| Chapter 1: | The Culture and Ideology of the DPRK |
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political climate proved ideal for Pyongyang’s adopting ultranationalism as the foundation of juche ideology.
Nationalism in the mid-1960s was still primarily “antiforeignism” and lacked a coherent philosophical structure. But as the ideology was refined in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, a set of goals and strategies for implementing nationalism was articulated. Specifically, juche was defined in terms of three analytically distinct objectives: political sovereignty, economic subsistence, and military self-defense. The aim of political sovereignty forced the regime to limit political and diplomatic ties, maintaining relations only with countries that Pyongyang found ideologically compatible and thus restricting foreign relations to a handful of socialist countries. It was in this period that North Korea campaigned against the South for superiority in legitimacy. Overwhelmed by nationalist sentiment, authorities in Pyongyang believed that the Seoul regime could be overthrown by its own masses on the grounds that the South lacked nationalist solidarity and thus political legitimacy. The North Korean government held that the people in the South would be induced to participate in an antiregime mass movement only if the trigger were pulled to disrupt the precarious stability. The infiltration of the Blue House (the presidential residence in Seoul) by a North Korean commando unit in 1968 could be interpreted as an expression of Pyongyang’s determination to disturb political stability in hopes of inciting mass uprisings against the Park Chung Hee regime.6
The policies of economic self-reliance have deterred economic growth, causing North Korea to fall further behind its neighboring countries, especially South Korea. This period happened to coincide with the high-growth years of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) and the “Asian tigers,” which included South Korea. All these countries employed the export-led strategy for economic growth. Instead of promoting balanced growth, as North Korea did, the NICs concentrated their efforts on producing export goods that would be competitive in the international market. But North Korea alienated itself from the world’s