ABSTRACT
Since the disintegration of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, many outside observers have been waiting for the North Korean regime to follow its erstwhile allies into the dustbin of history. But unlike Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or for that matter the South Korean military government, North Korea did not succumb to the “Third Wave” of democratization. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in the mid-1990s, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is still with us, its political system essentially unchanged. Some would argue that this is the result of the unusually effective coercive apparatus of the North Korean state, which, even after 15 years of economic involution, retains a powerful hold on its people. As a corollary to this argument, a view held by certain scholars, conservative South Koreans and American congressmen among others, North Korea’s odious and fundamentally illegitimate regime is “propped up” by international economic aid; take away this artificial support, and the long-oppressed North Korean people would rise up against their government and the regime would quickly collapse. Usually, in this scenario, absorption into the ROK in the South soon follows.2
