Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. x, 218 pp. (figures.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503627635.
This is the first academic monograph that provides a comprehensive overview of North Korea’s activities in the Third World during the Cold War, and as such, it makes a major contribution to North Korean studies. Earlier publications were either limited to the DPRK’s bilateral interactions with selected individual states (e.g., Zimbabwe or Guyana) or to its presence in a specific region (e.g., Latin America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Persian Gulf), or they treated Pyongyang’s Third World diplomacy only as a subtopic of the global competition between the two Koreas. In contrast, Young’s book seeks to cover each main geographical region of the Third World, and each region is represented by several in-depth case studies (e.g., Southeast Asia by Indonesia and Vietnam, and Sub-Saharan Africa by Angola, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe). This balanced approach enables the author to avoid the pitfalls of focusing on a few states at the expense of the global context or concentrating on the global diplomatic stage and making only passing references to the individual countries. Still, certain regions receive considerably more attention than others. For instance, North Korea’s relations with India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are described far less extensively than its interactions with the South Pacific microstates.
The book’s scope is panoramic not only in a geographical but also in a chronological and thematic sense. It investigates North Korea’s Third World diplomacy from the Bandung Conference (1955) to the end of the Cold War, with a brief outlook into the post-Cold War era. Each chapter describes a phase in Pyongyang’s Third World policy, linking its distinctive features to the dominant elements of the regime’s domestic and unification policies in that specific period. This structural concept helps to ensure focus and coherence (see the interesting parallels between North Korea’s relations with Indonesia, Cuba, and Vietnam in the 1960s), but it occasionally induces the author to over-state a single factor at the expense of others. For instance, the Rangoon bombing (October 9, 1983) is attributed near-exclusively to Kim Jong Il’s penchant for revolutionary violence. This interpretation overlooks the fact that Chun Doo Hwan’s trip to Burma was to be followed by a visit in India—a visit that the DPRK had every reason to prevent, as it would have granted Chun legitimacy in the eyes of many non-aligned countries. As early as March 1983, the Indian hosts of the seventh non-aligned summit (to which the book makes only a single indirect reference) rebuffed Pyongyang’s insistent requests to place the Korean question on the agenda.
Unlike earlier studies on North Korea’s Third World policy, the examined dimensions of interaction are not confined to the diplomatic and military spheres but include economic aid programs, sports training, and propaganda. The author offers a colourful description of the less-than-favourable impression that the DPRK’s heavy-handed methods made on the citizens of the Third World countries that Pyongyang sought to win over. The massive factual evidence the author presents in chapters 2 and 4 about these negative impressions is partly at odds with the tone of chapter 1, which places the main emphasis on North Korea’s favourable reputation in the Third World.
The book’s source base is of a similarly panoramic nature. By amalgamating the reports of US, British, ROK, and Soviet bloc diplomats with North Korean media sources and a wide range of secondary sources, the author is usually able to overcome the inherent limitations peculiar to one or another specific type of source. A particularly successful example of this multilateral approach is the book’s description of North Korea’s relations with Uganda under Idi Amin, Milton Obote, and Yoweri Museveni.
In some other cases, the author reaches his conclusions on the basis of less solid evidence, with occasional inaccuracies. For instance, he concludes that “the South Pacific remained dominated by North Korean influence and became one of the few spaces where Pyongyang exerted greater influence than Seoul. It was North Korea’s financial assistance … that South Pacific island nations most welcomed” (123). Of the eight relevant South Pacific states, Kiribati, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu established diplomatic relations only with South Korea, while Fiji, Nauru, and Vanuatu, anxious as they were to appear even-handed, established relations first with Seoul and later with Pyongyang. Their attitude toward the DPRK showed little correlation with the extent of their aid dependency: Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Solomon Islands were desperately poor and highly aid-dependent, whereas Nauru had an extremely high per capita GDP until the depletion of its phosphate mines in the 1990s.
By emphasizing Kim Il Sung’s efforts to pursue a course independent from the Communist Great Powers, the author develops a more nuanced narrative than those scholars who presented North Korea’s activities in the developing world as mere proxy operations carried out on behalf of the USSR. Actually, the analytical method of placing Pyongyang’s Third World diplomacy into the global context of communist foreign policies might have been utilized in some other case studies as well. For example, the author describes initial Indonesian-DPRK relations as follows: “As a developing Asian leftist state that struggled to affirm its nonalignment in international affairs, the Indonesian government gravitated to the proudly independent and socialist North Koreans” (20). In reality, Indonesia, having forged ambassadorial relations with the PRC as early as 1950, established consular-general relations with the DRV in 1955, with Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1960, and with North Korea as late as 1961.
All in all, this monograph is a valuable contribution to North Korean, Cold War, and Third World studies, as it provides detailed factual information on Pyongyang’s interactions with over twenty Third World states. Its colourful description of the heavy-handed methods of North Korean diplomacy makes it easier to understand why many non-aligned countries, having initially embraced the DPRK, soon became disillusioned with its behaviour. At the same time, the author also demonstrates that North Korea did manage to retain a foothold in certain developing countries even after a series of regime changes, precisely because of the same opportunistic pragmatism that repulsed some other Third World leaders.
Balázs Szalontai
Korea University Sejong Campus, Sejong