Such a scene would be screamingly phony even in a car dealership. But at the apex of North Korea, a state that boasts of unified, unquestioning loyalty to Kim Jong Il’s every word? The Soviets staged their good cop-bad cop act more credibly. According to Richard Nixon, they would take their “argument” into an adjacent room, leaving the visiting delegation (or so they hoped) to ponder the advantages of making a bold concession before it was too late. Then again, the Soviets had more respect for the Americans than Kim Jong Il ever showed to his South Korean counterpart. The reader expects Patrick McEachern to go to town on the above anecdote. As a foreign service officer and a former North Korea analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he must see through such tricks quicker than anyone. But no. “My theory of North Korean politics,” he tells us, “holds out the possibility that events like these are not staged….It is possible 314 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011 that this display actually reflected different bureaucratic positions within the state that Kim seeks to control.” (2) It is indeed possible that a dictator would inform an enemy state—with which his own state is formally at war—that he lacks the full support of his own elite. But is it likely? McEachern goes on to write, “The popular view that only one man matters in North Korea quickly breaks down upon investigation.”(3) It does not break down nearly as quickly as the view that divergent bureaucratic interests and positions cannot exist under one-man rule. One could instance Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China in this context, or the Yushin-era Park Chung Hee regime for that matter. But perhaps the most well known and pertinent example is the Third Reich, which was racked by far more intense disagreement between party, military and various ministries than anything McEachern can find evidence of in Pyong- yang. And yet Nazi Germany remains perhaps the most perfect example of a one- man dictatorship in history. One could conceivably argue that Hitler was not the only German who mattered, depending on what one means by the verb, but he always mattered more than the in-fighting that went on beneath him. I find nothing in McEachern’s book to suggest that the same cannot be said of Kim Jong Il, not least because the dictator espouses a comparably unifying and appealing form of paranoid ethno-nationalism. Part of the weakness of Mc- Eachern’s book is his apparent assumption—hence the unfortunate title—that this is a late Cold War communist state, and thus one held together none too firmly by a failed, outworn ideology. If North Korea really were such a place, the Kim Jong Il regime’s internal rivalries might indeed merit more study, presuming we had any reliable information on them. It is, however, manifestly not such a state. Now that North Korea has deleted the very mention of the c-word from its constitution, which enshrines military-first nationalist socialism instead, no writer or journalist should henceforth be allowed to call it a communist state without backing up the claim. Having said all the above, I concur wholeheartedly with McEachern’s opinion that North Korea is no longer a totalitarian state. The country clearly entered a post-totalitarian phase as it slid into famine in the 1990s. Apparent today to any visitor who leaves the showcase capital city is the existence of a second economy and second society, even if the latter remains atomized. (There is still no sign of the sort of civil society that came together in Eastern Europe after Stalin’s death.) But it is one thing to reject the totalitarian model, and quite another to assert that North Korea is not a one-man dictatorship. For the sake of argument I have so far acted as if I accept McEachern’s assertion that North Korea’s army, party, cabinet, foreign service, leader etc think differently about the economy, the nuclear program, Pyongyang-Washington Book Reviews 315 relations, and other central policy problems. Alas, no convincing evidence of such differences of opinion is anywhere provided. Not for nothing does the book kick off with such an unconvincing illustration—and re-use it in full later on. (135) Much is made 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 readi- ness 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,” (2) and that in North Korea, “Bureaucratic losers … continue to voice opposition publicly to the chosen policy direction.” (41) Yet again, it seems, we are dealing with a North Korea watcher who refuses to take the personality cult seriously. I defy Mc- Eachern to find a single example of public bureaucratic opposition to any genuine regime policy, least of all to foreign policy. It is embarrassing to have to point this out, but statements made during negotiations purely for the benefit of Americans do not constitute a “chosen policy direction.” The flip-flops that followed the currency reform of late 2009 do indeed indicate differences of elite opinion in regard to economic affairs. This does not mean that anyone is daring to differ with the Dear Leader himself; his is a military-first dictatorship after all, and if Kim is like his father he has no strong convictions on the economy, and no real understanding of finance. As for the nuclear, military and diplomatic fronts, I see little in the past fifteen years that does not reflect a very consistent (and successful) policy of deception, brink- manship and blackmail. The foreign ministry has a crucial good-cop role to play in this policy, and has always played it brilliantly. Thus are the arms negotiators celebrated in domestic propaganda as “diplomatic warriors” who bamboozle the Americans while refusing to make concessions. Yet after all this time, McEachern still believes that Kim’s foreign ministry has “advocated internally for diplomatic solutions to the North’s economic and security challenges.” (93) Here too the comparison to Nazi Germany is helpful. Before World War II one could conceivably have compared Germany’s frantic armament with Ribben- trop’s peaceful noises, or the Hitler-Stalin pact with flare-ups of anti-Soviet propa- ganda, and concluded—much as McEachern does in puncto North Korea—that the leader had his hands full pleasing ideologically-diverging constituents. We now know that when it came to the big questions, the Germans were all on the same page from the start. Perhaps we should not be surprised after all that the author is a foreign service 316 Acta Koreana Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011 officer. The business of the United States State Department is negotiation. Hence it will always persist in putting North Korea “inside the red box,” because our record of negotiating with communists is far more encouraging than our record of talking peace with paranoid nationalists. Diplomats also prefer the hawks-versus- doves model of North Korea—of which McEachern’s model is an only super- ficially more complex variant—because it allows for unflagging optimism in the face of annual displays of aggression and bad faith. None of this is to say that Patrick McEachern’s book is without considerable merits. All in all, I am glad that it was written; if it encourages North Korea watchers to pay closer attention to the various institutions inside the Kim Jong Il regime, it will have done an important service. As with Bruce Cumings’s work, one can learn a lot of history from it even while remaining highly skeptical of its central thrust. The prose is always lucid; there is no more jargon than absolutely necessary. Aware that his thesis will meet with strong opposition, the author ex- presses himself throughout with maximum care and thoroughness. Especially well-done is the book’s chapter four, an excellent overview of North Korea’s political institutions that I plan to keep close at hand. (It lends itself well to classroom use.) While one may disagree with the author’s interpretation of the facts, the facts themselves are invariably accurate, as are the many quotes translated from North Korean sources.