Small States and Cold War Reordering: North Korea
Small States and Cold War Reordering: North Korean Perspectives on Unification 1972-1974
A blog by CGSC postgraduate member Yujin Lim.
When thinking about the Cold War we often tell a story centered around the superpowers. I was not an exception until I started my PhD research on small states in the Cold War. The main focus of my research is North and South Korea’s experiences of the Cold War and their relationships with the great powers. Part of my PhD research delves into the proactive efforts of the small states to achieve their political and diplomatic goals free from the influence of the great powers. North Korea provides a strong example of this dynamic, so I have been spending time in the Information Center on North Korea as part of my archival research. These findings tell the story of the Korean Peninsula in 1972-1974 shown through The Pyongyang Times, with the purpose of magnifying the view of North Korea on the issue of unification during the time of Détente. The selected news articles from this time frame illustrate how North Korea thought unification should be achieved, how it viewed the South Korean government and the role of the United States in the Peninsula. Since the North Korean newspapers are censored by the Worker’s Party of North Korea, the primary party of the country, published articles can be considered as part of the official discourse of North Korea. My research on these articles challenges the traditional assumption that regional orders are first structured by globally powerful countries leading smaller and weaker regional actors to experience the change of the reorder.
In 1972, the US President Nixon made visits to Moscow and Beijing resulting in thawing relations between the two blocs. 1972 was also an important year for the Korean Peninsula as the North and South issued a Joint Statement on July 4 after a series of twenty-five Red Cross Talks. Considering how the events in the Korean Peninsula coincided with the period of Détente, it is easy to draw a hasty conclusion that this developed in line with the meetings and warming relations between the superpowers. Although the reviewed articles do not provide sufficient source to deny such conclusion, it is possible to observe from the timeline that the events happened between the North and South Korea do not fully coincide with the events happened between the superpowers.
In fact, during this period, the relations between North and South Korea were on a roller coaster. After the period of talks and the Joint Statement of 1972, in 1973, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung suggested the ‘Goryeo Federal Unification’ model while South Korea proposed simultaneous entry of the United Nations of North and South Korea. My review on The Pyongyang Times during this period reveals how North Korea strongly desired to unify Korea while removing US troops from the South, while the South wanted to carefully approach the unification issue. Although the North and South seemed to make progress, North Korea’s request of removing the U.S. troops from South Korea was the only option that it gave to the South to choose as a first step toward unification while the South insisted that both sides to walk through the stage-by-stage process together. The different approaches of the two towards unification pushed them apart and reversed some of the progress that had led to the issuing of the Joint Statement.
An editorial column of The Pyongyang Times on January 29 1972, ‘Epochal Proposal for Peace in Korea and Its Peaceful Reunification’, succinctly summarizes North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s idea of how unification should be achieved. Kim Il Sung believed a peace agreement between North and South should replace the Korean Armistice Agreement. As part of the transition from armistice to peace agreement, he stressed that drastically cutting down the armed forces were needed from both sides. This would also mean that the U.S. troops, labelled ‘the U.S. imperialist aggressors’ by North Korea, should be withdrawn from South Korea. A two-page long article published 20th July 1974 on The Pyongyang Times titled ‘Reunification or Division’, further illustrates the different approach of the North and South on the matter of unification. Two years after the Joint Statement, North Korea evaluated the situation to be ‘gloomy’ as ‘tension still persists’ between the two. The primary reason for it is attributed to Pak Jung Hi and the US. North Korea considered the ‘stage-by-stage approach’ of South Korea as an ‘attempt to justify their perfidy.’
However, as much as North Korea believed in signing a peace agreement with the South, it also strongly doubted the South’s proposals for such an agreement, blaming this doubt on what it saw as South Korean scaremongering. According to an editorial column which was written before the issue of Joint Statement, North Korea believed that Pak Jung Hi (Park Chung Hee) used the ‘threat of southward aggression from the north’ to justify his ‘criminal manoeuvres to intensify the fascist suppression and speed up war preparations in South Korea and perpetuate the division of the country’. This distrust is linked to the South Korean ties with the US, with The Pyongyang Times often calling the South Korean government and its leader a ‘puppet’ regime during the 1972-1974 period. Articles from the time contain repeated accusations the U.S. is attempting to invade South Korea and posing ‘imperialist aggression,’ which is compared to the Japanese colonialism before the outbreak of Korean War. Thus, an important premise, and the starting point, for unification in North Korea’s perspective was the withdrawal of US troops from the South. This can be seen in the headline of 4th May 1974’s article, ‘Pak Jung Hi Puppet Thug’s Barbarous Repression Is a Vicious Challenge to Democracy and National Reunification’. Another article, titled ‘Vicious War Machination of U.S. Imperialism against Korea’s Reunification’, of 4th November 1972 is a good example that shows the distrust of the US and its role on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea strongly believed that the US was modernizing the South Korean army to push forward another war in the Korean Peninsula.
Not leaving a room for a small compromise was a critical reason why North and South Korea could not take advantage of the diplomatic opportunity presented at this time in their history. Most importantly, my research shows that the diplomatic approach of the North was fundamentally detrimental to the relationship given how it was blatant when describing the South and its leader. Diplomatically speaking, North Korea could never achieve the ‘aspiration of the Korean People’ – as it often described unification – from the beginning considering that condemning and belittling the leader of the other side undermines the potential for a successful diplomatic outcome.
My research to date leads me to conclude that, while Nixon’s visits to Beijing and Moscow certainly provided a context for the region to potentially have smoother relations, the process of thawing relations was created prior to the beginning of détente and had a more complex unfolding. Thus it seems that the North and South had more control on their own relations with each other and were less focused on the broader superpower context. This is a significant change as compared to the period of the Korean War when neither Korean actor had much control of the situation and the events that happened in the Peninsula mostly depended on the decisions of the superpowers. My observations on the articles on unification in 1972-74 draws a boundary for the great power’s influence on small states; what the small states experienced in the time frame cannot be periodized according to the superpowers’ periodization, and the case of North and South Korea is a great example to show the clear ideological and political differences of the two small states within the Cold War. This calls attention to the importance of studies that decenter the Cold War as they can provide a historical grounding to the challenges for small states in the post-Cold War era.
Yujin Lim is studying for a PhD at the University of Leeds. She has published her work in the European Journal of Korean Studies and is an analyst at SinoNK.