Declared by the nationalist with a buzz of Wilsonian self-determination, March 1st, 1919 became a famous day for Koreans.

We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people. We tell it to the world in witness of the equality of all nations and we pass it on to our posterity as their inherent right.

We make this proclamation, having 5,000 years of history, and 20,000,000 united loyal people. We take this step to insure to our children for all time to come, personal liberty in accord with the awakening consciousness of this new era. This is the clear leading of God, the moving principle of the present age, the whole human race’s just claim. It is something that cannot be stamped out, stifled, gagged, or suppressed by any means.

An English translation of the Korean Declaration of Independence is provided by Columbia University and can be found HERE.

There is a lot of doubt as to the overall credibility of what Cumings says and the ways he portrays a country like North Korea.  Don’t get me wrong, issues such as the massive bombing campaign undertook by Americans over North Korea deserve to be discussed, critiqued and decried.  Another non-issue is the “local war theory/trap theory” put forward by Cumings in the second volume of his The Origins of the Korean War, published in 1990, which posits that not only was the Korean war a strictly civil conflict, but it was provoked by Syngman Rhee in order to get the Americans to intervene on behalf of south Korea’s defense.  Given that Cumings didn’t have access to the Soviet archives that would later show the level of involvement Stalin played in Kim Jong-il’s decision to invade, his error here is excusable.[2]  There aren’t a small number of scholars, though, who aren’t so forgiving.  Aside from hinting that the entire thesis of Cumings The Origins was wrong (it should be noted that there is much more to Cumings’ The Origins than the “trap theory”) scholars like BR Myers contend that after getting the Korean War Wrong, Cumings kept on going on with bad themes and even worse arguments.  Myers is worth a quote in order to capture the almost vitriolic disdain some scholars have for Cumings’ work:

Instead [of correcting the errors in The Origins] Cumings went on to write an account of postwar Korea that instances the North’s “miracle rice,” “autarkic” economy, and prescient energy policy (an “unqualified success”) to refute what he calls the “basket-case” view of the country. With even worse timing than its predecessor, Korea’s Place in the Sun(1997) went on sale just as the world was learning of a devastating famine wrought by Pyongyang’s misrule. The author must have wondered if he was snakebit. But now we have a new book, in which Cumings likens North Korea to Thomas More’s Utopia, and this time the wrongheadedness seems downright willful; it’s as if he were so tired of being made to look silly by forces beyond his control that he decided to do the job himself. At one point in North Korea: Another Country (2004) we are even informed that the regime’s gulags aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be, because Kim Jong Il is thoughtful enough to lock up whole families at a time.

The mixture of naiveté and callousness will remind readers of the Moscow travelogues of the 1930s, but Cumings is more a hater of U.S. foreign policy than a wide-eyed supporter of totalitarianism. The book’s apparent message is that North Korea’s present condition can justify neither our last “police action” on the peninsula nor any new one that may be in the offing. It is perhaps a point worth arguing, particularly in view of the mess in Iraq, but Cumings is too emotional to get the job done. His compulsion to prove conservative opinion wrong on every point inspires him to say things unworthy of any serious historian—that there was no crime in North Korea for decades, for example—and to waste space refuting long-forgotten canards and misconceptions. Half a page is given over to deriding American reporters who once mistook Kim Il Sung’s neck growth for a brain tumor—talk about a dead issue.

Love him or hate him, I find it interesting to see which side of the aisle Korean scholars stand regarding Cumings’ overall message about the Korean War and North Korea; generally speaking, those left-of-center “appreciate” his work (as it has been so delicately put to me), while the conservatives think he is either a “soft apologist,” at best, or a “paid propagandist,” at worst.  It’s also been stated to me, in a not-so-friendly tone, that Cumings’ work lacks credibility because it is published in English — as if publishing in Korean would change the arguments?  In any case, my experience discussing Cumings in Korea suggests that respect for his work rests solely on the left side of the aisle.

I won’t go any further into the debates surrounding Cumings research or his “controversial” conclusions.  Just keep in mind, for those of you unfamiliar with Cumings, that he is considered by many to be a “revisionist” historian; not something people like to be considered.

I do want to point out something that struck me while reading through some of Cumings’ work that is worth pointing out:  several arguments arguments made by Cumings subsequently became central focus larger works lauded for their breakthrough research.  The first comes via the Korean studies discussion list from an email sent by Cumings in response to a KCTV paean to Kim Jong-un.  Cumings uses an excerpt from vol. II of The Origins to put power transition, leadership and authority in North Korea into historical context.  The entire excerpt is too long to cite in toto, so I’ll quote an abridged form (see the entire email, including the excerpt, HERE [.pdf]).

In an important interview in 1947 with Kim’s first biographer, an unnamed member of his guerrilla unit promoted a Kim Il Sung line that remains the official history today. Kim set the following sort of example:

“This sort of person naturally has an extremely strong power of attraction to others…. And it goes without saying that a guerrilla organization with such a person at the center is incomparably strong. The sublime good fortune of our guerrilla detachment was to have at our center the Great Sun. Our general commander, great leader, sagacious teacher, and intimate friend was none other than General Kim Il Sung. …

The detachment’s “philosophy of life” was their willingness to follow Kim’s orders even to the death; “its strength is the strength deriving from uniting around Kim Il Sung … our guerrillas’ historical tradition is precisely that of uniting around Kim as our only leader.”

Kim loved and cared for his followers, and they responded with an iron discipline for which “a spirit of obedience is needed, and what is needed for that is a spirit of respect . . . above all, the spiritual foundation [of our discipline] was this spirit of respect. And the greatest respect was for General Kim Il Sung. Our discipline grew and became strong amid respect and obedience for him. … ["General Kim Il Sung is the Leader of the Korean people," Podo, no.3 (August 1947), pp. 18-21.]

The language used by this man is fascinating. It is all moral language, bathing Kim in a hundred virtues, almost all of which are Confucian virtues–benevolence, love, trust, obedience, respect, reciprocity between leader and led. It is a language of circles: the phrase “uniting around Kim” uses a term, chuwi, that literally means circumference; in a neighborhood it means living around a center or chungsim, which literally means a “central heart.” Synonyms for this, widely used in the North Korean literature, are “core” and “nucleus.” The Party center was also a euphemism for Kim and his closest allies, just as it became the euphemism for Kim’s son in the 1970s when the succession was being arranged.

The notion of a cult-centered authoritarian state in North Korea mirrors the “ethno-nationalist personality cult” argument put forward by BR Myers.[3]  Thus, it seems to me, Cumings’ original description of “uniting” around Kim Il-sung predates Myers’ more elaborate (and Korean literature-focused) analysis (see the CSPAN 2 Book TV with BR Myers about his book).

Cumings also does the same with Carter Eckert’s contention that the origins of capitalism in Korea are traced to the colonial occupation by Japan.[4]  This quote from vol. I of The Origins:

Most Korean were peasants before the Japanese came and remained peasants after they left.  Yet in the decade preceding liberation, the peasant class lost upwards of 10 percent of its members, mostly to industry; and many more than this had been touched by the force of the world market system.  It was the simultaneity of the coming of the market and the rise of industry that was so critical to shaping the fate of Korea under the Japanese and thereafter.  This was, in essence, the onset of Korea’s capitalist revolution. (p. 48)

As readers of both Eckert and Cumings know, Eckert develops the argument much further, providing more quantitative support and historical evidence of the landlord-entrepreneurs — a phrase first coined by Cumings in vol. I of The Origins to describe the upper echelon of Korean society.  Nevertheless, Cumings lays down the original argument which is later expounded upon by Eckert.  Cumings, however, gets only one mention from Eckert in his book on page 49.

Cumings strikes me as an ardent anti-establishment scholar (for better or worse), who cloaks his leftist-critiques of conventional wisdom and the establishment in his reputation as a scholar who studies and writes on Asia.  I’ve talked with other readers of Cumings asking why he isn’t treated in the same way other academics treat Noam Chomsky?  No one likes being called a Chomskyite; but no such epithets exist for admirers of Cumings (Am I a Cumingsite?).  As I briefly noted before, Cumings’ “alternative” interpretation of westward expansion and American hegemony in his latest book is certainly a different way of viewing American history and industrial-lead expansion and growth in the 19th and 20th century.

Cumings’s so-called “revisionist” interpretation of history is a breath of fresh air at times; but, like anything, it must be taken as the opinion of one scholar who is just as likely to be fallible as another.  I haven’t read all of Cumings’ work – as it seems someone like Myers has – so my reserved praise for Cumings could be misplaced.  I’ll stick by it for now, though.

I’ll throw it some bones.

Parsimonious theories are attractive – especially logical, well-thought out ones like John Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism.”  Personally, I’m not too found of Mearsheimer’s grand, mono-casual theory.  Yes, we all know that uncertainly about state’s intentions drives all states to behave in certain ways.  Yet, it seems to be that such beliefs are used as a crutch to skirt actually “knowing” about another state, society, domestic political structure and individual leaders.

Henry Kissinger, as much as a hate to say it, has a very appealing interpretation of historical events and expectations of the future baed on intimate knowledge of world leaders and the unique social, political and culture system they come from (his latest obviously being that of China).  Kaplan, in his for-the-most-part favorable review of Measheimer’s thought in The Atlantic, contains some reservations and points of disagreement.  I found this point one of the better critiques of the dangers of Mearsheimer’s parsimonious worldview:

… Mearsheimer’s very cold, mathematical, states-as-billiard-balls approach ignores messy details—like the personalities of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Slobodan Milošević—that have had a monumental impact in deciding how wars and crises turn out. International relations is as much about understanding Shakespeare—and the human passions and intrigues that Shakespeare exposes—as it is about understanding political-science theories. It matters greatly that Deng Xiaoping was both utterly ruthless and historically perceptive, so that he could set China in motion to become such an economic and military juggernaut in the first place. Manifest Destiny owes as much to the canniness of President James K. Polk as it does to Mearsheimer’s laws of historical determinism.

Nevertheless, and despite my objections to “establishment tyranny” (my phrase to denote the dominance that a few ivory toweresque academics have on IR discourse), Mearsheimer should be given credit where credit is due.  A central theme of his seminal work, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,  is that China is the next challenger to US hegemony and the containment of China should thus be the focus of  America’s foreign policy efforts as an “offshore balancer” — the latter part (being an offshore balancer) is a common theme amongst contemporary realists, even if a containment strategy of China is not.  Despite official rhetoric about “engaging” China in a way that will not make it feel threatened or the object of a new US containment strategy, it seems Mearsheimer’s preferred strategy is now becoming American foreign policy in the Asia Pacific (see analysis that supports this view here, here and here).  It may not be the “official” policy the US government promotes in its defense white papers and national security strategies, but all indications point to the “Asia pivot” as one primarily directed towards containing Chinese power and influence in the region.

Now, before I sound like I’m praising Mearsheimer for a good idea, let me clarify what I mean by “giving credit.”  Mearsheimer deserves acknowledgement not necessarily because he was an early advocate for the adoption of US policies aimed at containing Chinese power and influence but mainly because what he advocated for in the past is now becoming a policy reality, more or less.  In other words, his words are proving to be prophetic.  Being prophetic, though, is not always a good thing.

Also, Mearsheimer’s contention that China will seek to supplant US power in the region does seem to be true, even if not in the way Mearsheimer would have one believe.  The threat to the current balance of power in the Asia Pacific, at least currently, does not – as James Fallows points out – seem to stem from China’ military, as Mearsheimer would contend.  Instead, the shift in the balance of power stems primarily from China-centered growth in the Asia Pacific and the subsequent changing patterns of trade.  Any country that is dependent on exports for economic growth is in serious business with China, especially the countries of ASEAN, Japan, South Korea and, to a degree that casts question upon its national autonomy, North Korea.  In other words, all the countries that are located along the Pacific Rim near or bordering China.  Although the US is the primary protector and guarantor of stability, China is the engine of economic growth and will thus be in a position to benefit from the effects of trade dependency.  One possible result is found in Kaplan’s article:

Andrew F. Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, believes that nations of the Western Pacific are slowly being “Finlandized” by China: they will maintain nominal independence but in the end may abide by foreign-policy rules set by Beijing. And the more the United States is distracted by the Middle East, the more it hastens this impending reality in East Asia, which is the geographical heart of the global economy ….

It is thus impossible to imagine 10-20 years from now a political economic system in the Asia Pacific that has the US as the lone central player.  Granted, it is also impossible to imagine the US as an insignificant player.  Regardless, as I’ve discussed before, the traditional hub-and-spokes system (i.e. the San Francisco System) will be — nay, is — under challenge from an up-and-coming China.  The US’s so-called Asia pivot, despite economic hurdles, is shaping up to be what Mearsheimer called for over a decades ago.

Now, if I can wax subjective for a moment or two, I’ll comment on the containment strategy the US seems to be adopting in an effort to challenge burgeoning Chinese influence.  To do this, let me juxtapose two different views of China’s rise.  The first from the Fallows article cited above:

China has too many things going on, and going wrong, within its own borders to have the time, energy, skill, or ambition for much of an ‘expansionist’ world effort. From the outside, it looks like an unstoppable juggernaut. From inside, especially from the perspective of those trying to run it, it looks like a rambling wreck that narrowly avoids one disaster after another. The thrust of Mearsheimer’s argument is that such internal complications simply don’t matter: the sheer increase in China’s power will bring disruption with it. I am saying: if you knew more about China, you would be less worried, especially about military confrontations. He is saying: ‘knowing’ about China is a distraction. What matters are the implacable forces.

Naturally, I think this view is wrong, or at least too mechanistic; and that while we need to think constantly and seriously about China, a ‘showdown’ would be a result of miscalculation or recklessness on either side, rather than of unstoppable tectonic pressures. On the other hand, I completely endorse Mearsheimer’s (and Kaplan’s) view that we should have been paying more attention to China, and been less bogged down in the Middle East, through the past decade. But his case is certainly worth considering, and Bob Kaplan lays it out very well. I expect that we’ll also hear from Jeffrey Goldberg soon about the other part of the article, about the Mearsheimer-Walt book.

This is very similar to the view espoused by Kissinger in his book On China and in earlier articles.  To summarize Kissinger, I’ll quote from a paper I wrote last year dealing with the topic of power transition:

Henry Kissinger, despite his obvious realist sympathies takes the position that contrasts sharply with Kaplan’s assertion that China’s rise necessarily poses a serious security threat to U.S. interests in the Pacific region.  In contrast to Kaplan, who sees the rivalry brewing in the Pacific as a natural outgrowth of China’s aggrandizement of power, Kissinger warns against such positions, stating that they may become self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, if U.S. policy makers, politicians and the nation as a whole believe China’s rise poses a serious threat to American security and vital interests, it may because of that belief become reality.  Kissinger challenges the position held by Kaplan and others that conflict with China is inevitable, stating that such an assumption “is as dangerous and it is wrong.” Kissinger argues that the policy of containment is an antiquated policy of the past and is no longer a wise or productive strategy and argues instead for constructive engagement, not isolation. To Kissinger, strategies like the one proposed by Kaplan are counterproductive and work against what Kissinger sees as a potential to build a peaceful international world order.

Kaplan’s view referred to in the quote is similar to the position advanced by Mearsheimer and can be understood as supporting his positon on US foreign policy in the age of China’s rise (a cursory reading of Kaplan’s work over the last 5 years will reveal this).  To see the other side of approach to China’s rise, let’s return to Kaplan’s adulation of Mearsheimer:

Mearsheimer’s admonition [is] that a struggle with China awaits us. ”he Chinese are good offensive realists, so they will seek hegemony in Asia,’ he tells me, paraphrasing the conclusion to Tragedy. China is not a status quo power. It will seek to dominate the South China Sea as the U.S. has dominated the Greater Caribbean Basin. He continues: ‘An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?’ On the penultimate page of Tragedy, he warns:

“Neither Wilhelmine Germany, nor imperial Japan, nor Nazi Germany, nor the Soviet Union had nearly as much latent power as the United States had during their confrontations … But if China were to become a giant Hong Kong, it would probably have somewhere on the order of four times as much latent power as the United States does, allowing China to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States.”

Mearsheimer’s realist convictions, as shown here by Kaplan, leads him to believe that conflict is an inevitable event between the US and China and the sooner the US realizes this, the better off she will be — hence his admonition.  This is the view Mearsheimer advances in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (referred to throughout Kaplan’s article as the Tragedy – making Mearshimer’s work come across as playwright by Shakespeare).  Without going too deep into a critique, the biggest problem I have with this approach to understanding China’s rise in the age of American hegemony is the same as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s.  In a 2005 “debate” in Foreign Policy with none other than Mearsheimer himself, Brzezinski made this comment:

As an occasional scholar, I am impressed by the power of theory. But theory — at least in international relations — is essentially retrospective. When something happens that does not fit the theory, it gets revised. And I suspect that will happen in the U.S.-China relationship.

If I could re-phrase Brzezinski’s comment slightly to more accurately reflect my own, I would do it like this:  Theories are convenient and useful, insofar as they help us understand a complicated world in a way that is systematic and useful.  Systematic by default — a good, logical theory is always systematic; and useful, since theory can be used as a guide for policymakers and politicians.  However, theory should not be used in a way that is deterministic.  (Mis)using theory in this way has the effect of limiting choices, constraining debate and unnecessarily ruling out potentially better options.  In the case of Sino-US relations, an adoption of Mearsheimer’s theory has the effect of forcing another Cold War-style foreign policy based on a Kennanesque containment strategy and a balance of power understanding of international relations.  Does it have to be that way?  No, certainly not — as the (newer) brand of social constructivist scholars like Alexander Wendt have shown.  However, if one is to buy Mearsheimer’s worldview, foreign policy  options become much more selective.

To close, I’ll summarize my critique of Mearshimer as such:  The real tragedy of Tragedy is that it may become so strongly believed (even if not publicly) that it is likely to become reality via a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We don’t have to make Mearsheimer a prophet though.

Ideology and Eckert’s Offspring of Empire

Pohang is where POSCO, one of the world’s largest steel producers, was founded in 1968 with the help of the Japanese government.  I toured around the steel plant itself and took a self-guided tour at the POSCO museum located next the steel plant.  While walking through the museum and reading the abridged history of POSCO written on the murals, podiums and displays throughout the museum one thing stood out:  the concept of “steel patriotism” (제철 보국).  It reminded me of the concept of “Kokutai no hongi,” the Japanese idea of putting public interests over private and a key tenet of a view of capitalism from the standpoint of “national economy.”  In other words, capitalism ought to be used as a means to advance state ends — an explicit form of economic nationalism.  I came across this term while reading Eckert’s Offspring of Empire.  I’ll quote part of the passage quoted in Eckert:

Our national economy is a great enterprise based on His Majesty’s great august Will to have the Empire go on developing for ever and ever, and is a thing on which the subjects’ felicity depends; so that it is not a disconnected series of activities aimed at fulfilling the material desires of individual persons, a doctrine expounded by Western economists.  It is a thing in which the entire nation joins the Way of musubi, each person fulfilling his duties according to the part he has been assigned to play… The attitude of mind which is based on the spirit of musubi and puts public interest before private ones, paying full attention to one’s allotted duties and to being in harmony with others, has been an attitude toward industrial enterprises in our nation; and it is a basic reason for the rise of a strong impetus in the world of industry, for encouraging initiative, stimulating cooperation, greatly heightening industrial efficiency, bringing about the prosperity of all industries, and for contributing toward the increase of national wealth.

Although I haven’t made any in-depth inquiry into the similarities, from my tour of the POSCO museum and what I already know about the political economy of Korean economic development, there is a link between the Japanese concept of Kokutai no hongi and “steel patriotism.”  Consider this quote from a Chung-a Ilbo  article (중아 일보) about industrial management ideology following the death of POSCO founder and industrial giant Pak Tae-joon (박대준):

On June 9, 1973 at 7:30 a.m., workers cheered after molten metal poured out of a furnace at Korea’s first steel mill POSCO. When a yellow flash coming out of an iron notch rose higher than a human`s height, POSCO founder Park Tae-joon clenched his fists. This was the moment Korea’s first blast furnace produced molten metal, called the “rice of industry.” Korean-made steel boasting high quality and affordability laid the foundation for Korea to be a leading player in shipbuilding and manufacturing of cars and electronics.

When Park began construction of the still mill in 1970, he advocated the “spirit of facing right,” saying, “If we fail to build a steel mill, all of us shall jump to our deaths into Yeongil Bay on the right side.” He built a 200-square meter, two-story wooden building on the coast of Yeongil Bay for use as a control center for the construction. At night, workers slept in the building and called it “Rommel House” since it looked like a field army command post operated by Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel in World War II.

Park, who built the world`s fourth-largest steelmaker in operating capacity on a sandy plain, passed away Tuesday at the age of 84. He was the symbol of Korea’s rapid economic growth and the epitome of the indomitable entrepreneurial spirit. Korea was a poor agricultural country whose per-capita income was 254 dollars in 1970. For the country to be transformed into an advanced industrial nation, steel production was a must. Equipped with patriotism and a military spirit, Park fulfilled his task of building a comprehensive steel mill assigned by then President Park Chung-hee.

From a political economy, and modern Korean history point-of-view, the similarities between Japanese and Korean development ideology, which, according to Eckert’s historical analysis, is a result of colonial economic development in Korea between the years 1910-1945.  The two quotes are slightly different, one being more philosophical, the other editorial.  However, I think the similarities can be seen:  development for the sake of the state at the sacrifice and hard work of the people.  The notion that economic development is not done in order to make individual profit but to make the state prosperous and wealthy is a rather general, unspecific tenet of Korea as a “late industrializing” state, but still an important one to note.  The militaristic theme is also found throughout both Japan (pre-War) and Korea (one can read about the “blitzkrieg war” that Pak Tae-joon decarled in order to complete phase one of POSCO construction; also, to my knowledge, compared to Japan, the pervasiveness of military culture pervades Korean society to this day).  The German theme at POSCO (the Rommel House, “Blitzkrieg” construction) strikes me as very strange; I have not explanation for it at the moment.

Eckert’s book also does well to show the opportunistic behavior of the Korean bourgeoisie (land owners and early industrialists) during the colonial period and their preference for profit over cultural and political identity.  I don’t know how, exactly, this book was received by Korean scholars (I’ll find out this semester), but I think I can safely assume that the conservatives (at least) didn’t find Eckert’s research and conclusions regarding the origins of capitalism in Korea and early industrialization to be in line with their own.  I’ll quote a few passages to show what I mean:

Without condoning Japanese imperialism, one may say that the forty years of Japanese occupation left both halves of postwar Korea with a substantial material base for subsequent industrial development….

[C]olonialism was the setting in which Korean capitalism experienced its first real surge of growth.  Although this was certainly unfortunate, and is perhaps embarrassing or distasteful for many Koreans to admit, it is nevertheless a fact…. Korean capitalism had been spawned within the matrix of Japanese colonialism.

Engaging North Korea

I recently had a in-depth discussion with professor Park Young-chun (박영준), a professor at Korean National Defense University.  His recent editorial in the Chungahn Ilbo (Korean) talks about various ways in which to engage Kim Chong-un and the DPRK leadership in order to mitigate the “provocative tendency of North Korea.”  He suggests that South Korea enlist the help of Russia and China for diplomatic assistance, since China and Russia are the two major power allies of the DPRK (China an official guarantor of the DPRK; Russia a de facto ally).  He thinks the US’s role, regarding ROK-DPRK relations is strictly military in nature (deterrence).

I’ll have more substantial analysis of our discussion in the next day or so.

Zakaria – Japan and (American) Industrial Policy

Fareed Zakaria analyzes the recent reports indicating that Japan has registered its first annual deficit since 1980.  His analysis is very different from that of Eamon Fingleton’s.  Fingleton disagrees with analysts who focus on only the visible trade balance.  Part of his critique:

The proper way to measure a nation’s performance is not by the visible trade balance alone but by the current account, which is the widest and most meaningful measure of a nation’s trade. The current account includes financial flows such as interest payments,  dividends, insurance premiums, and patent royalties. The balance in such items has been positive for Japan since the 1960s and the net invisible surplus has grown astoundingly in the last two decades. This reflects not only the fact that the underlying economic performance in true invisibles has been strong but because of so-called transfer pricing, which is now rampant in Japanese industry and results in massive understatement of exports.  (In a typical maneuver, goods might be shipped to China via Hong Kong. The goods are exported from Japan at heavily discounted prices and a Hong Kong subsidiary takes a huge profit in selling to China. Such profits constitute hidden export revenues that are not caught in the visible trade numbers. The maneuver makes sense because Japan’s corporate tax rate is one of the world’s highest.)

Zakaria also chimes in on the (emerging?) debate surrounding this age-old question:  does America needs an industrial policy?  A summary of his answer:  it may be “inefficient” and contrary to conventional economic wisdom (whatever that is), but it seems to work.  So, it appears he answers in the affirmative.

The Unipolar Era

I’m finally getting on board with the “Unipolar Era” debate (following links in Walt’s article; also see here and here — yes, it is Walt-heavy in analysis; I’ll diversify later). I got around to reading Michael Beckley’s article (chapter from his dissertation) “The Unipolar Era:  Why American Power Persists and China’s Rise Is Limited” this morning.  Definitely engaging and worthy of a read and several critiques.  Perhaps I’ll have more on this later; for now, these passages from to beginning of his article stand out to me:

[Globalization works in favor of American industry because] globally networked production — in which goods are produced in multiple stages in a number of locations.  This system helps American firms preserve their competitive advantages by specializing in high-value activities, exploiting innovations created abroad, and attracting high-quality human capital.

The dollar’s global role … forces the U.S. to run persistent balance-of-payments deficits to supply the world with liquidity, a policy which diminishes the competitiveness of U.S. exports as well as the confidence of markets and central banks in the dollar.

The U.S. … manipulates international trade and investment flows to benefit itself and its allies while excluding potential adversaries.

Beckley paints a relatively brighter future for America, compared to the “declinists” he critiques throughout his article.  Most important for IR theory and foreign policy is the notion that the unipolar world order the world has come to know since the end of World War-II isn’t going anywhere.  If Beckley’s analysis of the future America’s military prowess is anywhere near accurate, neither is America’s defense-biased outlook on world affairs (for better or worse).

To Hell With the Establishment

James Fallows’ follow-up piece to Robert Kaplan’s “sympathetic Atlantic profile of John Mearsheimer” (to quote Jeffery Goldberg) shows establishment scholars (e.g. Mearsheimer, Waltz and Kaplan — but definitely people like Walt, too, and probably Beckley in due time) at their worst.  Fallows states:

(Kaplan)  also explains why Mearsheimer believes a strategic/military confrontation between the US and China truly is inevitable — and why he, Kaplan, mainly shares this view. I mainly disagree with both of them, and the basis of our disagreement touches on another important theme of the article.

In an article of my own in next month’s issue, and in my forthcoming book, I argue that China has too many things going on, and going wrong, within its own borders to have the time, energy, skill, or ambition for much of an “expansionist” world effort. From the outside, it looks like an unstoppable juggernaut. From inside, especially from the perspective of those trying to run it, it looks like a rambling wreck that narrowly avoids one disaster after another. The thrust of Mearsheimer’s argument is that such internal complications simply don’t matter: the sheer increase in China’s power will bring disruption with it. I am saying: if you knew more about China, you would be less worried, especially about military confrontations. He is saying: “knowing” about China is a distraction. What matters are the implacable forces.

Why really “know” about the other culture?  To quote Beckley, who is summarizing Waltz:  Because of anarchy, uncertainty and all that jazz, “states become ‘like-units,’ taking on similar characteristics as they compete for superiority across a full spectrum of capabilities.  Waltz calls this dynamic the ‘sameness effect.’”

Yes, I know I am oversimplifying Waltz, Measheimer and others.  But, it also occurred to me living as an ex-pat in Asia, studying about Asia that, despite the wonderfully systematic theories and air-tight logic of the big-shot establishment scholars, Asia is different — very different at times.  To understand this requires one to know about the other culture, its institutions, language, history (especially modern history) and so on.  Mearsheimer, Waltz, et al. sometimes come across as polite ivory tower know-it-alls with little practical knowledge about what’s really going on in these monoliths (aka: nation-state) they talk so much about.

The Two Parties and the KORUS FTA

Before starting, let me briefly inform you of basic knowledge about the Korean domestic political party setting. Korea has several parties, but the main parties are the Grand National Party (GNP) and Democratic Party (DP). The GNP is currently the ruling party and it can be regarded as a conservative party in terms of its political characteristic. On the other hands, DP is considered progressive. Interestingly enough, recently both parties have changed their party names. In December 2011, DP changed its name as Democratic United Party (DUP) with unification of Citizens Unity Party (시민통합당) and Federation of Korean Trade Unions (한국노동조합총연맹). Most recently, yesterday (February 2, 2012), GNP also changed its name, “Saenori (새누리)” or “New World” party. (It does not offer any official English name, so I referred to the BBC News article. See here) However, this change is quite different from the DUP’s because GNP’s name change was not a result of unification among several parties. This dynamic party composition in Korean domestic politics is critical to understand Korea’s political problem.

As a fact, the South Korean economy has the highest trade dependence rate among the G-20 countries. Considering the severe trade dependence (it is almost 100% in 2011. See here), the importance of trade in its economy cannot be stressed enough. And having China as a no. 1 trade partner, South Korea’s asymmetric trade dependence on China is getting bigger. S.C. Denney’s recent post, Unnatural Alliances and Northeast Asia’s Shifting Geopolitical Landscape, also points this out:

Korea is extraordinarily dependent on exports for economic growth. Most important to note is the fact that Korea is becoming exceedingly dependent on China’s market to feed this growth.

In fact, Korea’s both imports and exports to China is almost double those to the US (see also S.C. Danny’s table1 and table 2). With this fact in mind, it is natural for South Korea to pay close attention to its relationship with China if it is a rational state. If Korea ruined the trade relationship with China, it would bring huge negative effect on Korea’s economy. No state wants a sluggish economy. It is natural. In that regard, the KORUS FTA ratified by the National Assemble of South Korea on in November 2011 can be assessed as an irrational decision because it would harm Sino-Korea trade relationship, which would hinder Korea’s economic growth as a whole. Moreover, the ratification process was even more problematic because it was ratified in surprise vote. It was the first time in history. Let me introduce an excerpt from the Korean newspaper, JoongAng Daily:

The long-stalled Korea-U.S. free trade agreement was finally ratified by the National Assembly yesterday after the ruling Grand National Party blindsided liberal opposition lawmakers with a surprise floor vote in a chaotic session complete with a tear gas attack in the main chamber.”[…] “The Blue House yesterday welcomed the news. “It’s fortunate that the FTA is ratified, although the process was difficult,” said Choe Geum-nak, the Blue House senior public affairs secretary. “We thank the people for giving unconditional support for the FTA. We also thank the lawmakers who have worked hard for the ratification.”

Despite the ratification, the severe debate between the two parties (Grand National Party and Democratic United Party) is still going on. About a week ago, the newly elected Supreme Council of the main opposition Democratic United Party pledged to fully repeal the disputed Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. According to the Korean Herald on January 17, 2012, the new DUP leader, Han Myeong-sook, who was the nation’s first woman prime minister under the Roh Moo-hyun government, said after being elected party head on Sunday.

All council members agree that the KORUS FTA was lopsided and flawed. We shall abolish the entire pact and restart the talks from scratch.

As seen above, Korea’s two dominant parties appear to be at the end of the line. Considering that Korea will have two big elections this year (the general election in April and the presidential election in December), the current tension between the two parties is dangerous. Consequently, the future of the KORUS FTA is unclear in spite of the ratification.

Grand National Party’s Rationale

Since GNP is the ruling party (of course, now the name changed to “Saenori” or “New World” Party. But let me use the old name, “GNP”, because the FTA issues in this writing deal with the past), its rationale for the KORUS FTA takes the same course with the Lee Myung-bak government. The rationale includes two factors: economic and security.

In order to find official statements, I visited the official website for KORUS FTA. This website is run by the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trades. One thing interesting about this web page was that only Korean was available in the website. I guess it is because the web site was designed to provide information for its people. However, I believe other languages (at least English, because it is a website for the KORUS FTA) should be available too in order to avoid misunderstanding or misuse of information. Anyhow, this site provides the entire official documents and informs Korean people of the details and specific impacts of the KORUS FTA. (Visit here, http://www.fta.go.kr/korus/main/index.asp)

Throughout looking at this website, I discovered one more interesting thing: the information provided on the website is all about economy. On one section called 한미FTA기대효과 ( KORUS FTA expected effects), in particular, includes six sub-sections, and each introduces specific effects by providing easily understandable materials. Let me introduce some to you.

[Picture 1]
Source: KORUS FTA website
(Click here to see the full text)

[Picture 1] says that the KORUS FTA opens economic highway (경제고속도로가 열린다!), which means it will accelerate Korea’s economic growth. If you click the full version, you will see how interesting it looks because it is filled with cartoons.

[Picture 2]
Source: KORUS FTA website
(Click here to see the full text)

[Picture 2] also talks about the economic effect. It says that the KORUS FTA will be the first step for a strong trade state (통상강국). The full version includes a lot of graphs, charts and diagrams. It even provides FAQs regarding the major issues such as agriculture, ISD, jobs, medical welfare and etc.

[Picture 3]
Source: KORUS FTA website
(Click here to see the full text)

[Picture 3] emphasizes the impacts of KORUS FTA on our daily lives. The full text consists of two parts: Ⅰ. 한·미 FTA 최대 수혜자는 ‘소비자’(The main beneficiaries of the KORUS FTA is ‘consumers’) and Ⅱ. 한·미 FTA 시대, 중소기업 경쟁력 高고GO! (Small and medium-sized companies’ competitiveness goes up!)

As seen above, all three pictures and the full texts seem to be very interesting and easy to understand, but I wonder how many people actually see this documents or how many people are aware of the existence of this website itself. Regardless of it, this KORUS FTA website is running well at this moment by offering economic effects. Security-related effect was hard to be found. I found one from a general document called “한ᆞ미 FTA, 우리 미래를 위한 선택입니다 (KORUS FTA, it is a decision for our future).” Out of the whole 162 pages, only three sentences were about security. It was on page 4 briefly saying, we can expect KORUS FTA to improve US-Korea relationship by expanding the scopes of the US-ROK military alliance into economy. But that was it.

Then, the GNP’s rationale is mostly about the economy? Of course, not. Since Lee Myung-bak’s government and the GNP value the US-ROK alliance as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, the KORUS FTA means a lot more than the economic effect. Korea’s official website, Korea.net shows this clearly:

Overall, President Lee’s latest U.S. trip produced win-win results for both countries. The most meaningful outcome of the trip comes from the agreement between the two leaders to upgrade the 58-year-old Korea-U.S. alliance by increasing its scope. […] The two leaders also agreed to renew and upgrade the joint vision for the alliance between South Korea and the United States which they initially adopted at the Korea-U.S. summit in June 2009 so that the two countries can work together to resolve challenges facing the international community, such as climate change, the global economic crisis, and poverty.

However, it seems hard to find the connection between the KORUS FTA and the US-ROK alliance. Professor Chung-in Moon at Yonsei University commented in his class last semester that the FTA is one thing and the military alliance is another. That is, Lee Myung-bak’s government is trying to appeal to the people with using the wrong information. I agree with his point. I believe Lee Myung-bak’s administration and the GNP should ask for popular support by providing appropriate information and answering what people wonder about. The Koreans and the DUP were angry not about the ratification itself, but upset about the method that GNP and the government had used in the ratification process. If they had proper and enough evidence to support their argument, would they have to ratify in surprise?

There is not much room for maneuvering by incumbent President Lee Myung-bak’s government during its final year. It is too risky to make a major move. Instead, it is best to try to maintain the status quo and lessen the burden on the next administration. The candidates running in the December presidential election should, in fact, be prepared to take up the challenge. They must thoughtfully study and concoct a long-term security blueprint for the country.
Ching-in Moon on January 3, 2012 in JoongAng Daily

Fortunately, if not hopeless at all, Korea has one more chance: this year’s two elections. I hope Koreans vote for the policy and not for the party itself. Before that, I do hope Korean politicians to appeal with great policies, not by criticizing the opposition party. People don’t need no more childish politicking between the two parties. Lastly, I do expect the future leaders to be prepared to take up this important situation.

One rather peculiar thing I’ve noticed about the South Korean media is that whenever a big-time Korea-related story occurs there is a tendency to report the fact that major non-Korean media sources also reported on that story. When I started reading North Korean media, I quickly noticed the North Korean tendency to do the same. I’m not a media analyst, so I don’t know how prevalent this practice is in other countries, nor do I have any idea about why and when it started on the Korean Peninsula. Feedback in this regard is most welcome. Since the last major story on the Peninsula was the death of Kim Jong Il, we’ll look at how two major media outlets in both countries dealt with the the “foreign reaction.”

Just for fun, here are the front pages from the North’s Rodong Shinmun, the most important—but not the only— newspaper in the North along with one of South Korea’s leading dailies, the right-leaning Dong-A Ilbo.

The Rodong Shinmun’s headline on the day after Kim’s death (written from top to bottom on the left-hand side) reads: “The Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il Will Be Immortal”

The Dong-a Ilbo’s headline is a bit more cynical: “NK Handed Over to a 29-year-Old Kid.”

Here though are the articles of relevance. Starting with the Dong-A Ilbo:

Translated* as follows:

Headline: “America’s CNN and Others Interrupt Regular Broadcasting to Report Breaking News [of Kim’s death]”
Body: Major news outlets around the world unleashed a flood of analysis about the future of North Korea’s succession system and its regime dynamics after news broke on the 19th of the death of National Defense Chairman Kim Jong Il.
The American news network CNN interrupted regularly-scheduled programing to report on the breaking news. CNN described Chairman Kim as a “constant thorn in the side of the US and South Korea.” AFP described Kim as a “politically-seasoned and ruthless dictator who maintained his barbaric power despite famine and economic difficulties.”
The New York Times called Kim “a man who sent disloyal subjects to political prison camps while arming his country with nuclear weapons” and, [called Kim] “a Hollywood stereotype of a wacky post-Cold War dictator.” The Times added, “He was a man who held on to his final nuclear card even as [his country] drew close to famine and collapse.”
China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that South Korean military authorities were raising the military alert level and urgently reported on the South Korean military reaction. Besides these countries, media in Russia, France, South and Central

America, Vietnam, the Netherlands, and others around the world reported [this story] as top news with in-depth coverage, while Cuba’s state-run media, despite that country’s close relations with North, remained silent.

*In my haste, I did not track down the original quotations from the English-language media used in the article so what you read here may vary in terms of phraseology from what was actually written.

For contrast, here’s the North’s take:

And my translation:

Headline: ‘The Official Announcement of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il’s Death [which was entitled] ‘A Message to All Party Members, Personnel of the People’s Army, and the Masses’ Was Reported by News Agencies, Newspapers, and Broadcasters in All Countries’
Body: When the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il died on the 19th, every nation’s news agencies, newspapers, and broadcasters reported on the announcement by the Korean Worker’s Party Central Committee, the Korean Worker’s Party Central Military Commission, the National Defense Committee of the DPRK, the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly, and the DPRK Cabinet, [which was entitled] “A Message to All Party members, Personnel of the People’s Army, and the Masses.”
China’s Xinhua New Agency reported on the Korean Worker’s Party Central Committee, the Korean Worker’s Party Central Military Commission, the National Defense Committee of the DPRK, the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly, and the DPRK Cabinet’s announcement “A Message to All Party members, Personnel of the People’s Army, and the Masses,” as follows:
While “ A message to all party members, personnel of the People’s Army, and the Masses” says that Leader Kim Jong Il unexpectedly died, this “is a great loss to the Korean Workers Party and the revolution, and the greatest sadness to the Korean people and nation.”
[Accoring to Xinhua,] the announcement demanded that under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, sadness will be transformed into power and bravery, that today’s crisis be conquered, that all party members, military officers, and the people will faithfully respect the leadership of respected Kim Jong Un, and for all party members, the military, and the people to firmly defend national unity. Leader Kim Jong Il was born on February 16th 1942. He was installed as general secretary of the Korean Workers Party in October 1997 and was reappointed to that position on September 9th 2010.
China’s “People’s Daily” also relayed the contents of “A Message to All Party members, Personnel of the People’s Army, and the Masses.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s ITAR-TASS news agency; Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency; Japan’s Kyodo news agency, Jiji news Agency, and newspapers “Mainichi Shimbun,” “Asahi Shimbun,” “Tokyo Shimbun,” “Nihon Keizei Shinbun,” and broadcaster NHK; France’s AFP news agency; Australia’s broadcaster ABC; America’s AP news agency, UPI news agency, broadcaster ABC, broadcaster CNN, broadcaster VOA, and newspapers “Washington Post,” “New York Times,” “USA Today,” “International Herald Tribune,” and “Baltimore Sun” all reported on the death of the Dear General.

It’s interesting to note (though not at all unexpected) that the South Korean version gives the most column inches to the American response, while the North Korean version spends the most time on China. The second most referenced media in the South is China, while in the North runner-up goes to America (South Korean media is not mentioned at all). The body of the South Korean article mentions nothing about Japanese reactions though the caption below the picture reads “People watch a daytime breaking news TV report on the death of Kim Jong Il at an electronics market in downtown Tokyo on the 19th.” The big factual discrepancy between the two articles is that the South Korean report mention the Cuban media’s silence, while the North Korean report says Cuban media did issue a statement.

Finally, the North Korean report gives us an interesting tidbit of “Kremlinology” to ponder: Notice the ranking of the party and state organs:

1) KWP Central Committee (Led by Vice Chairs Kim Jong Un and Ri Yong Ho)
2) KWP Central Military Commission (Led Vice Chairs Kim Jong Un and Ri Yong Ho)
3) National Defense Commission (Led by Vice Chairs Chang Song Taek, Kim Yong-chun, Ri Yong-mu, and O Kuk-ryol)
4) The Presidium of the SPA (Led by Kim Yong Nam)
5) The Cabinet (Led by Choe Yong Rim)

Party first, Military second, State third?

If you chose to go along with the group despite your preference, you have engaged in “preference falsification:” the act of concealing one’s private preference (i.e. the choice one would make if given the opportunity to vote by purely secret ballot) due to perceived social pressure. The operative word here is perceived; one need not be bullied or threatened directly to engage in preference falsification, but one need only hold the belief that the consequences of believing what you believe to be an unpopular preference will have negative social ramifications. In the example above, objecting to eating Thai food when everyone else is unanimous in their opinion might cause others to think you are difficult and argumentative, and if you start earning that kind of reputation, people might stop wanting to hang out with you; no one wants to be “That Guy” (or Girl).

Besides a night out on the town, we encounter preference falsification frequently in our lives. The norms of polite society dictate so. Every male instinctively knows what to say when his wife or girlfriend asks, “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?”—lest he venture to spend a lonely night on the living-room sofa. And when you’ve been invited over to your boss’s house for the evening, it’s probably better to compliment his wife’s interior design aesthetics, regardless of how tasteless the decor. However, preference falsification is not limited to the social realm; it also plays an important role in politics and economics, and it plays an especially important role in the theory of revolutions.

Just months before the 1989 Revolutions, in a startling moment of prescience, Timor Kuran, a Turkish economist at Duke, wondered why revolutions tend to take everyone by surprise, and in doing so he developed a brilliant mathematical model based on his idea of preference falsification. Mathematically-inclined readers can read the original paper here, but for everyone else, I’ll try my best to summarize the results intuitively. (See here as well.)

First, we assume that an individual is faced with two choices: support the government or support the opposition, and that he has a private preference such that his preference for the government or the opposition lies somewhere between 0 and 1 where values closer to 0 indicate greater preference for the government and values closet to 1 indicate stronger preference for the opposition. An individual has to make a preference declaration. Whether or not he reveals his private preference publicly depends on the sum of two “utilities.” The first is the utility gained from having a reputation for believing a certain preference. The second is the utility gained from integrity. An individual’s reputational utility is a function of the amount of popular support each position has: the more popular the position, the greater his utility. Returning to our Indian/Thai food example, since the rest of the group was unanimous in their support for Thai food, you would have a higher reputational utility by choosing Thai food, and lower reputational utility if you had chosen Indian food. The second component, integrity utility, is the difference between your private belief and your public belief. Think of this as how bad you feel for betraying your values. If your preference for Thai food was only slightly greater than your preference for Indian food, then the “cost” of going along with the group wouldn’t be as great if you were—say—a hardcore vegetarian.

Putting these two components together we learn two things: first, as expectations about the share of collective support increases from the government to the opposition, individuals are more likely to publicly side with the opposition (and vice versa), while at the same time, as an individual’s private preference increases from the government to the opposition, they are more likely to side with the opposition. The boundary at which all supporters of the government switch to the opposition is called the threshold function. The threshold function tells us the levels of expected support for which it is it is optimal for individuals of a certain private preference to support either the government or opposition. Note that we’re talking about expected shares of support: how much support individuals believes either position has, not how much support it actually has. The latter is denoted by the weighted average of private preferences, weighted by the relative importance of each individual. The graph below depicts this situation. The top axis shows the actual share of the opposition, the bottom axis is the expected share, and the side axis are private preferences. In this particular situation the expected share in favor of the opposition in 70%, meaning it’s optimal for individuals whose private preferences are greater than 0.5 to support the opposition, while the actual weighted share of of individuals whose private preference is greater than 0.5 is 20%. This system is in equilibrium.

Revolution, defined by Kuran, is “a sudden and massive shift in collective sentiment which induces a fundamental transformation of the social order occurs when one or both curves shifts.” The following graph shows just a such a change. Notice that the weighted average of private preferences curve has shifted. Perhaps economic conditions in the country have deteriorated drastically. There are three equilibrium: one at 0, one at 0.5, and one at 0.8. As long as the opposition’s expected share stays below 0.5, the equilibrium will move back to 0, and if it moves above 0.5, it will revise itself upwards to 0.8 (0.5 is an unstable equilibrium). In the latter case, revolution will ensue.

This is just one possible type of change. Kuran summarizes the possible types of change as follows:

First, a rise in the expected collective sentiment can precipitate a revolution if the stage for a revolution has already been set. Second, a leftward shift of the threshold function can set the stage for a revolution, and it can also precipitate one. And finally, an upward shift of the density of private preferences can help set the stage for a revolution, but it cannot precipitate one by itself.

Let’s put this back into the context of the Indian/Thai food analogy. First lets assume there is a sudden jump in expected share of support. As you’re walking to the restaurant, you overhear one group member talking on the phone about his love of Indian food. Would this lead to a “revolution”? Not necessarily. It depends on the structure of the reputational incentives given by the threshold function. If the Thai food restaurant were owned by the uncle of one of the group members and choosing not to go would hurt his feelings, then the group might still choose to eat Thai food. Next, suppose that the threshold function moves. On the way to the Thai food restaurant, you bump into the Indian chef who promises he can get you a good deal if you bring your party over. Suddenly, it becomes optimal for people with lower private preferences to support eating Indian food, thus precipitating the “revolution.” The group eats Indian food. Finally, consider a shift in the weighted average of private preferences curve. Perhaps one of the group members finds an article online touting the health benefits of eating Indian food. Like a shift in expectations, a “revolution” may be precipitated, but it might not occur, depending on reputational utility.

There are some important caveats to this argument, however. Kuran does not explain how people overcome the collective action problem associated with revolutions. From an economic point of view, revolutions are “public goods.” They are non-rival in the sense that one person’s “consumption” of the benefits of a revolution do not take away from another person’s “consumption” of those benefits, and revolutions are non-excludable because you cannot prevent me from enjoying the benefits even if I did not “pay” for them (in the form of protesting or opposing the regime). There is also another problem: the costs of personally participating in a revolution are quite high: death, injury, arrest, financial ruin, blacklisting, and so on, while the benefits of participating are extremely low: one extra person in the main square doesn’t make much difference overall. So the question is: even if I strongly support the opposition, what incentive do I have to go out on the streets? This seems especially true if I believe that opposition support is quite high and that the revolution is likely to succeed. I might as well stay home, take it easy, and let other risk their lives.

Now, let’s bring this back to North Korea. what can this theoretical framework tell us about the prospects for revolution? First, let’s revisit what B.R. Myers wrote in his New York Times Op-Ed:

Membership in the great family is also thought to provide greater access to the elders’ wisdom. This makes the time Kim Jong-un spent away in a Swiss school especially problematic, but the propaganda apparatus may be planning to ignore that part of his life altogether. (The latest reports suggest that he is now being credited with having written, at the age of 16, a treatise on his grandfather’s thought, presumably while in Pyongyang, the capital.) In any case, the notion that army generals or any other important faction would object to Kim Jong-un’s takeover was an improbable one to begin with; no North Korean could oppose the hereditary succession without being opposed to the state itself. Such an attitude is unlikely to be held by anyone in the ruling elite.

and also:

By Communist standards, the North Korean masses would have to judge both the government’s economic performance and the succession in the harshest possible terms. It is because they judge them by very different standards that Kim Jong-un was able to take over so effortlessly while promising to budge “not an inch” from his father’s line. We should therefore not make too much of the fraudulence of all that on-screen wailing. Just because North Korean TV never films anything before rehearsing all spontaneity out of it does not mean the average citizen was unmoved. By ultra-nationalist, militarist criteria, which have more to do with North Koreans’ perception of where the country stands in the world than material living conditions, the Dear Leader did a very good job indeed: the Korean Central News Agency may well be correct in saying he made the country virtually impregnable.

And finally here was Joshua Stanton’s critique of this point:

Brian Myers thinks that the succession of Kim Jong Eun does not presage instability in North Korea, because the people with the power and the guns are invested in his survival. As much as I respect Myers’s understanding of North Korea’s official pathology, I don’t see how he could possibly have enough information to know this. The premise is probably true, but it was just as true that a year ago, men who now make up the Free Syrian Army were invested in the survival of Bashar Assad. When the people rise against a system like this (or at least somewhat like this), as history suggests they usually do eventually, it’s always in defiance of most expert predictions. Repressive regimes are very good at concealing nascent discontent from foreign observers, and foreign observers who get access to repressive countries tend to be selected for how easily they can be fooled.

Stanton’s critique seems right on the money in a number of respects: he notes that repressive governments are “very good at concealing nascent discontent,” and as Kuran demonstrates, the people themselves are very good at concealing discontent as well. He’s correct to point to the example of Syria (and Libya, Egypt, etc.) as a state with seemingly rock-solid regime suddenly suddenly began to dissolve in the face of widespread discontent. All of this is consistent with Kuran’s model. But what about the other factors? What empirical evidence is there regarding private preferences? In a recent Korea Times piece, Andrei Lankov, basing his finding on interviews with defectors, concludes:

[H]aving interviewed well over a hundred North Korean refugees over the last two years, the present author would probably dare to try to answer the question.

People who succeed under the new, de facto market economy, tend to prefer the current system. They remember the regimented life under Kim Il-sung as a nightmare ― especially if they came from underprivileged groups, whose members had no chance of social advancement under the old system. Youngsters are positive about the changes, too. These people take the current situation for granted and don’t feel much in the way of nostalgia for the recent past.

However, the older generation largely hold a different view. They frequently say that they would prefer to live in the times of Kim Il-sung in the 1960s and ‘70s. They are willing to admit that those times were not without serious shortcomings. They are not fond of the political indoctrination sessions and mutual criticism meetings which in those times took a couple of hours on an average working day (separate from the normal working day, meaning a longer day at work).

Other research conducted on North Korean refugees has found a similar patterns. Though noting that attitudes toward the regime are becoming more negative, Haggard and Nolan found that 58% of North Korean in China left the country for economic reasons, while only 27% left for political reasons and 8% out of “fear.” That is, they weren’t leaving because they hated North Korean society, but because they lacked opportunity. All of this is consistent with assertions made by Myers, Cho Myeong-chul, and others.

One must also imagine that the reputational costs of dissent are quite high in North Korea as well. Anyone’s who has spent time in South Korea knows that Korean culture is a high preference-falsification culture. Much import is placed on creating a good group “feeling” (cheong/청/靑) and good “atmosphere” (bunwigi/분위기). The pressure to conform and follow the dictates of seniors is quite strong (though this hasn’t stopped South Koreans from engaging in multiple attempts at revolution and uprising, nor has it stopped South Koreans from developing a vibrant political protest culture). Similar social pressures exist in the North. There’s also the very real and very deadly costs of taking a stand against the regime that can’t be dismissed. In South Korea, rebelling against your boss might be socially harmful, but in the North it could land you and your family in jail.

There’s also the issue of the expected size of the opposition. How do North Koreans form judgments about this? In his 1989 article, Kuran notes the importance of revolutionary leaders in this regard. This was, of course, before the era of the Internet, social media, and Al-Jazeera. The recent Arab uprisings have demonstrated that revolutions no longer require Khomeinis, Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas. Civil society and telecommunications can help fill this void. But in North Korea, where civil society is non-existent, informants and spies are lurking everywhere, and travel and communications are highly restricted, how would North Koreans know what events were transpiring on the other side of the country? To borrow the phrasing of that oft-quoted thought experiment: if a protest erupts in Chongjin and no one from Pyongyang is around, does it make a difference?

So on the face of it, it seems highly unlikely that North Koreans will be taking up arms against their government any time soon. But to conclude so would be to miss the entire point of Kuran’s body of work on revolutions. His goal is not to predict when revolutions will occur, but to demonstrate precisely why they are impossible to predict. Revolutions, as Kuran shows, are nonlinear systems. A tiny change in one variable can have a profound change on the overall system, while a major change can have limited effect. Due to preference falsification, societies like North Korea’s are imperfectly observable. This is all the more true given outsider restrictions on access to the country. So the best advice I have: don’t bother predicting North Korea’s demise. Oh, and enjoy the Thai food.

Cumings and the Military-Industrial Complex

- I recently finished reading Bruce Cumings latest book Dominion from Sea to Sea.  I’ve got it slated for review sometime in the next month.  One of the major themes put forward throughout Cumings’ book (there are many, perhaps too many) is the notion that American development (particularly western development) was — and continues to be — built on defense contracts.  American industrial policy (yes, one exists! or at least existed) was underwritten by the needs of the defense department.  Cumings attempts at painting an accurate picture of American history by suggesting the following grand narrative:  America is a nation built on war and expansion lead by a small number of political and industrial elites, especially since 1945 when American enter onto the world.  This view is reflected in Cumings use of C. Wright Mill’s conceptualization of the “power elite” of American society.  Cumings states:

Somewhat like President Eisenhower, C. Wright Mill took a look around in the 1950s and discerned something entirely new in American life:  a military-industrial complex.  More than that, a ‘power elite’ made most of the important decisions: a tripartite group of corporate leaders, executive branch administrators, and military brass had a virtual monopoly on key choices, industrial production, and the use of force.  They talked to each other, exchanged jobs, sat on the same corporate boards, played golf together, and occupied the top portion of a pyramid of power (which suspiciously resembled the Masonic symbol on the back of your dollar bill).  Just beneath the top were ‘the middle levels of power,’ which corresponded to the democratic and pluralist theories about how the country works that people imbibed from first grade through their PhD programs.  Below that was a ‘mass society’ filling two-thirds of the pyramid and containing most Americans, who were mostly clueless about elite practices.

In the aftermath of Wolf War II, American found itself on top.  Elites like George Kennan would provide the theoretical framework from which America would shape her internationalist agenda and interventionist foreign policy and through which the so-called military-industrial complex would flourish.  As it relates to Asia, Cumings looks out towards the peninsula and the “forgotten war:”

The Korean War was the crisis that built the American national security state and pushed through the money to pay for it, and with victory in the war to reestablish the South (containment) and defeat in the war to topple the North (regime change), this war transformed and stabilized Kennan’s doctrine.  It also finally got the Japanese and West German economies growing strongly.

Stated alternatively, the American military-industrial complex drove the world and opposed anything that restricted America’s desire for “maximum, unhindered American freedom in the world.”  This, in short, lead to America’s drive west, across the Pacific and into the Oriental theater.

The implications for policy makers of understanding America’s proclivity to war and the existence of a military industrial complex is touched upon in this Lexington Institute report by Loren B. Thompson entitled:  “Keeping America Competitive: The Military Needs To Limit Its Industrial Roles.”  The gist of the argument is summarized as follows:

During the Cold War, the U.S. military acquired a vast network of public-sector industrial facilities and private-sector suppliers. Over time, a division of labor emerged between the two segments of the defense industrial base: private companies would develop and manufacture combat systems, while public facilities would maintain and repair them. Although this arrangement required the government to fund two parallel industrial systems, it worked reasonably well as long as the U.S. economy generated the wealth necessary to support a vast “military-industrial complex.”

However, in recent years the U.S. economy has begun to falter and the federal government’s debt has risen rapidly. That has led to a widespread belief that the government needs to reassess how its activities impact economic performance. One facet of the debate is the relationship between military spending and the nation’s industrial base. While it is indisputable that Pentagon research has led to important technological breakthroughs such as computers, jet engines, lasers and the Internet, other facets of the military enterprise may be impeding economic competitiveness and progress.

- William Astore, in this recent article at the AsiaTimes Online, is decidely more critical of the military-industrial complex, as is revealed in these passages:

When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death”, the title of a best-selling expose of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the US in 1934.

….

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

- Arthur Herman’s review of Cumings’ book at the WSJ provides a good summary.  His comments at the end, however, are not so insightful.  I won’t go into here, but think Fareed Zakaria’s book about  illiberal democracy and his section on how referendums contributed no small part to California’s current budget woes.

“Fingleton Dialogue”

- My term to describe the (what seems now stalled or blown-over) debate about the truth behind Japan’s so-called “Lost Decade” (see my post at my homepage for more on the first slavo of articles).

- Eamonn Fingleton’s latest piece criticizes the Wall Street Journal for inaccurately reporting on the state of Japan’s trade — thus adding to perception that Japan is much worse-off economic than she actually is.  I’ll have a summary of the articles (with commentary sometime in the future, along with a reading packet with all the readings synthesized, if I can get Instapaper to do it correctly).

Asia-Pacific/Security Architecture

- Geoff Wade, at the East Asia Forum, discusses the establishment of an “Offshore Asia” security zone to compliment the Northeast Asia security zone.

The Darwin deployment is only one part of a much larger regional strategy, placing US forces far enough from Chinese missiles to be comfortable, but still sufficiently near to maritime Southeast Asian allies to swiftly engage if necessary. The proposed stationing of the US Navy’s newest littoral combat ships in Singapore and the growing American naval and air force cooperation with Indonesia serve a similar function.

This episode is the beginning of a major addition to US-led East Asian security architecture, involving the creation of a Southeast sector to the ‘Offshore Asia’ security zone.

- Wade links to another East Asia Forum article by Donald Emmerson.  In this article, Emmerson indicates something I’ve written on myself:  changes in the geopolitical landscape caused by the emergence of a new China-centered economic architecture in the Asia Pacific.  America has, to according Emmerson, become a half-super power in Asia.  Here’s the reason:

But back in 2003 America took in more than three times the share of ASEAN’s exports absorbed by China — 19 per cent versus 6 per cent. Seen from Southeast Asia, that American advantage over China has since disappeared. From 2003 to 2008, China’s share of all Southeast Asian trade burgeoned at an astonishing average annual pace of 26 per cent.

China’s economic importance to its southern neighbours will only increase as Western economies retrench. Certainly, China will not escape collateral damage if the euro zone implodes and American budget deficits and national debts spiral unchecked. But China could still emerge from such extreme turbulence relatively better off than Europe or America, thus better equipped to cushion the shocks to Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asians are by no means giving up on the American market. But the tendency in Southeast Asia is to think of Beijing and Washington as playing specialised roles: China the economic partner who facilitates prosperity, America the security provider who guards the peace.

Or the provocateur of war.  What if the Chinese moved 2,500 Chinese marines to a base somewhere in South America?

Papers, Essays and Reviews (PEAR), the Yonsei University Graduate Journal of International Studies provides an opportunity for scholars of International Studies, especially graduate students, to publish their work.  We accept submissions on all topics related to the study of international relations.

We are currently seeking submissions for our forthcoming Spring/Summer 2012 issue.

For more information on submissions refer to the ‘Call for Papers’ information sheet [.pdf] or visit the ‘Submit’ section of our website.

For inquiries, contact me (the Editor in Chief) at pear@yonsei.ac.kr.

The deadline for papers is March 10.  The deadline for essays and reviews is April 15.