In the wake of Kim Jong-il’s death, there has been an avalanche of articles attempting to peer beyond the veil of North Korean secrecy and prognosticate about the future policies of the new government.
Will Kim Jong-un advance the nation’s nuclear program? Will he turn away from the hardline policies of his father and put an emphasis on modernization as a Deng Xiaoping-esque figure? Or, will he maintain North Korea’s fabled “juche”, leaving the nation as self-sequestered as ever. Furthermore, is Kim Jong-un even the person to watch? Kim Kyong-hui, a powerful general and sister of Kim Jong-il, and Jang Song-Taek, her husband and the de-facto 2nd-in-Command of North Korea, remain powerful figures. They have far more experience than the young Kim Jong-un, and it’s therefore not unreasonable to surmise that Kim Jong-un could simply be the face needed to cover their ascendancies. After all, it has been reported that Jong-un has only been groomed for leadership for the last two years, meaning that he may be unable to effectively command North Korea’s goliath state bureaucracy. Reports of his uncle, Jang, having taken an advisory role seem to corroborate this uncertainty. As usual, North Korea is a riddle wrapped in mystery, but despite a general lack of internationally available information, we can still extract a transcendent significance from the passing of the “Dear Leader”.
On top of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Protests, the continuing Eurozone crisis, China’s impending leadership change, as well as the emergence of a Latin America that seems to be stepping further out of the U.S’s shadow, it has become increasingly obvious that the paradigm of international politics with which we have become accustomed over the last decade is rapidly shifting, and the death of Kim Jong-il heralds this shift as well as any other single event. Of course, it’s a fluke of timing that Kim Jong-il should die in such a turbulent year, but this doesn’t keep his death from serving as a poignant marker. North Korea’s place in the world has, up to this point, been nothing if not predictable. The U.S and the West in general would tell North Korea to give up its nuclear program and return to multi-lateral talks. China would act as the North’s only, yet exasperated, supporter, reining in Kim Jong-il when it became necessary. All of this would happen while South Korea attempted to manage its eccentric northern neighbor.
However, with the passing of Kim Jong-il, the these geo-political positions are potentially invalidated. China, the U.S, Japan, Russia and the multitude of other parties that find themselves mired in the affairs of North Korea can still maneuver to establish desirable positions, but with the new uncertainty at the top of North Korea’s leadership pyramid, past experience is no longer paramount. This isn’t to say that North Korea has the freedom of complete redefinition. The leadership is still bound by its need to maintain legitimacy, which means it doesn’t have leeway to abandon juche and repudiate Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-Sung. However, as Raul Castro is showing in Cuba, slow liberalization movements by institutions that were once ideologically entrenched against it are still within the realm of possibility. On the whole, North Korea now has an opportunity to realign its position in the world. It may not be immediately apparent, but just the simple fact that future North Korean policy is now an uncertainty, completely alters the former geo-political situation.
Looking at the year as a whole, this realignment-through-uncertainty has been a key theme. Events have conspired to essentially redefine global politics in such a way that it has become obvious that no one hegemon is in control or even on top of the changes happening in the world. As much as the old hands of international politics wish for gradual change, incrementalism, or pragmatism, anything but that has occurred this year. Whether it be inequality in America, democracy in states affected by the Arab Spring, the North Korean leadership change or another one of the many tectonic shifts that happened in 2011, 2012 and subsequent years will largely be dominated by states having to deal with these new, or previously ignored realities.
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