Defining the Nature and Future of the Party–Military Relations in North Korea

Abstract

Since Kim Jong-il officially launched his Songun politics in 1998, conflicting assessments have generated two competing arguments regarding the political role of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). The military garrison state argument suggests that Songun politics brought about the decline of the party and political ascendance of the military, while the party’s army model argues that the KPA is still the party’s army and under the party’s firm control. This article suggests that the debate mischaracterizes the KPA’s political place in North Korea and that the military has not been a politically influential organ from the state-building to the current Kim Jong-un era. This article identifies two distinct patterns of military control mechanisms—namely partisan (1960s–1990s) and personalistic (1998–2008)—and argues that the different control methods have little to do with the KPA’s political strength or weakness. Rather, they merely reflect the dictator’s ruling method of choice for regime survival. The analysis illustrates that the current Kim Jong-un regime is more stable than many outside observers may estimate, and a military coup is highly unlikely in the near future.

Keywords

North Korea Songun politics coup d’état party–military relations Kim Jong-il

Introduction

Since Kim Jong-il officially launched his Songun (military first) politics in 1998, the political role of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) has attracted close scrutiny from North Korean experts and policymakers alike. Kim’s Songun politics placed the KPA at the forefront of his rule in order to survive both external and internal challenges to his regime—a shift often interpreted as the political ascension of the military in Pyongyang. A decade after the declaration, Kim Jong-il and his son Jong-un seem to have switched from Songun politics and returned to Sondang (party first) politics of the Kim Il-sung era (1948–1994). Under the current Kim Jong-un leadership, KPA officers’ presence in key party and cabinet positions has been significantly diminished, and these positions have been filled with new (and younger) elites from the party and the cabinet.

One puzzling question is what the KPA’s place has been in the overall political system in North Korea. Did Songun politics render the military a dominant political force in Pyongyang’s power structure under Kim Jong-il? Contrariwise, has Kim Jong-un’s Sondang (party first) policy substantially reduced the KPA’s political clout (without any noticeable resistance from the military) and made the military a mere servant to the party and Suryong (dear leader)? These questions are critically important in assessing Pyongyang’s regime (in)stability because it will ultimately be the military, not the organized opposition of ordinary people or an external intervention, that may pose an immediate threat to regime security. Interestingly enough, one may recognize that scholars disagree over the nature of the military’s power and influence in the overall political power structure. Some suggest that Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics made the KPA a politically dominant institution that wields significant influence in the nation’s overall decision-making process, which is termed in this article as the military garrison state thesis (I. Kim, 2006; Mansourov, 2006; Woo, 2015). Others argue that North Korea’s political system in general, and the KPA’s role in particular, remains intact and the army remains a political servant that merely acts on Suryong’s and his party’s will, which can be termed as the Sondang thesis (Haggard, Herman, & Ryu, 2014; Lee, 2003; Park, 2013; Park, 2014; Woo, 2016).

One shared assumption between these opposite assessments is that the party’s firm control of the military (i.e., Sondang) indicates a firm civilian control of the military, a stable regime, and a low probability of a military coup in Pyongyang. By the same token, Songun politics is assumed to be weak civilian control of the military, the KPA’s political supremacy, and thus regime instability. This article suggests that the debate over the KPA’s political influence has largely been misdirected due to a lack of proper understanding about how Pyongyang’s political system is structured and political power is exercised, especially related to the military control mechanism. It argues that, unlike other communist totalitarian states, the three Kims—Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un—have been positioned above the ideological and political structure of the state and exercised ultimate political authority over the entire populace. The three Kims often mobilized the KPA to consolidate their political dominance. However, this does not indicate the political ascendance of the military in North Korea, as the dictators designed a complex web of military control mechanisms—both interpersonal and institutional—to prevent a military coup. Ultimately, the dictators’ move between Songun and Sondang has been a mere reflection of their ruling method of choice and, therefore, not a relevant indicator for the rise and fall of the KPA’s political influence. To support the argument, this article comparatively analyses two major shifts in party–army relations that transpired in North Korea since 1948: first in the 1950s–1960s and second between 1998 and 2008.

This article first critically evaluates differing estimations of the KPA’s political influence, especially in the context of the emergence of Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics, and presents an alternative framework of analysis. The empirical analysis section compares two major shifts in party–army relations that first transpired between 1948 and the 1960s and then again between 1998 and 2008. Based on the comparative analysis, this article concludes with political implications of the third shift (2009–present) that took place under Kim Jong-un.

Songun Politics and Political Influence of the Military

Since Kim Jong-il officially pronounced Songun politics in 1998, conflicting assessments about the KPA’s political influence have emerged. Prior to 1998, the KPA was viewed as a politically insignificant institution that was under the firm control of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) and merely carried out the party’s will (i.e., party first or Sondang politics); it was considered the armed servant to the party and the leader. However, Kim Jong-il emerged as the undisputed leader with the declaration of Songun politics three years after the death of Kim Il-sung, the founding father of the nation and the originator of the state ideology of Kimilsungism. The switch from Sondang to Songun in the late 1990s resulted in notable changes in virtually every quarter of the society, including the ideology, political power structure and economic and security policy directions. Such changes led numerous Pyongyang observers to speculate on a newly defined political role of the military in the post-Kim Il-sung North Korea. Their assessments of the KPA’s political influence reveal extremely wide variations, from the military’s political dominance (i.e., military rule) to its political insignificance (i.e., party’s political supremacy). This section introduces these conflicting assessments regarding the KPA’s political role during the Kim Jong-il era and discusses how the assessments mischaracterize the nature of the military’s political influence in North Korea.

Songun Politics as the ‘Military Garrison State’

Since Kim Jong-il pronounced his political leadership in 1998, a number of North Korean experts have estimated that he carried out a complete overhaul of the political system, shifting it from a party-centred one to a military-dominant one (I. Kim, 2006; Moon & Takesada, 2001; Oh & Hassig, 2000; Wada, 1999). Moon and Takesada (2001, p. 357), for example, begin their analysis of the KPA’s role with a direct quotation from the Central News Agency of North Korea: ‘[T]he military is the party, the state, and the people’. They also argue that the KPA’s ‘primacy in politics contradicts the previous configuration of North Korean politics where the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) prevailed as the dominant political machinery …’. Another expert goes even further to suggest that Kim’s Songun politics was equivalent to a military coup in which the KPA rules the KWP. He argues that ‘the military directs party affairs as the superior … so powerful that it is above the state … turning North Korea to a military garrison state’ (I. Kim, 2006, p. 61).

The so-called military garrison state argument rests on a few notable changes that Songun politics brought to North Korea after 1998. It focusses on the decline of the KWP’s politico-ideological authority and governability after the Cold War ended. The party’s authority over the state ideology of Kimilsungism was destined to lose popularity in the context of the worldwide decline of communism and the death of Kim Il-sung. As the ideological vanguard of Kimilsungism, the KWP lost its authority over the people—both elites and ordinary citizens—when the state was in a dire economic crisis in which millions of people suffered from a chronic shortage of food and other basic necessities, not to mention the seemingly imminent security crisis that came from the American-dominant unipolar moment. In this context, Kim Jong-il made a strategic choice for regime survival by demoting the party and bringing in the military as the vanguard of the juche revolutionary mission. The military garrison state thesis suggests that KPA’s political rise was clearly reflected in personnel changes in key leadership positions across the entire political system, with more senior generals being assigned to key positions and massive promotions taking place in the KPA hierarchy (Horak, 2011).

Furthermore, Songun politics coincided with the political elevation of the National Defense Commission (NDC) as the highest political decision-making body. The NDC was originally founded in 1972 as one subcommittee within the Central People’s Committee, but subsequently emerged as a prominent political organ after Kim Jong-il was elected vice chair of the NDC in 1991 and chair in 1993 (Woo, 2016, pp. 259–260). Likewise, the NDC’s political rise ran parallel to the power succession to Kim Jong-il. The constitutional revision of 1998 designated the NDC as the highest authority of the state’s sovereignty and its chair as the supreme leader who ‘is in charge of the whole of our political, military, and economic capabilities and is the top post of the republic’ (Kihl, 2006, p. 7). Along with the institutional restructuring, Kim Jong-il made the military and defence build-up a national priority, prioritizing the provision of economic benefits to key leaders of the KPA and security agencies in charge of Kim’s regime security (Byman & Lind, 2010). Furthermore, his so-called guidance tours focussed on military- and defence-related facilities and were escorted mostly by the top brass in the KPA (Jung, 2011, p. 127).

The military garrison state argument suggests that Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics and the rise of the KPA’s political influence weakened the dictator’s control over the military and made the country’s military-security policy dangerously adventurous due to the KPA’s hijacking of the policy-making process. It explains Pyongyang’s frequent armed provocations towards South Korea and the development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles as an outgrowth of the KPA-driven policies of Kim Jong-il. The military garrison state argument estimates that the post-Kim Il-sung North Korea political system has been unstable, making a military coup more feasible than before. The argument gained currency in the early years of the Songun era and, in particular, in Western (more specifically, American) academia and policy-making circles.

Sondang Politics: Still the KWP’s Political Supremacy?

Meanwhile, a contrary assessment indicates that Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics was nothing more than a political slogan and his strategic choice for survival; therefore, the KPA remained as the party’s and Suryong’s army. This so-called Sondang argument suggests that Songun politics has not changed Pyongyang’s political system in general and party–army relations in particular. The 1998 constitution first codified Songun politics and stipulated that ‘all state activities must be conducted under the leadership of the KWP’, which was later reaffirmed in the 2010 constitution (Woo, 2014, p. 119). Clearly, the constitution of the Songun era declared the KWP’s political pre-eminence. Although much weakened, the KWP remained at the centre of the political system and directed major policy initiatives, including the military and security sectors.

This Sondang argument is based on the assumption that the party and the military are not separate institutions, but rather closely interconnected and mutually interpenetrated actors, although the party is superior and directs the military. Following the classical theoretical models of civil–military relations that were designed to analyse the Soviet and other communist systems (e.g., Colton’s participation model and Odom’s interest congruence model), this Sondang argument posits that the two institutions are inseparable and linked through interpersonal and inter-institutional penetration (Colton, 1979; Odom, 1978). Furthermore, all political institutions in a communist political system share the same ideology, norms and political objectives; thus, it would be absurd to expect an institutional conflict between the party and the army. In North Korea, the KPA was still the party’s army, and both shared interest in maintaining the dictatorial regime by the Kim family.

The Sondang argument analyses the KPA’s role through Kim Jong-il’s political strategy to secure his regime survival by redefining the military’s mission from the party’s and the people’s army to the Suryong’s army in charge of regime security. Just as the KPA became the backbone of the Kim regime’s survival, the top brass in the military constituted the regime’s key inner circle, or the selectorates, and received numerous benefits in the form of prestige/honour, political power, promotions and/or economic rewards (including luxurious goods and management rights for profit-generating industries; Byman & Lind, 2010). However, such provision of benefits does not mean that the KPA’s political influence was elevated under Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics. Quite to the contrary, the KPA’s regime security role was accompanied by a complex web of institutional and interpersonal control mechanisms to monitor and purge army officers whose political allegiances were in question (Byman & Lind, 2010; Collins, 2015; Jeon, 2000; Woo, 2016). This suggests that the introduction of Songun politics accompanied the political rise of various security institutions—the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS), the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Pyongyang Defense Command, Guard Command and the Military Security Command (MSC) of the KPA—as counterweights to the military. Kim Jong-il created a complex system of checks and balances among these institutions and their leaders to prevent powerful elites and security institutions from colluding in a coup d’état. As a result, the Sondang model argues that Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics ironically further weakened the military’s political influence.

Songun vs. Sondang as Ruling Methods of Choice

Both arguments have significant pitfalls. The military garrison state argument does not take into account the constitutional power and authority given to the party and the party’s supremacy over the military. Moreover, it ignores that the political system in Pyongyang has been built to serve the single dictator, Suryong, and all political organs function to support him. If Songun politics had immensely augmented the KPA’s power and prestige, the top brass in the KPA would have resisted (or even attempted to revolt) when Kim Jong-un introduced several political measures to downgrade the military’s political presence. The current Kim Jong-un regime has purged numerous senior army officers and transferred profitable businesses from the KPA to the KWP and the cabinet, without encountering notable resistance from the military (Park, Choe, Kim, Park, & Jang, 2014). Meanwhile, the Sondang argument aptly points out the KPA’s political weakness under Songun politics. However, the emphasis on the continuity of the party–army relations cannot explain Kim Jong-il himself being highly critical of the KWP and declaring Songun politics as his ruling style. In fact, no one can deny the fact that Songun politics brought about a massive expansion of the KPA’s roles in politics, economy and foreign relations.

Although the two arguments present quite contradictory assessments of the KPA’s political influence and its relationship to the party and the leader, both agree that the party–army relations (or, more specifically, the party’s control over the military) serve as an indicator that mirrors the KPA’s relative power vis-à-vis other institutions in Pyongyang. More specifically, Sondang politics renders the party’s firm control of the military, which indicates that the Pyongyang regime is stable, the dictator’s control over the military is firm, and a military coup is highly unlikely. On the contrary, Songun politics significantly weakens the party’s (and therefore the dictator’s) control over the military, the regime is unstable, and a coup is more likely. The KPA is assumed to be under firm control when the party maintains supremacy over the military, whereas the military is considered more powerful if the party’s control weakens.

Against such widely held judgement, this article argues that the strength or weakness of the KWP’s control over the KPA is not closely associated with the military’s power position in Pyongyang’s political system. Rather, it is a mere reflection of the dictator’s ruling method of choice for regime survival: Kim Jong-il sometimes bypassed the partisan apparatus and mobilized the KPA directly to secure his power; other times, he utilized the partisan establishments for the same purpose. This political logic originates in the nature of Pyongyang’s political regime, which was largely shaped after power struggles that occurred throughout the 1950s through which Kim Il-sung successfully purged rival factions, pronounced juche as the governing ideology, and consolidated his undisputed leadership over the entire political system and the populace.

Since the 1960s, the political system in North Korea has become vastly different from other communist party states in Moscow and Eastern Europe, where the party was the origin of the politico-ideological authority. Although showing major regime characteristics of a communist totalitarian state (including the single party, the official state ideology, and total mobilization and control), political systems in Pyongyang are quite distinct from Moscow’s totalitarian regime. In an ordinary Leninist party–state system, the party commands the highest politico-ideological authority, and a dictator’s political authority originates from and is vindicated by the communist party (Scobell, 2006, p. 18). Thus, the origin of political authority is not the dictator, but the party. In North Korea, however, the relationship is reversed, as the origin of politico-ideological authority is Kim Il-sung (and later Jong-il and Jong-un), who is not constrained institutionally or ideologically. The KWP is the central political organ that carries out the Suryong’s instructions. In Pyongyang’s political system, the party and the military acquire political authority by completely submitting to the dictator.

In the realm of party–army relations, the relative rise and fall of the party’s and the military’s authority have been a mere reflection of the dictator’s political and policy preference. This becomes evident when one examines the historical pattern of party–army relations in North Korea from state-building to the current Kim Jong-un regime. Historically, North Korea experienced three major shifts in party–army relations: first, partisan control of the military in the 1960s through 1997; second, the KPA’s relative autonomy from the party in 1998 through 2008 and, third, back to the partisan control model starting in 2009. The ensuing sections of this article comparatively analyse the first two major shifts that transpired starting in the 1960s and in 1998, respectively. The analysis will clearly illustrate that the different military control methods do not indicate the KPA’s political strength or weakness; rather, they reflect the dictators’ ruling methods of choice and, therefore, the military has never been a dominant political actor in North Korea.

The First Shift: Establishment of Sondang Politics (1948–1960s)

The first party–army relations in North Korea were shaped in the early years of state-building through the 1960s, beginning with the institutional autonomy of the KPA from the party’s control in the 1940s and ending with the establishment of partisan supremacy and control at the end of the 1960s. During this period, party–army relations in North Korea went through three distinct stages of modification. First, at the outset of statehood, the party’s control over the military was virtually non-existent as the former enjoyed institutional autonomy from the latter. During this period, the KPA also lacked institutional cohesiveness due to multiple factions that had formed during the Japanese colonial rule. Second, the political power struggle in the 1950s resulted in fundamental changes in the political power structure in general and the military hierarchy in particular. The power struggle established the undisputed dictatorship of Kim Il-sung and his Manchurian guerrilla forces at the turn of the 1960s, which led to the political rise of the KPA. Finally, Kim Il-sung effectively curbed the armed forces’ political influence by instituting partisan control mechanisms within the military organization in the 1960s. This section discusses these historical changes to illustrate that the KPA’s political rise in the 1960s was a mere outcome of Kim Il-sung’s mobilization of the military for his power struggle and immediately followed by tight partisan control to curb the military’s political influence.

As soon as the Japanese occupation forces withdrew from the Korean peninsula, the Soviet Army occupied the northern half of the territory and installed a Muscovite-communist state by establishing the KPA and the KWP. Initially, Kim Il-sung was not a dominant political figure but rather just one of numerous communist leaders in the post-colonial era; he returned to the motherland not as a national hero, but as a Soviet army officer. However, Kim quickly emerged as a leading political figure for several reasons. The first was support from the Soviet occupation forces, which appointed Kim as the leader of the provisional people’s committee in 1946, enabling him to expand his leadership over the indigenous communist forces. Second, most of the prominent communist leaders had left Pyongyang and based their political activities in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, which was under American occupation. The departure of these leaders made it relatively easy for Kim to climb the power hierarchy in Pyongyang (Oh & Hassig, 2000, p. 83). Finally, his Manchurian guerrilla faction served as the backbone of his power struggle. Although Kim Il-sung and his guerrilla faction were relatively weak in the party, they emerged as a hegemonic force within the KPA. The KPA was officially launched months before the actual inauguration of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and Kim’s guerrilla faction took most of the key positions in the military—including Choi Yong-gun (Supreme Commander of the KPA), Kim Il (Commander of the Department of Culture), Kim Chaek (Commander of the Second Army Corps) and Kang Geon (Chief of General Staff), among others (Suh, 1988, pp. 101–102). These military generals became important political assets for Kim Il-sung’s power struggles in the 1950s, especially Kim’s Manchurian faction’s struggles with the Yanan faction within the KPA, which included—among others—Moo Jeong (Commander of the Artillery Department), Pak Il-woo (Deputy Commander of the Combined Chinese–North Korean Force) and Kim Ung (Vice Minister of Defense; Suh, 1988).

Such a discrepancy—that is, his political weakness in the party versus his dominance in the military—made Kim Il-sung prefer institutional separation between the two institutions. He kept the KPA politically independent of partisan influence because he wanted to use the military as his main political stronghold. At the same time, Kim aimed to block the party elites’ penetration into the military hierarchy because it would further factionalize the KPA along partisan lines and weaken his Manchurian faction’s hegemonic position (Moon & Takesada, 2001, p. 362). Although Kim Il-sung and the KWP installed the General Political Bureau to enable partisan control over the military after the KPA’s miserable defeat in the Korean War, the armed forces’ relative autonomy continued throughout the 1950s.

However, the decade-long power struggles in Pyongyang in the 1950s brought fundamental changes to the entire political system and the KPA’s political role. The power struggles in Pyongyang began immediately after the Korean War ended with an armistice agreement. As the one who initiated the armed attack on South Korea, Kim Il-sung was to take the blame for the war. However, Kim used the failed war to purge his political competitors, beginning with Pak Heon-yeong, the leader of the southern branch of the Korean Communist Party, and other prominent party leaders, charging them with ‘allegedly aiding and abetting the enemy and plotting to replace the Kim regime ...’ (Oh & Hassig, 2000, p. 7).

The power struggle in the 1950s revolved around the post-war construction efforts and adoption of the party’s political and policy lines, which in turn were heavily influenced by external environments in the communist world. The power struggle in Pyongyang clearly reflected political changes in Moscow and Beijing. In Moscow, the death of Joseph Stalin brought about Nikita Khrushchev’s denouncement of his predecessor; in Beijing, intellectuals and party elites criticized Mao Zedong’s policy failures in installing the Soviet-style economic system. Influenced by the changes in their patron states, prominent communist leaders in Pyongyang criticized Kim’s cult of personality and his faction’s monopoly of power. In particular, the Soviet and Yanan faction leaders wanted to adopt a more moderate policy line similar to Khrushchev’s and establish a party-centred collective leadership system (Lankov, 2015, p. 14). With support from Moscow and Beijing, these factions attempted a coup while Kim was on an extended trip to his communist allies in the summer of 1956. This so-called August Incident ended in failure and led to massive purges in the party and the military, which further strengthened Kim’s personal dictatorship.

Kim Il-sung’s monopoly of power in the party engendered important changes in the state ideology and the party–army relations, which later enabled Kim’s undisputed leadership and the hereditary power successions to his son and grandson. Juche as an ideology did not have a clear doctrinal logic, but rather continuously evolved through changing domestic and international circumstances. However, the ideology became an effective tool for Kim to purge his political competitors with the slogan of anti-factionalism and anti-imperialism. With anti-factionalism, Kim was able to purge other factional groups in the party and the military, especially those tied to Beijing, Moscow and the communist party branch in South Korea. With anti-imperialism (i.e., against the United States and Japan), Kim capitalized on his prior position as the leader of anti-Japanese guerrillas fighting in Manchuria. The ideology allowed Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla faction to consolidate its hegemonic position in the party and the military. Concurrently, juche brought to the North Korean society the personality cult that went beyond praising Kim’s personal leadership qualities. Personality cults are commonly found in totalitarian states but, in North Korea, such a cult was extended to a family cult that included Kim’s parents, his wife, his son, and—most recently—his grandson (Yang, 1994, p. 255). Indeed, Bruce Cumings defines Pyongyang’s political system as an Asian version of the neo-socialist corporatist state that departs from orthodox Marxist–Leninist doctrines and builds the society based on hierarchy, organic connection and family (Cumings, 1993, p. 209). At the turn of the 1960s, Kim and his Manchurian faction monopolized power in the party and the military: Among 85 full members of the Central Committee of the KWP, only three Yanan faction members and one Soviet faction member were included; furthermore, only Kim Il-sung’s faction in the military represented the KPA Central Committee (Moon & Takesada, 2001, p. 363).

The Manchurian faction’s rise in the party and the military-transformed Pyongyang’s political system from the previous Muscovite party-centred system to one that Kim Il-sung positioned above the political, legal and ideological authorities. At the same time, it brought about inter-institutional integration between the party and the military as well as the former’s institutional control over the latter at the outset of the 1960s. Kim Il-sung’s decision to strengthen partisan control over the military came after the August Incident, in which a number of KPA officers joined the coup attempt to depose Kim. After the incident, the KWP’s Central Committee decided to strengthen the party’s control over the military by instituting the party committee at all levels of the KPA, beginning in 1958 and being completed in 1961. Previously, the KPA had maintained a unitary command system through the Ministry of National Defense (from the Defense Minister at the top through the lowest military units). Now, the General Political Bureau was in charge of a partisan command system, dispatching political commissars to all military units. As a result, political commissars were deployed to all KPA units at the corps through regiment levels, with political guiding officers at the lower units (Woo, 2014, p. 120).

Meanwhile, the Kim regime created the Military Committee within the KWP’s Central Committee, and Kim became chair of the committee in 1962. As the highest military leadership organization installed in the party, it allowed Kim to direct the KPA’s organizational structure, doctrines and other military-related policy-making. At the beginning, the Military Committee was one of several subcommittees within the Central Committee of the KWP. In 1980, it was renamed the Central Military Commission (CMC) and its political status was further elevated as it was made independent of, and equal to, the Central Committee of the KWP. One interesting aspect of the CMC’s ascendance is that it was accompanied by the power succession to Kim Jong-il and establishment of his authority over the KPA in the 1970s through the 1980s.

The two institutions—namely CMC within the party and the General Political Bureau in the KPA hierarchy—served as the central partisan tools to control the military throughout Kim Il-sung’s rule. Kim Il-sung survived the 1950s’ political power struggles and established his undisputed leadership, thanks to the KPA and his Manchurian faction. Yet at the same time, his faction’s political monopoly within the KPA was followed by the installation of partisan control mechanisms over the military as a part of Kim’s ruling method.

The Second Shift: From Sondang to Songun (1998–2008)

It is interesting to note that the KWP played a vital role in bolstering Kim Il-sung’s undisputed authority in political and ideological leadership, hereditary power succession to his son Jong-il, and the younger Kim’s consolidation of power through the party organs. Kim Jong-il rose to power as a designated successor by controlling key party leadership positions, such as the head of the Organization and Guidance Department (OGD) and the Propaganda and Agitation Department, dating back to the early 1970s. Kim’s first political mission was to promote his father’s juche ideology to the official state ideology of Kimilsungism and indoctrinate the entire populace—including party elites, military officers and ordinary people—with the ideology by brainwashing them using the ‘Ten Principles for a Monolithic Ideological System’ (Lim, 2012, p. 561). In establishing his authority over the KPA, Kim Jong-il utilized the OGD (often called ‘the party within the party’) to establish his political supremacy by appointing high-ranking officials in the party and the military, carrying out ideological indoctrination, and inspecting other state apparatuses (Jeon, 2009). The hereditary succession became official in 1980, when Kim was elected as a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and the CMC, the highest partisan organ in charge of security and military affairs. Likewise, the three-decade-long power succession in North Korea proceeded through the party organs, as Kim Jong-il made efforts to strengthen party discipline and the party’s superiority over the military.

In this sense, it was ironic that Kim Jong-il completely nullified his prior political efforts to strengthen party discipline by declaring Songun politics in 1998. Why did Kim Jong-il suddenly abandon his political dependence on the party and align with the military? Was his Songun politics a sign of political weakness and a lack of ability to control the KPA? How much did Kim’s Songun politics elevate the military’s political clout in the Kim Jong-il and Jong-un regimes? As argued in the preceding sections, Songun politics cannot be interpreted as the KPA’s political ascendance because the military has always been politically weak and a mere servant of the Kim family. This section will explain why Kim Jong-il declared Songun politics, whether it brought about the ascendance of the KPA’s political influence, and what made the military remain politically weak.

In a sense, Kim’s abandonment of the KWP in the 1990s was a testament to his leadership failure in the party. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kim tried to create a party-centred political structure in which the party assumed the leading role in espousing juche as the governing ideology and the key organ carrying out the revolutionary mission defined by the Suryong. By the time of his father’s death, however, he had realized that the KWP could not perform the mission in hostile internal and external environments, including the end of the Cold War and the concomitant decline of communism worldwide, the leadership crisis following his father’s death, and the economic difficulties that caused massive famine and led to citizens’ defection to neighbouring countries. Although Pyongyang’s elites managed to survive the downfall of their communist comrades, juche was unable to function as a utopian ideology to build a militarily strong and economically prosperous nation (the so-called Gangsongdaeguk). Even worse, the KWP consisted of a group of old crooks from the first-generation guerrilla faction of his father’s era that had no willingness to reform; old and corrupt, the party itself was the source of all problems with ‘bureaucratic indolence, arrogance and rampant corruption’ (Woo, 2014, p. 47). Certainly, Kim Jong-il may have realized that he would be unable to survive such internal and external difficulties through the party-centred political system.

Kim Jong-il had a three-year interval between his father’s death in 1994 and the official declaration of his leadership in 1997 due to challenges from every quarter of the country, including diplomatic isolation, economic difficulties, frequent natural disasters and chronic famine, and massive defections to neighbouring countries. These dire challenges to the security of the state and the regime forced Kim to proclaim the beginning of his era with the slogan of Songun politics. At the heart of the idea was that he would put the KPA (and not the KWP) at the forefront of his rule and identify the armed forces as the vanguard of the juche revolutionary mission. Kim’s immediate concern was not to deal with the people’s livelihood through extensive socio-economic reform, but rather to pass the burden of the problem to the people in order to focus on his own political survival. The Pyongyang regime substituted its long-term strategies of political and economic reform for a ‘muddling through’ strategy in which scarce resources were ‘channeled to politically influential groups and individuals, either openly or through corruption’ (Noland, 1997, p. 117). The regime’s survival through that muddling through became possible by redefining the KPA’s raison d’être as the armed organ for the new leader and his political zeal for a Gangsongdaeguk. With Songun politics, the KPA became the principal agent for Kim Jong-il’s political stronghold.

Kim Jong-il proclaimed the KPA as ‘the most patriotic, creative, and effective institution in society most capable of realizing the juche ideology’ (Cho, 2005, p. 95). It was not the proletariat or the vanguard communist party, but the military that was in charge of building a strong and prosperous nation with the highest spirit and determination. Kim Jong-il once declared that ‘the party is the very army and the army is the very party … the army is the people, the state, and the party … without the army, there will be no party, no state, and no people’ (Jeon, 2000, p. 768). Under Songun politics, the KPA experienced massive role expansion from its traditional role of national defence to the management of the national economy and, ultimately, the security of the Kim regime (S. Kim, 2006, p. 82).

Songun politics brought about an institutional separation between the party and the military and the latter’s institutional autonomy from the former, similar to the pre-1960s era in which Kim Il-sung maintained institutional autonomy of the KPA from the KWP. This led many North Korean experts to estimate that the separation raised the KPA’s socio-political status and even to suggest that the party and the military ‘were rebalanced as peer organizations’ (McEachern, 2010, p. 78) or that the KPA had become the de facto ruler of North Korea (I. Kim, 2006, p. 61). They further argue that if the pre-Songun era sustained a hierarchy of political authority by maintaining the party’s supremacy over the KPA, Songun politics made the party and the military equal organs or the latter more powerful. To demote the party’s relative authority vis-à-vis the military, Kim Jong-il immobilized key party organs such as the KWP’s Central Committee, the Politburo (and Standing Committee) and the CMC. Ultimately, the party organs could not make important decisions, as the KWP became a non-functioning organ; instead, the NDC assumed the major decision-making roles.

However, one cannot simply argue that Songun politics made the KPA politically influential and weakened Kim Jong-il’s control over the military, although the KWP’s control mechanisms were non-functioning. The 1998 constitution, which first codified Songun politics, declared that ‘the DPRK and the entire Korean people will uphold the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung … the juche revolution under the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea’ (Kihl, 2006, p. 7). The same constitution named Kim Il-sung eternal president and made the NDC the political institution with the highest political authority as well as the NDC chair the national leader. Many observers identify the NDC as a decision-making institution built within the KPA; yet it was not a mere military organ but rather a decision-making body that included a small number of key elites from the party, the military and the cabinet. The NDC functioned as the highest decision-making body by invalidating the key partisan institutions, including the Central Committee, CMC and the Politburo (Standing Committee). However, the fourth session of the 13th Supreme People’s Assembly held in June 2016 abolished the NDC and created the State Affairs Commission as the highest political authority, which Kim Jong-un currently chairs.

Along with the institutional alterations, Kim Jong-il created a delicate system of interpersonal management to secure his personalistic control over the high-ranking officials in the party, the military and especially security institutions. With Songun politics, Kim Jong-il reversed his father’s style of managing the government. Until his death, Kim Il-sung relied on inter-departmental coordination and communication by appointing an official to multiple positions across different agencies. For instance, O Jun-u, the third highest political figure after Kim Il-sung and Jong-il, concomitantly occupied numerous positions across the party and the military, including Director of the General Political Bureau, Chief of General Staff, member of the Central Committee of the KWP, and member of the Politburo. However, Kim Jong-il maintained the political system by compartmentalizing the institutions and personnel appointments, making inter-institutional and interpersonal communication for policy coordination virtually impossible. Instead, Kim let them engage in inter-institutional and interpersonal competition for loyalty and recognition from him. Compartmentalization of the government effectively disconnected horizontal inter-departmental/interpersonal coordination and, instead, allowed coordination only through the single dictator (Jeon, 2000). Such a system prevented the horizontal flow of information across different institutions and their leaders. At the same time, Kim granted more power to security institutions, such as the MPS, the MSS and the Defense Security Command (DSC) of the KPA, as counterweights to the seemingly influential army officers (not to mention severe competition among the security institutions for Kim’s recognition). As a result, Kim Jong-il maximized his authority over all political institutions and micromanaged key personnel in the party, the military and the cabinet.

In addition to the compartmentalization of government branches and inter-institutional competition, Kim Jong-il adopted a delicate system of interpersonal checks and balances to prevent anti-Kim collusion from emerging. In the early years of his Songun politics, he placed several of the Manchurian guerrilla leaders of his father’s generation or their subsequent generation in the highest positions across government institutions. Although they were positioned at the top of each agency, they were not necessarily the most powerful figures, but rather symbolically honourable celebrities. Instead, Kim appointed his close confidants to the number two (or three) positions next to the old leaders and let them exercise the real decision-making power. Kim Jong-il bypassed the organizational hierarchy by communicating with his confidants, receiving reports from and giving orders to them directly (S. Kim, 2006, p. 103). He appointed his close aides to serve in these institutions, especially graduates of his alma mater, the Mankyungdae Revolutionary Academy, and those who had studied in Moscow or Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s (Woo, 2014, p. 122). As a result of these inter-institutional and interpersonal checks and balances, the KPA came under the dictator’s tight control and remained politically weak throughout the Songun era. Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics created a gap between his slogan that made the KPA the leading institution for the juche revolutionary mission and the KPA’s actual political weakness throughout Kim’s rule.

Conclusions: The Third Shift under Kim Jong-un

Kim Jong-il’s health problems forced him to prepare for a sudden power succession to his youngest son, Jong-un, who was in his mid-twenties and had virtually no political career or military background. The hereditary succession to the young and inexperienced leader led many onlookers to anticipate the possibility of political turmoil, or even a military coup. Such an expectation was based on the estimation about the outgrowth of the KPA’s political influence under Songun politics. Contrary to such expectations, however, there has been no prominent symptom of political commotion—or at least no sign of political resistance—from the KPA. The lack of military resistance to Kim Jong-un was puzzling to many Pyongyang watchers, given that the current Kim has drastically relegated the KPA’s political and economic power.

A few plausible explanations can be proffered. The first is Kim Jong-il’s preventive measures to curb the KPA’s political clout after 2008; he made decisions to restore the KWP’s authority and reduce the KPA’s political role. After his health problems emerged, Kim Jong-il tried to ensure the power succession through party organs by restoring the decision-making authority of key partisan institutions, including the Politburo (Standing Committee), the KWP’s Central Committee, and the CMC. The power rebalancing preceded the hereditary succession. The second explanation is the caretaker role of his uncle, Jang Sung-taek, until Kim Jong-un gained control over the party and the military. Until Jang was purged in December 2013, Kim Jong-un depended on his uncle’s political clout. Finally, the elites in the military may have had a common interest in maintaining regime stability by keeping Kim Jong-un as their leader. If that is the case, the current Kim may have been a political marionette and his regime may be extremely volatile.

Against these explanations, the analysis in this article reveals that the KPA has never been a politically influential institution to the point that it could threaten the three Kims’ political leadership. The current Kim’s attempts to strengthen the party vis-à-vis the military have not backfired with the KPA leadership, who has remained silent. Upon assuming political leadership from his father, Kim Jong-un has taken bold steps to limit the KPA’s role—reducing the number of officers in key positions in the party and the cabinet, frequently reshuffling high-ranking generals, carrying out unpredictable purges and demotions of officers, and—most importantly—relocating management rights over several profitable businesses from the KPA to the party and cabinet. Certainly, after these power rebalancing efforts, there is no sign that Kim Jong-un’s political power status and the overall political system have weakened or become unstable (Grice, 2017; Yea, 2017).

The political institutional and personnel changes that Kim Jong-un implemented focussed on curtailing the KPA’s political influence. Kim Jong-un’s institutional reforms strengthened major party organs, such as the KWP Central Committee, the Politburo (Standing Committee), and the CMC. While Kim Jong-il made important political decisions through the NDC and did not even convene the Politburo and the CMC until 2008, Kim Jong-un made and announced important political decisions through these party institutions. Moreover, the younger Kim reduced KPA’s presence in these party institutions and replaced them with party and cabinet officials who are younger and more reform minded. For example, the 7th Party Congress, held in 2016, elected Politburo members that included only one KPA general in the Standing Committee (Madden, 2016). One of the notable elites who symbolize Kim Jong-un’s political overhaul is Pak Pong-ju, who had previously served as premier (2003–2007) and performed economic reforms under Kim Jong-il but was purged and had disappeared from the political hierarchy. Kim Jong-un brought him back to Pyongyang to lead the economic reform, and he currently occupies leading political positions across the party and the cabinet. At present, Pak is the premier (head of the government), member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the CMC, and member of the State Affairs Commission (SAC) that replaced the NDC. Pak is the one who manages inter-institutional collaboration for economic reforms.

Equally important, Kim Jong-un abolished the NDC that had been the symbol of his father’s Songun politics and created the SAC in 2016. As the highest political organ under Songun politics, the NDC had been filled with KPA leadership; in 1998, nine NDC members included seven KPA officers and two civilians (the two civilians—Yeon Hyong-muk and Chon Byong-ho—also led defence-related industries; Suh, 2002, p. 154). However, the new SAC was significantly weakened compared to its predecessor and curtailed KPA officers’ power; out of 12 members, there are only three army generals. The overall pattern of the institutional and personnel changes under Kim Jong-un revolved around power rebalancing between the party and the military, that is, restoration of the KWP’s authority and reduction of the KPA’s political role during the Songun era.

Kim Jong-un’s institutional reforms and personnel reshuffling were followed by changes in policy directions, called ‘the Byungjin line’ that links pursuit of WMD to economic development. Since the term was codified in the 2013 constitution, the Byongjin line replaced Kim Jong-il’s Songun politics and became North Korea’s new policy direction. In November 2017, North Korea declared that it finally completed the WMD programme, including nuclear weapons and inter-continental missiles that can reach North America—Washington DC. An equally important policy objective for Kim Jong-un has been the visible improvement in the national economy that has been in constant crisis mainly due to ever-toughening sanctions by the international community. At the 7th Party Congress, Kim Jong-un announced a five-year economic development plan that will focus on the civilian sector economy to improve the people’s living conditions (Madden, 2016).

What does this finding say about the current Kim Jong-un regime? The current Kim regime is far more stable than many outsiders may think, and a military coup is highly unlikely at this moment. Although predicting the occurrence of a coup is extremely difficult, one can assess the possibilities of a coup in Pyongyang based on the ways in which political power has been structured and the major political institutions—especially the party and the military—are controlled by the single dictator. There has been no visible opposition from the KPA ever since Kim Jong-un implemented a major political overhaul to cut the military’s political influence as well as its business interests. This symbolically reveals the KPA’s political weakness in post-Kim Il-sung North Korea.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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