To improve the academic integrity of this blog, henceforth I shall post up all my written papers and assignments done while earning my Bachelor's Degree.
First up, one from my Political Science module (of sorts).
“Political power grows out the barrel of a gun” – Communist Leader Mao Zedong
The annals of history have shown us the wisdom of the above quote, and even if it is slightly incendiary, the saying is not without reason or logic. Countries have risen and fallen by the sword, and then the bullet delivered most of the time from an external force; sometimes the shot which disintegrates the established political system comes from inside the nation, from the people most qualified to use it: the military. Despite essentially being one complete country, North and South Korea are not only divided by the 38th Parallel, but also alienated from each other over their emphasis on the military in the political climate, and it is this differing prominence – among other things – which poses a major obstacle to the Korean Peninsula’s long standing quest for reunification.
The Military as a Driving Force
It is at once remarkable and also saddening to note that both North and South Korea are under different political regimes, have different states of development as well as dissimilar levels of societal progress, although they are by and large a single country divided into two by an artificial but fiercely guarded line across the 38th Parallel. The main focus of this paper, however, is the position the military has with regards to the political structure of the two Koreas, for each has their own unique take on the role of the military within national politics.
Before delving deeper into the Korean peninsula, it is important to understand why the military is such a formidable force, inside politics and otherwise. Since the rudimentary beginnings of humanity, the military remains a pivotal force in any civilization. Empires were carved out using strength executed by a technologically superior and highly-disciplined armed forces, and many instances in history have showcased the tremendous effect an efficient military has on the people they were turned loose on. Genghis Khan did not cut a swath of destruction through Central Asia using diplomacy and political connections; he created one of the largest empires in the world by the might of the Mongol army, a force that was respected, feared, and frighteningly efficient at what it was established to accomplish.
Governments were overthrown, reinstated, and then overthrown again by their own militaries, proving that the armed forces have the clout and might of a potent political institution to destroy or create governmental regimes. In current times, military dictatorship is still ubiquitous and very real to the people of Mauritania, a small African country of three million which recently reversed itself from a democratic institution after a military removal of the civilian president. Since its independence, the tiny nation has endured an incredible nine coup d'états (Hochman, 2009), and the penultimate coup was supposed to be the one to end all military takeovers, which is ironic since the latest takeover restored the militaristic regime.
In the United States of America, the military plays a sizeable role in society. Out of America’s 43 presidents, 12 were formerly from the military (Global Role of Military in Politics, 2004), the latest being Dwight D. Eisenhower after his stellar performance in the Second World War. US servicemen are also given a significant amount of admiration for their occupation, something extraordinary for a civil servant. This suggests that the military is generally a highly-respected unit within society, and that it is one of the few organizations within the country that is both self-contained and independent – to a certain degree – from the machinations of the political climate.
Why is the military such a powerful force? The key principle lies in the quality of its organization, which, by modern standards, is both cohesive and hierarchical; even the most ragtag or badly-maintained armies are many times the organizational and structural superior of any civilian group (Finer, 1962). This can be traced to the army’s perceived role: to fight and win wars and it can only perform this task well if its command is centralized enough and authority flows down the upper echelons to the obedient rank-and-file both fluidly and lucidly. Indeed, the convention of obedience has to be underscored, as it stems from the army’s primary purpose to win wars, and a battle plan can only be properly planned and executed if obedience existed within the ranks (Finer, 1962).
The military thus becomes a separate, disciplined organization in itself, an organ of the main country if you will, an inseparable part of the greater body. If the country does not exist, there is no need for the army to subsist and vice versa: if the military was absent, the country would in due course be swept into the territorial boundaries of a superior nation. The military as an entity has such power to move and to change, and as mentioned earlier, is more than capable of demolishing a political administration.
To add on, the military has the opinion that the onus is on them to remove the current regime from power when they deem the civilian government too weak, and that it is their right, and even their duty, to do so (Hochman, 2009). Moreover, as stated by Dafna Hochman, a former foreign policy advisor in the US Senate, the sheer structural integrity of the military as a construct makes it the only institution capable of dealing with disasters and policy challenges. The role of the military cannot be construed, and North Korea marries the military and central leadership of the nation into one comprehensive political structure, the fates of both branches thus forever entwined.
Military-First Politics
North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as it is formally known, is one of the five remaining nations in the world still proclaiming themselves communist even after the fall of the Soviet Union, although their ideas have generally changed over the years as the promises of socialism failed to deliver. North Korea is a highly militarized and staunchly totalitarian state, with the current Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il controlling every aspect of life: from the economy to education and from culture to national legislature. Kim accomplishes this feat of total control over his country through the one entity that is united and powerful enough to support his means and achieve his ends: the Korean People’s Army (KPA).
Yet, the DPRK was not always this militarized in the past. During the reign of Kim Il Sung (1912 – 1994), he emphasized the model of juche ideology, the idea of self-reliance, which broadly meant that the masses – not the army – can only be revolutionary under the leadership and command of a Suryong, or great leader (Kim, 2006). His son however, saw the importance of the armed forces in his quest for total control of both the government and then the rest of the country, and began to change the political landscape in North Korea to songun chongchi, or military-first politics.
Once Kim Jong Il was in power, he quickly expanded the scope of his vision. Indeed, the attention afforded to the armed forces can be seen when he gave a wristwatch to all military personnel (and none to the political parties) on the 60th anniversary of the KPA’s founding, showing just how much Kim Jong Il valued his soldiers and the military machine in general (Kim, 2006). The ruling party in North Korea for the past four decades, the Korean Worker’s Party (KWP), saw its power begin to wane and eventually diminish to near nothingness as Kim Jong Il consolidated his control of the struggling nation.
The KPA ranks highly in North Korea society, in no small part due to Kim Jong Il’s expansion of the military’s involvement in politics. The KPA holds a number of roles in the nation: being the deliverer and provider, the problem solver, the engine for social engineering, the creator and advancer of culture, the synthesis of body-mind-spirit and also the exemplar in addition to its intrinsic defense duties (Park, 2008). Although the aforementioned titles may come across as superfluous and flamboyant, multiple studies exist to examine and confirm the military’s involvement in society.
Kim Jong Il recognized that the military is more organized and better disciplined than its KWP counterpart, and that the army was made up of the younger populace of society, unlike the aging bureaucrats, and therefore more responsive to his imperatives (Kim, 2006). Furthermore, the KPA is patriotic and ready to give their lives for the country at a moment’s notice. Additionally, by promoting loyalists to key positions in the armed forces, Kim strengthened his control of the military, at the same time replacing the KWP with the KPA under the military-first banner (Gause, 2006). The nature of this shift to the military was made crystal in the 1998 constitutional amendments, which made Kim Jong Il the chairman of the National Defense Commission - essentially the high command of the North Korean armed forces – but in effect had destroyed the party-based political system and transferred all real power to the military. A Japanese journalist went so far as to call Kim Jong Il’s actions a military coup, since the military is usually subordinate to the ruling party in Soviet-era communist regimes (Kim, 2006). After the amendments however, the military was in fact so influential that it is above the state, and it was able to direct KWP matters as its superior (Kim, 2006), not its subordinate nor its equal. The nation was in fact turned into an enormous military stronghold commanded by the KPA. Furthermore, to cement that revamped focus in power, in the event of the death of the Great Leader, the party or the state itself will not assume control of the country: the military institution will rule in his stead.
In addition, an internal publication within the country once mentioned that “military-first politics is a cure all in this era of ideological, military and economic confrontation with the imperialists”, (Kim, 2006) driving home the point that the military in North Korea is first and foremost the foreman of the nation, just one step below that of the Great Leader who controls the military, effectively demonstrating that in the DPRK, the military is directly involved in national policy, being only secondary to Kim Jong Il.
Kim Jong Il has also tied the nation’s economic capacity with military supremacy, meaning that both economic advantage and military growth are strongly intertwined (Byung, 2005). Even if the country has been in severe economic crisis for past decades, the armed forces are still maintained as one of the largest in the world at 1.2 million regular personnel, and had flexed its nuclear arm power by testing atomic weapons twice (Jung, 2010). Policymaking under military-first politics have been, and still is, dominated by a guns or butter dilemma, and it would seem that the focus is still on the procurement of more weapons than on measures designed to improve the ailing economy (Foster-Carter, 2004).
Inevitably, many believe that it is this emphasis on the armed forces that led to the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, and Mr. Ra Jong-Yil – former Security Advisor to former South Korean president Mr. Roh Moo-Hyun – states that the overarching political influence of the military establishment along with North Korea’s ongoing dire economical problems may make it difficult for Kim Jong Il to control the “internal dynamics of the regime” (Ra). North Korea does not have many options left, and given its problems both on the homefront and with the international community regarding its nuclear programme, it might run out of alternatives and choose to run with its guns instead, driven by its military-first political system coalesced with the traditional purpose of a military’s establishment.
Indeed, as Kim Il Sung’s third-generation of dynastic succession comes of age, the regime has sought to reconfirm and even strengthen its songun chongchi, pinning a general’s badge on the chest of Kim Jong-Un, and reiterating to the world that in order to control North Korea, the leader must first be in command of the military (Jung, 2010).
As songun chongchi rolls into its 16th year since its inauguration, it still remains to be seen if the new Great Leader will place a greater emphasis on economic development than on military spending. One detail is certain: military-first politics has been reaffirmed as North Korea’s principal political force, but it is also one major hurdle in the way of the elusive concept of reunification with the South.
From Consolidation to Fragmentation
Where military influence is combined with the political structure in the North, a polar opposite is witnessed in South Korea, where military control is fragmented and uncombined into the overall control scheme of politics in South Korea (Kim, 1984). As the more affluent Korea on the peninsula, South Korea is interesting as it owes the results of its success to an authoritarian regime in its history, which ironically also led to the regime’s own downfall. This chapter will be revisited to trace the South Korean military’s progress, or rather decline, down the political food chain.
Upon the division of Korea along the 38th Parallel, both the USSR and the USA instituted different forms of government upon the Koreans under their jurisdiction. North Korea became communist, and is still communist to this day. The South on the other hand, went through a roller coaster ride of political systems, finally culminating in the presidential republic of today.
Korea as a whole was ruled by a monarchy before the Japanese annexation in the years preceding World War 2, and during the latter times the Japanese governed Korea with a repressive, authoritarian regime. As such, the South was plainly ill-equipped to deal with its newfound freedom during the US occupation, or more specifically, the USA-brand of liberal democracy (Yung, 2004). Lacking the political custom of democracy in general, the foreign-imported First Republic quickly devolved into an authoritarian administration led by the strongman Syngman Rhee as its president.
Things however did not go well for Rhee as he progressively resorted to overt force to obtain his desires, and was forced into exile when students demonstrated against his regime in response to a blatant act of vote-rigging in supposedly fair elections (Saxer, 2002). As the winds of change died down, the dictatorial government in South Korea was replaced by a parliamentary system headed by a Prime Minister. Nevertheless, this new system of governing was too weak and was promptly removed in a military coup d'état led by General Park Chun-Hee, ushering in an era of military involvement in politics as well as strong economic growth (Saxer, 2002).
The army had surfaced as the strongest organization in society after the Korean War, and it was with this strength that the democratic institution in South Korea was crushed. In the thirty years of military rule, the South Korean economy and society as a whole were essentially altered: society diversified, class forces grew and became better organized and the democratic orientation of the population strengthened (Yung, 2004), all in the backdrop of a rapidly improving GNP and economic success (Saxer, 2002). These seemingly advantageous points however, had dire ramifications for the military as the years progressed: it was no longer the most powerful nor the strongest organization in society.
As the 1990s rolled along, and the South Koreans grew more receptive of democracy, which almost always came with positive capitalism, the authoritarian dictatorship became a victim of its own economic success (Shin, 1999). Granted, under military leadership, South Korea’s economy grew at an average of 10% a year, but it also led to an expanding of the middle class, which in turn increased their demand for participation in the political process. It was the non-existence of economic problems that the table could be cleared for talks by the players of democracy, and the transition was to take a long, narrow but eventual path. It was also on this conduit that South Korea passed the threshold of “no return” (Kim, 1998), that there were simply no other plausible alternatives to democracy, and no institution – the military inclusive – can object to the actions of popularly-elected policymakers. Economic success thus proved to be the blade severing the thread of authoritarian regimes in South Korea, and also contributed to the overall fragmentation of military-political involvement.
In fact, in 1993, Kim Young-Sam, the first civilian president in more than three decades of military rule, realized it was pertinent to consolidate his power against the military, to astutely establish civilian supremacy over the militarily institution (Shin, 1999). Upon his appointment, he sacked the upper echelons of the military with links to former presidents, especially the ones belonging to past authoritarian regimes. Throughout his term, Kim took measures to curtail the power of the military, from outlawing factions to combating corruption, in particular concerning promotions within the army. By that time however, the military had mellowed somewhat, with no expressly overt motives for political gain and a redirection of their emphasis back to their main mission of external defense, spurred on by the very existence of the DPRK. As 1995 came into being, Kim Young-Sam had accomplished his mission and firmly established civilian preeminence over the military as a result of his wide-reaching efforts (Shin, 1999). The military was no longer directly involved in South Korean politics.
The South Korean military is still a viable and powerful force today, with a regular force of 3.7 million personnel, and has the second highest number of soldiers per capita, just after North Korea (Cordesman & Kleiber, 2006). It still exerts influence on modern politics and former officers still permeate vital areas of society and the political landscape, mainly due to its ongoing conflict with the DPRK (the two nations are still technically at war), leading to a more critical accent on the military and its defense efforts (Yung, 2004). Yet, the military is now undersized and underdeveloped as opposed to other, more civilian, sectors of society – a stark contrast to the authoritarian years – and that in itself manifests the South’s pseudo-philosophy on political power, that it will never again be wrought by sheer, brute force.
The current president Mr. Lee Myung-Bak in 2009 stated that the South Korean military was to be a more global force for a swift response to emergent threats outside of the normal locus of control and also to match the nation’s economic power (Jung, 2009). Although the government seems to be shifting its priorities back to the military, it is of the essence to note that its motives are mainly to protect its economic interests both from external forces and also from North Korea, which had been developing its asymmetrical military capability (Jung, 2009). The DPRK has been showing signs of instability in recent years, and the move to bolster the South’s defenses would invariably be linked to this ongoing, omnipresent threat, not ostensibly to renew its emphasis on the military machine.
Conclusion
An enduring goal on the Korean peninsula would be the removal of the 38th Parallel, essentially a reunification of the North and South. Although some might agree with the union on the basis of restoring cultural ties and national identity, others are skeptical of this ultimate ambition. For one, the DPRK’s economy is in shambles, and even if South Korea is Asia’s fourth largest economy (Cordesman & Kleiber, 2006), it would still be an uphill struggle to bring the North back up from the abyss of economic ruin while trying to maintain its own foothold in an increasingly competitive regional and international market. Economics aside, the two Koreas are still, and will be for a long while, divided over the role of the military in politics.
While the North advocates a military first and foremost policy, the South is against the consolidation of military power, as evidenced by the political weakening and fragmentation of the South Korean military. If reunification was to happen, both sides would have to reach a compromise regarding the military, and it would not be in the realm of simplicity due to the fact that North Korea has its political structure with the military in the center, and if that element was forcibly removed, the entire construct would dissolve into chaos, anarchy, and perhaps even into nuclear winter. Subsequently, the North Korean citizens, after so many years of totalitarian rule, will also experience culture shock, and will undoubtedly have a tough time reintegrating into the greater Korean society, causing problems to all levels of the societal spectrum. For the South, the thought of returning to quasi-military rule is unacceptable, in theory at least, with a stout majority opposing military administration (Shin, 1999). South Korea has seen its fair share of oppressive regimes and authoritarian rule, and has endured the strenuous process of dismantling the power base of the military. No doubt, in the eyes of many, the military still has positive societal value, but it will always be in charge of the nation’s defense and little else. Therefore, the South Koreans would ostensibly be opposed to a military-first political system and opt to maintain their present presidential republic, and relegate the military to its clear and present goal: defense.
Although the prospect of reunification is by no means uncertain, it is still a long way off, and unless the two Koreas can reach a mutual understanding for their beliefs in the military, the 38th Parallel will continue to invisibly partition the peninsula in two, with two different takes on the classic conflict of the soldier and the state.
3577 Words
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