After North Korea
Lurking in the background of yesterday’s interesting Robert Farley post on North Korea is a point that I really think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, the fact that in some ways the real nightmare scenario is a North Korean collapse rather than a North Korean attack. West Germany pursuing reunification with East Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a pretty enormous economic catastrophe. It caused a lot of dislocations in the West German economy, inspired the government to try extensive fiscal stimulus that didn’t really work, etc.
And yet East Germany was in much better shape than North Korea is. East Germany was, by most measures, the wealthiest and most successful of the Communist countries. There’s also a substantial time difference. The end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall was 45 years. That was 20 years ago, meaning that if North Korea collapses in the next few years the DPRK regime will have lasted about 50 percent longer than East Germany. North Korea’s population is bigger relative to South Korea’s than East Germany was to West Germany, and North Koreans have been much more brainwashed and cut off from outside information. The upshot is that a North Korean collapse could put a nearly intolerable burden on the South if they tried to reintegrate the countries. And there are no real plans in place for international assistance, and no real way for South Korean politicians to disavow the claim to represent the entire peninsula.
I don’t have any novel solutions to this problem, but it’s important to keep in mind as part of the background to how these various North Korea crises are dealt with.
45 Responses to “After North Korea”
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April 17th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
yeah, but you’re getting a bit hyperbolic here.
no peaceful nightmare on the peninsula is as nightmarish as a military nightmare.
several decades of economic integration will be tough.
but several hours of artillery barrage on seoul would produce far, far more misery, for a longer time.
it would be nice to be in a position where our biggest problem was figuring out how to reintegrate north and south.
we still have to avoid some real nightmares before we get there.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
West Germany pursuing reunification with East Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a pretty enormous economic catastrophe.
Huh? It may be called a fiscal catastrophe for people living in the former West Germany, but it has hardly been catastrophic for the German economy. Germany is still as well off compared to the rest of Europe as West Germany was, and the former West Germany is today maybe even more dominant.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
North Korean collapse? I don’t see it. They are already as fucked up as a country can get. Where do you go from there? Maybe they could try the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero route, but that might be an improvement. They are pretty much at the point where any random change would be for the better.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Well, West Germany did spend a couple of decades providing various forms of assistance to East Germans and the East German economy, along with lots of broadcasting aimed at East Germans. Maybe the South Koreans could try something like that out to ease the transition before North Korea collapses.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I wrote a paper last year on North Korea and I looked at some discussions of eventual reunification. Even a peaceful/non-collapse reunification scenario is pretty ugly. The (West) German economy took a pretty big hit after reunification and South Korea’s economy isn’t nearly as big.
Scary Stat that sums up how much better life in South Korea is:
the average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean
April 17th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I’m with Why oh why. German unification was painful, but it wasn’t a catastrophe. Germany is doing fine now. As I side note, I met the last person to have crossed the Berlin Wall. He was so messed up from it that the doctors induced a two month coma to treat him. When he woke up, he was watching people tearing down the wall on the TV. He should have just waited, but nobody knew that at the time.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Au contraire: The red army used to have an annual exercise in Eastern Europe
simulating an attack on the West. For all the economic pain, German
reunification has been a huge success, especially when compared to
the alternative.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
It’s important to understand that West Germany was able to offload at least some of the financial burden of taking care of the DDR invalid onto the rest of Europe. By 1989, most of the EEC currencies were locked within rather narrow exchange rate bands with respect to each other, in what was called the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
In order to absorb the huge costs of reunification without slashing services, Kohl’s government ran huge deficits. The Bundesbank, aghast at the inflationary impact of such policies, raised interest rates accordingly. The knock-on effects of the higher interest rates were felt not just in Germany but throughout the EUropean Monetary System.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
That’s why thawing relations and encouraging travel and trade between these countries is such an important first step. More Sunshine Policy!
April 17th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Re: East Germany was, by most measures, the wealthiest and most successful of the Communist countries.
My understanding is that Yugoslavia with its market-communism was the most successful of the European Communist countries, and the wealthiest _relative_ to comparable capitalist countries. Yugoslavia may have been poorer than East Germany on paper, but it was not too far behind the capitalist countries of southern Europe like Spain or Greece. My understanding that Yugoslavia was also the most successful in terms of having a reasonably content populace.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
My understanding that Yugoslavia was also the most successful in terms of having a reasonably content populace.
In the 80’s Hungarians were probably the most “content populace”, thanks to the famous Goulash Communism.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
South Korea has almost twice the population of North Korea. South Koreans are very hard-working, bright, and prosperous. As fans of Olympic sports know, they are hyper-nationalistic.
So, my view is that integrating North Korea into a peninsula-wide free Korea is their problem. It will be a big problem, and probably take them two or three generations to resolve, but it’s their problem.
I wish them well.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I disagree with Matt. Both scenarios involve North Korean collapse. The question is whether they knock the bejesus out of everything within 100 km of the DMZ along the way.
Beggaring the ROK before unification would lead to the sort of thing moms tell their kids to get them to eat their dinner.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Nostalgic movies were made about East Germany (for example Goodbye Lenin). Were any made about Yugoslavia?
If you’re talking about people in Slovenia or the touristy parts of Croatia I’d agree with you that they could have been “reasonably content.” But the rest of the place?
April 17th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
It’d probably be in the US’s best interest to help South Korea with funds and other forms of support in absorbing a collapsed North Korea if such a scenario should occur, if only to prevent the Chinese from filling that gap (one of the reasons why the Chinese would try to fill it is because they have no interest in seeing thousands of North Korean refugees flooding over their border, as well as having a US-friendly regime sitting on their doorstep).
April 17th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I think shortly before the collapse of the iron curtain, Hungary was the most prosperous. That’s a bit deceptive though. I knew people who were running small businesses in Hungary from America, before the collapse. The USSR had lost the will to do anything about Hungary’s tolerance of private business. The E. German government was more gung ho, and probably wasn’t allowing that sort of thing.
Prior to that freedom, E. Germany was probably the most well off Warsaw pact country.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
“My understanding is that Yugoslavia with its market-communism was the most successful of the European Communist countries”
That’s probably true, but only because The Czechoslovakian economy was dragged down by Slovakia. If the Czechs were judged on their own, they’d look pretty damn good. What I can’t figure out is why Slovakia wanted to split from the Czechs. Who gives up their sugar daddy? From the Czech point of view, the split is obvious. Everyone wants to ditch their unemployed drunken cousin.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
It seems like the most likely reasons for N Korean collapse are succession struggles or some sort of food riots. Would reunification necessarily be part of anyone’s agenda in the North? Perhaps if it were S. Korea would feel compelled to take them back, if not I suppose China and S. Korea would compete for influence in the new regime, which presents its own nightmare scenarios; hopefully the Japanese could at least be convinced to lay low if the other parties promised to secure their vital interest in the return of their kidnapped citizens.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Whatever you may say about how merger affected West Germany, it was a huge boon to East Germany, and it geopolitically, it cemented the fact that there was no going back to the Warsaw Pact (how quaint that sounds today.) The real reason we can’t do much to accelerate unification is because China doesn’t want a free and prosperous country on its border, especially not a US ally.
@fostert – Maybe they could try the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero route, but that might be an improvement.
What planet do you live on?
@njbunk – the average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean
Would you rather be East German or Russian today?
@Daddy Love – That’s why thawing relations and encouraging travel and trade between these countries is such an important first step. More Sunshine Policy!
They’ve tried it. The NK guys keep arresting visitors. You can’t deal with insanity by smiling.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Fostert,
I wasn’t using ’successful’ in a purely economic sense, but also in the sense of how content the people were. Czechoslovakia may have been richer in a purely economic sense than Yugoslavia, but after 1968 the ruling authorities had permanently lost the trust of the people, and were seen as a satrapy of the Russians. Yugoslavia on the other hand always remained independent of Russian influence- under Stalin, under Khrushchev and under Gorbachev- and was the most liberal, both economically and politically, of the east European states.
Moreover, Yugoslavia was _much_ better off in 1980 than she had been in 1945, while Czechoslovakia (which had been industrialized before the war) did not advance to the same extent. I would imagine that Czechs and East Germans tended to compare their material conditions with those of West Germans, while Yugoslavs compared theirs to Spanish or Greeks, and in that comparison Yugoslavia does not look so bad.
All of which adds up to the fact that Tito, much more than Kadar or any of the various empty suits that ruled East Germany, was a genuinely popular leader, and one who was and is loved by a great many former Yugoslavs, even today. I don’t know if they make films about the man but I do know that the various Yugoslavs that I or friends of mine have talked to are full of praise for Tito and “Self-Managed Socialism” while there are many fewer East Germans, Czechs or Hungarians today who fondly remember the socialist days.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
In other words, the original Mecenaries game: North Korea collapses, the US (in the person of the UN) invades to secure Nukes, allied with the South Koreans. China also intervenes to do the same and keep it’s own country safe. The Russian Mafia takes advantage of the Chaos to buy and sell weapons from everyone and what’s left of the North Korean Government is attempting to sell it’s nukes to the highest bidder and get enough control to flee.
Enter, 3 hotshot mercenaries (that’s you) with a hankerin’ for cash.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
“or some sort of food riots”
Food riots? The North Koreans are already very malnourished. I’m not sure if they have the energy to riot. And even if they did, surely they would have rioted by now. If eating dirt isn’t enough to get you to riot, I’m not sure what is enough. And it’s not like North Korea will run out of dirt.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I do know that the various Yugoslavs that I or friends of mine have talked to are full of praise for Tito and “Self-Managed Socialism” while there are many fewer East Germans, Czechs or Hungarians today who fondly remember the socialist days.
East Germany is now Germany, and both Hungary and the Czech Republic are members of the EU. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia went from disaster to disaster in a long civil war; Croatia and Serbia are now among the poorest countries in Europe. So it is not surprising that ex-Yugoslavs are somewhat nostalgic.
Hungarians were still the happiest Communists (except, of course, Scandinavians).
April 17th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Who wouldn’t press a magic button to get that North Korean collapse tomorrow, if they could? It would be far cheaper than the current situation, and we wouldn’t have the threat of destruction (and that’s without the nuclear stuff) hanging over northeast Asia. So yeah, it would be a huge problem, and they’d better start planning for it if they haven’t already, but a North Korean collapse absolutely is the desirable goal.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Why oh why,
Not saying you’re lying, but I’d like to see some proof of that. Yugoslavia was widely considered during the cold war to have obtained considerable benefit from a market-oriented socialism based on workers’ cooperatives, and from its neutralist political stance. Do you have surveys that suggest otherwise? Again, I’m not talking purely about per capita income here.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Hungary did a similar thing with goulash communism, but to a lesser extent. And Hungary, unlike Yugoslavia, was always subject to Soviet influence.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
I’m not some lunatic wanting a North Korean collapse tomorrow.
Millions more people would starve and die, and I might care about their fate more than yours. It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t think you merit survival any more than a North Korean.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
“Czechoslovakia may have been richer in a purely economic sense than Yugoslavia”
Hector, you missed my point. I wasn’t talking about Czechoslovakia as a whole. I was trying to separate the Czechs from the Slovaks. If you just look at the Czech part of that bygone country, you’d see that they were actually very successful. But they were combined with the unsuccessful Slovaks, so the combination doesn’t look so good. Now that they are separated, we get a clearer picture of the two cultures. If you want to put it in American terms, Czechoslovakia was like combining the Bay Area of California with rural Alabama. With the Czechs being the Bay Area, obviously. And you can check (or Czech) it out for yourself. Compare Bratislava to Prague. Bratislava is nice, but it isn’t even close to Prague. The Czechs are as intelligent and sophisticated as the Germans, but they have creativity on top of that. The Czechs are a very impressive culture. The Slovaks, well, they’re just Slovaks. I’d try to compare them to other Eastern European cultures, but all the other Eastern European cultures are better. I can say that the Slovaks are more honest than the Bulgarians, but that isn’t saying much. The Bulgarians were overrun by damn near every empire on the planet, they only survived through deceit. That they even survived at all is nothing less than a miracle. But survive, they did. And they have the food and the music to prove it. Their food and music are a bizarre mixture of Slavic, Greek, Turkish, and German influences. But it’s somehow Bulgarian.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Fostert,
I think you missed mine. And I don’t deny your point- as the saying goes, Prague is west of Vienna, and the Czechs are essentially historically a Western people, in terms of industrialization and modernization. My point was that socialism in Czecholovakia, after 1968, failed one of the basic purposes of any government, to keep people reasonably content and to maintain their trust and allegiance. Dubcek probably could have, but after 1968 the Czechs knew that it wasn’t really _their_ government anymore, it was a creature of the Soviets, the same way many right-wing LA tyrannies were creatures of the Americans.
The Yugoslavian regime, in contrast, did enjoy substantial popular allegiance, loyalty and in some cases even love.
Just out of curiosity, is the ‘ch’ sound in Czechoslovakia pronounced like an English ‘k’ or more like a Russian ‘kh’?
April 17th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Croatia, although outside of the EU for now for various sundry historical and political reasons, is comparable in development and wealth to Slovakia or Poland, and comfortably ahead of Hungary, and quite far ahead of the Baltic States, Bulgaria or Romania.
And it’s hardly fair to compare Serbia, which was an international pariah until 2001, and so began its transition an entire decade after the rest of Eastern Europe.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Hector, no I don’t have any real proof that Hungarians were the happiest. Just, I traveled in Eastern Europe and got such an impression. In many countries, people ranted about the ‘terrible communist era’ (especially in East Germany), while Hungarians often shrugged when talking about it (”it wasn’t that bad”). Many Hungarians were also unhappy with some of the post-communist reforms, so that may also explain it: I doubt many Russians, for example, are happy with the direction their country is going – plummeting life expectancy, oil robber barons and all – and therefore might regret the Soviet era.
nd, you are completely correct. Croatia is much richer than Serbia, and I shouldn’t have grouped them together. Also, Slovenia is now an almost rich country, and Kosovo is a third-world country. Interesting how all those former parts of Yugoslavia diverged, although as you point out a lot of it has to do with idiotic leaders – war.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
fostert is engaging in some breathtaking exaggeration (I’ll hesitate to call it bigotry, but just about) when comparing the Czech Rep. and Slovakia. I mean, come on – deciding which cultures are “better”?
Athough it’s true that the Czech lands were historically more developed, the difference today is much less prominent than he suggests. Czech GDP/capita is $21k, whereas the Slovak one is $19k – hardly an Earth-shattering difference, especially considering that Slovakia has been able to meet its ERM II obligations earlier and adopt the Euro sooner. If anything, the Czechs are losing their historically inherited advantages.
And really, comparing Prague, which at one point was the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, with Bratislava, which until the 19th century was a sleepy provincial Habsburg town, is hardly indicative of the countries as a whole. Modern Czechs can hardly take any more credit for Prague than modern Italians for ancient Rome.
To understand why they were ever even together, we need to look at the creation of the Czechoslovak state, at the Paris Peace Conference. At the time there were strong pan-Slavic ideas (similar ideas lead the creation of Yugoslavia). It’s much more complicated than ” why did the Czechs want to carry the Slovaks”.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
WoW, no worries, just wanted to clear things up.
Slovenia is undoubtedly rich. Without a question, it’s the richest and most successful of the former Eastern European states.
Croatia is more on par with the rest of the more successful Eastern European states like Poland. Certainly if not rich, then well-off.
Serbia is weighed down by some difficult issues, but is improving. Ditto Macedonia, which is being held to a kind of penury by Greece’s obdurate refusal to allow them to take their rightful place in the community of nations.
Bosnia is a special case, a kind of invalid under foreign supervision.
Kosovo is basically a narco-state. Independent or not, it was going to be trouble.
Still, Yugoslavia had a federal system that could have countenanced these contradictions if war had been avoided. I certainly can’t see why, absent the war, Yugoslavia wouldn’t be performing similarly to the other eastern European countries.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Hector, re: pronounciation, you can say ‘k’ in English. In Czech, the name of the old country is Ceskoslovensko so there is no “kh” or “k”.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Re: The Bulgarians were overrun by damn near every empire on the planet, they only survived through deceit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the Bulgars a great empire of their own at one point, that posed a serious threat to the Byzantines and managed to hold back the Arabs?
Why oh Why,
I know Russians and Yugoslavs who have similar nostalgic feeling for the old Communist days, it’s not just the Hungarians. Croatia and Slovenia, of course, were part of the core of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and so it’s not surprising that they were more developed, and remain more developed today, than Serbia, which was an independent nation and a client of the least industrialized of the great powers, Russia.
part of this may also have to do with Catholic-Orthodox cultural divides, and the extent to which (for better or worse) each of these great branches of the faith made its peace with modernity, but that’s a story for another day.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
ND,
If Yugoslavia had avoided war, it might be doing well under market socialism, and might feel less need to join Europe in the first place. I can easily see an alternate history in which Yugoslavia managed to stay united, and managed to liberalize and ‘marketize’ their economy a bit more while maintaining a generally authoritarian government and the basic principles of “worker self-management”. Such an alternate Yugoslavia might have allied itself with a resurgent Russia and China- and maybe pulled Bulgaria and Romania in that direction too- rather than joining Europe and the West. The Yugoslav civil war was, in one sense, a good thing for America and western Europe, inasmuch as they destroyed the one East European country that really worked.
I guess you can put that down as just my anticapitalism and antiliberalism talking- I admit that I sometimes let what I wish would happen and what I think would happen blend into each other.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Hector, I didn’t say that the Hungarians I talked to had “nostalgic feelings”, just that they thought the communist era wasn’t that bad (that’s a much more positive feeling than what I heard in East Germany or Romania). Most were still happy it was over.
It doesn’t surprise me that many Russians miss the USSR, though; why wouldn’t they? Life for the average Russian has gotten worse by many measures. Similarly, my guess is that whether an ex-Yugoslav misses Tito depends on where he or she lives: does the average Slovenian miss the communist era? Probably not.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:29 am
“fostert is engaging in some breathtaking exaggeration”
You can criticize me all you want, but my writings are based on actually traveling to those countries and talking with the people. And I stand by those assertions. You can read all the books you want, but being there is a lot more real. And there is an astounding difference between the Czechs and Slovaks. And it’s much bigger than the GDP figures would have you believe. The difference is really between an industrial culture and an agrarian one. Obviously, the Czech Republic has agriculture, and Slovakia has some manufacturing industry. The difference is in which industry really holds sway. And if you went to those countries, you’d know what they favor. And you’d also know what their education systems favor. It really is California vs Alabama. And as we know, Alabama has some manufacturing, and California has a lot of agriculture. But that’s not really what those states are about.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:47 am
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the Bulgars a great empire of their own at one point, that posed a serious threat to the Byzantines and managed to hold back the Arabs?”
You are right about that. And it’s amazing. Somehow, the Bulgarians managed to have an empire in between being taken over by various other empires. I’m actually very impressed by the Bulgarians. They’ve usually had their ass kicked, but they also kicked some serious ass. But through it all, they maintained a very unique culture. I’ve traveled through what’s left of Yugoslavia, and those cultures have nothing on Bulgaria. Bulgaria is truly unique and special. And they some of the most impressive mountains I’ve ever seen. The region near the Serbian border blows away anything I’ve seen here in Colorado. Not as nice as the Himalayas, but nothing is as beautiful as that.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:06 am
“with Bratislava, which until the 19th century was a sleepy provincial Habsburg town,”
If Bratislava was just a sleepy town, explain to me who built the castle. It’s more than a thousand years old. It’s not as nice as the castle in Prague, but it’s still a real castle that wouldn’t have been built by some sleepy town. Granted, Bratislava never had the silver resources to build a town like Prague, but they still were a real kingdom at the time. At that time Prague had the silver mines to make them one of the richest cities in Europe, but that was long time ago. In these days, the difference is in education, not silver. And every country can decide how well they want to educate their people. The Czech republic has decided to educate their people well. Slovakia, not so much. And that’s the difference in mentality.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:56 am
[...] reunified. Now, consider the huge load of trying to deal with Korean reunification, both economic and social. I don’t want to imagine the political, considering that the North Koreans [...]
April 18th, 2009 at 5:45 am
The least worst option for South Korean policy vis-a-vis North Korea is to continue to encourage N Korean dependency on it, and on the outside world. That means electricity grids, foreign trade etc. The benefits are small and won’t be apparent until after the inevitable collapse. On the other hand, the idea that such dependency “props up” the regime politically is routinely exaggerated.
April 18th, 2009 at 9:06 am
None of the problems in Matt’s post aren’t problems right now. North Koreans are starving and dying right now. Right now, there is no particular plan from anyone to try to assist them. The collapse of the regime would simply make it impossible for the rest of us to continue to throw up our hands about the humanitarian catastrophe that is happening in North Korea right now (and has been for 65 years).
April 18th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Additionally, the collapse of the North Korean state would mean not only the abatement of the military threat to South Korean cities, it would also mean that the North’s concentration camps would cease to operate and the gross overallocation of food resources to the North Korean military would end.
April 20th, 2009 at 2:07 am
This is the real problem here– North Korea knows that neither South Korea nor China can afford to see it fall; however, its internal system has failed. So it’s using its own weakness as a weapon to prop up a corrupt, oppressive system that does not work. It is extracting material support and political concessions by being so awful that it would die explosively without it.
It’s really a fascinating paradox.