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EU's North Korea policy a
non-starter
By Axel Berkofsky
BRUSSELS - The
European Union's role in re-establishing peace and
stability on the Korean Peninsula was already marginal
before North Korea's nuclear revelations last year, and
its influence will continue to be close to irrelevant as
long as security and nuclear issues dominate the agenda.
Nuclear issues and pessimism aside, however, the
EU is officially still committed to its engagement
course toward North Korea. For the time being, though,
because of North Korea's refusal to dismantle its
nuclear facilities, European Commission (EC) officials
claim that the EU has no choice but to put its
engagement course on hold. The EU feels betrayed by
North Korea, some bureaucrats explain in off-the-record
conversations.
Back on the record, the same EC
officials insist that the EU remains a strong supporter
of South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" seeking engagement
with North Korea through economic assistance and the
ability to ignore North Korean propaganda and
belligerent rhetoric every now and then. South Korea
itself, however, following US "advice", has recently
shown very limited enthusiasm for continuing its
Sunshine Policy, confirming to EU policymakers that
taking a wait-and-see attitude is the right choice for
the time being.
Indeed, EU policy initiatives
that would qualify as "trailblazing", or even
"independent", are not in the offing. EU diplomats
advocate "quiet diplomacy" strategies instead, stressing
that the EU's policies and initiatives will strictly
remain "complementary" to South Korea's policy toward
the North.
"Overly quiet diplomacy," mock the
critics, claiming that any EU policies toward North
Korea remain largely unheard outside of Brussels.
EU policymakers, of course, are more optimistic,
even hoping that EU policy toward North Korea could
become a test case for the union's Common Foreign and
Security Policy (CFSP). Whereas the EU was unable to
formulate anything resembling a common position during
the US-led invasion of Iraq, agreeing to collectively
condemning North Korea's nuclear-weapons program seemed
feasible. Formulating a common security policy centered
on humanitarian assistance, food aid and technical
assistance should be relatively easy, EC and EU Council
officials hoped.
But it wasn't easy, of course,
and North Korea is indeed very unlikely to become a test
case for the CFSP as long as the EU is excluded from
negotiating a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
Then again, being excluded from these
negotiations seems almost reasonable in the EU context,
given that some of its member states, including France
and the United Kingdom, have strategies in place for
dealing with nations in possession (or allegedly in
possession) of weapons of mass destruction.
Gone
also seem to be the days when EU policymakers hoped that
the advantage of being a "distant power" with no
strategic interests and colonial legacy on the Korean
Peninsula would enable the EU to act as a mediator
between the United States and North Korea. This turned
out to be a case of wishful thinking, although a recent
European Parliament initiative to set up a seven-nation
meeting in Brussels to discuss nuclear issues with
Pyongyang suggests that the EU hasn't caved in just yet.
The well-meant initiative, however, still needs the EC's
go-ahead and follow-up, and Pyongyang's strategy of
snubbing the EU on security issues does suggest that
food and cash are all that North Korea wants from
Brussels.
That there is not much else left to
talk about would indeed be a very sobering conclusion
after five years of political dialogue between the EU
and the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).
Five rounds of political dialogue have been held since
1998, although the EU has usually revealed very few
details on the outcome of the talks beyond calling them
"useful" and "constructive".
Less useful and
everything but constructive when human rights were on
the agenda, though. The EU and the DPRK started
discussing human rights two years ago, only to see the
talks break down after only one session. Despite this
setback, the EU still insists that human rights remain a
"natural topic" for discussion, admitting, however, that
talks with North Korea "do not yet match", in quality
and substance, the EU's human-rights dialogue with
China. Given the poor quality of the EU-China dialogue,
however, this assessment seems even less encouraging.
To make things even more difficult, the EU
recently submitted a resolution on human rights in the
DPRK to the 53-member UN Commission on Human Rights in
Geneva. The resolution, the first formal UN assessment
of human rights in North Korea ever, expressed "deep
concern" over the situation in the DPRK, which the EU
claimed is marked by "widespread abuses, such as torture
and public executions".
Pyongyang, as usual,
immediately complained that the EU was toeing the US
hard line of pursuing a confrontational course. The
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the government's
official mouthpiece, called the resolution a
"unacceptable provocation", announcing that it "will
have an impact on EU-DPRK cooperation".
Pyongyang for its part is being accused of
maintaining political and diplomatic relations with the
EU for the sake of playing it off against the United
States - and vice versa. However, its relations with the
EU have hardly developed into a trump card for squeezing
concessions and cash out of the EU or the US.
North Korea's seemingly very limited enthusiasm
to expand its relations with the EU, however, comes as a
surprise given the importance of trade with Europe.
Although EU-DPRK trade saw better days in the late
1990s, trade with the EU accounted for 13.7 percent of
North Korea's overall trade in 2000 (compared with 24.3
percent in 1998). North Korea, on the other hand,
accounted only for 0.015 percent of the EU's overall
foreign trade and their total two-way trade amounted to
a very modest US$270 million in 2000.
In fact,
based on volume, EU-DPRK trade is roughly 1,000 times as
relevant for the DPRK than it is for the EU, Rudiger
Frank, visiting professor at Columbia University in New
York, wrote in a recent article in the International
Journal of Korean Unification Studies.
And there
is more bad news. The EU this year decided to freeze its
technical assistance projects, scheduled to be launched
this summer. A total of 35 million euros ($39.6 million)
has been set aside for EU technical assistance projects
until 2006, making the EU the only substantial donor of
technical assistance to the DPRK.
The EC-DPRK
Country Strategy Paper (CSP) and the EU's National
Indicative Program (NIP) for the DPRK set out the
framework and objectives for technical assistance
projects in North Korea. The CSP and NIP, if ever
implemented, provide for training in market economic
principles and projects designed to support and promote
sustainable management and the efficient use of natural
resources and energy in the DPRK, as well as
institutional support and capacity-building.
And
the good news? Feeding starving North Korea is still on
the EU's agenda. In January, after World Food Program
(WFP) warnings that it would be running out of food and
medicines to distribute in North Korea very soon, the EC
decided to ship 40,000 tons of cereals to North Korea,
mainly for children and mothers of newborn babies.
Humanitarian assistance aside, the EU has furthermore
provided food aid and structural food security
assistance to North Korea worth more than 220 million
euros since 1997.
Despite the WFP's assessment
that the food situation in North Korea has improved in
recent years, more than 40 percent of North Korean
children are reportedly still malnourished. Other WFP
reports cheering that the food and humanitarian
situation has improved from "catastrophic" to "grave" in
recent years is hardly good news either. The EC's
Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) thought so too and
provided an additional 7.5 million euros in support of
the health sector in the DPRK this year.
Despite
ongoing concerns that medicines and medical equipment
provided to health centers and hospitals very often do
not reach those in need, ECHO officials insist that the
distribution and monitoring of food and medicines is
"going well". Suspicions, however, remain that North
Korea's armed forces and other privileged groups are the
main beneficiaries of international humanitarian
assistance and food aid. What's more, and usually
contrary to the EU's own reporting, non-governmental
organizations stationed in North Korea still report
cases in which hospitals are closed down only one day
after receiving a truckload of medicines.
The
EU, at least for the time being, appears to have shifted
from "engagement" to "conditional engagement", being
reduced to hoping that diplomacy will prevail over the
more bellicose solutions favored by the United States to
"solve" the nuclear crisis in North Korea.
Remaining in the wait-and-see mode, at times
flirting with a strategy of hoping for an early collapse
of North Korea's regime, however, is hardly enough for
an EU claiming to be a major player in international
politics.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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