Hermits no more, and not for
turning By John Feffer
If North Koreans simply knew more about
the world outside - or received more accurate
information about their own society - they would
transform their country. This is an operating
assumption behind much of the policy thinking in
Washington and Seoul. Both governments pour money
into radio stations that beam information into
North Korea. Civil society activists, perhaps
impatient with the incremental pace of government
policy, try to get information into the
notoriously isolated country by any means
possible, from floating balloons over the border
to crossing into the country to proselytize in
person.
When the first North Korean
defectors began to trickle out of the country,
they were astonished to learn about the world
outside. The first North Koreans to go to China
during the famine years of the mid-1990s couldn't
believe that the communist neighbor they'd always
considered economically backward had cutting-edge
technology, bustling
markets, and affluent consumers. So, too, did the
first North Koreans to visit South Korea remark on
the startling contrast between the free,
prosperous Seoul in front of their eyes and the
impoverished dictatorship that had been drilled
into their imagination.
But much has
changed since the "soft power" strategy of
covertly educating North Koreans began in earnest
two decades ago. North Koreans are no longer
completely in the dark. We can't quantify the
amount of information that has leaked into the
country because we can't conduct public opinion
surveys in North Korea. But we can make indirect
assessments. Hundreds of thousands of North
Koreans saw first hand the economic progress in
China when they went back and forth across the
border in the 1990s. Even now, more than 40,000
North Koreans officially visited China in the
first quarter of 2012, a 40% increase over the
same quarter last year. Chinese-made goods are
available in private markets throughout North
Korea, so even more North Koreans must confront
the advanced state of the Chinese economy.
Then there are the more than 50,000 North
Korean workers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex.
At this South Korean-run facility just north of
the de-militarized zone, the North Korean workers
come face to face with the comparative prosperity
of South Korea: the advanced technology, the clean
factories, the abundance of food in the cafeteria.
But it's not only the relatively small
class of workers at Kaesong who have contact with
South Korea. As a result of the proliferation of
private markets, North Koreans now own DVD
players, MP3 players, USB sticks, and the like.
South Korean movies and soap operas have become
quite popular. Many North Korean young people are
listening to South Korean-produced K-Pop.
Thanks to the Egyptian company Orascom
(though it is now owned by Russia's VimpelCom),
there are more than a million North Korean
cell-phone service subscribers, which means that
information flows more quickly and easily within
North Korea. What had once been vertical, with the
state in control of what North Koreans know and
how they access information, has now become
increasingly horizontal.
Yet, despite all
this information flow, North Korea has experienced
no major political change. Advocates of the "soft
power" strategy argue that it's just a question of
time: all this information flow is like a swarm of
termites eating away at the foundations of North
Korean society, the edifice looks solid and then,
one day, it all just collapses.
That may
happen. But I'm not sure whether more information
translates into more dissent. The premise of the
"soft power" strategy may simply be wishful
thinking.
First of all, what matters most
is not volume of information but type of
information. The inhabitants of Eastern Europe in
the 1970s and 1980s knew plenty about the outside
world. Guest workers from Poland and Yugoslavia
had been going back and forth to Western Europe
for decades. East Germans could easily watch West
German television. Even the relatively isolated
Russians passed around self-published dissident
manuscripts.
What made the information
flow of 1989 different was that East Germans
learned about the possibility of change in Poland,
and Romanians learned about the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and Albanians learned about the collapse of
the Ceausescu regime in Bucharest. It wasn't
random information. It was information about what
was suddenly possible from a political point of
view in countries that shared similar political
structures and cultures.
The same can be
said about the "Arab Spring". Tunisians,
Egyptians, and Bahrainis did not lack information
about the outside world or about their own
societies. What electrified the citizenries in
these countries was information about what had
become politically possible all of the sudden in
the Arab world. They could rise up against an
autocrat and no one intervened from the outside to
prop up the dictator.
It wasn't a question
of an increase in information. It was a question
of a decrease in fear.
North Koreans have
no such examples to follow at the moment.
Information about South Korean wealth may engender
sorrow or resentment or envy, but it will not
likely create a political movement. Information
about pop music, soap operas, and religion may
completely transform individuals - but it won't
likely inspire North Koreans to rise up against
their leaders.
The difficult truth is that
North Korea is not just run by a small handful of
aging autocrats. There is a significant elite in
the country - political, economic, social - that
benefits from the current system. They travel to
other countries. They are reasonably well informed
about the world. They are largely pragmatic,
though they must toe the official political line.
This elite will form the core of a new
political and economic order in North Korea. But
they won't change their allegiances simply because
of what they hear on foreign radio broadcasts or
what they see on black-market DVDs. They will
collectively break from the status quo only if
their core interests are threatened, if there is a
serious power struggle at the top that requires
taking sides, or if they are suddenly no longer
living in fear.
Knowledge is certainly
power. And the free flow of information is a good
in and of itself. But we should be careful not to
assume that a more widely educated population is a
more revolutionary population. Information has its
limits.
John Feffer is the
co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular
World Beat column, and will be publishing a book
on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012.
His past essays can be read at hiswebsite.
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