EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper No. 20

Author

Jin-Ha Kim is a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU). He was formerly a visiting professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security (IFANS). Dr. Kim received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2009. His research interests lie in comparative authoritarianism, bureaucratic dictatorship, post-socialist transition, and the North Korean political economy. His recent works on North Korea include “On the Threshold of Power, 2011/12: Pyongyang’s Politics of Transition” (Forthcoming), International Journal of Korean Unification Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (December 2011); “North Korea’s Leadership Structure and Post-Socialist Transition: Comparing with the Cases of Vietnam and Romania” (in Korean and co-authored with Moon-Hee Song), Unification Policy Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (June 2011); and “Reopening the Six-Party Talks: Prospects and North Korea’s Likely Negotiating Strategies Following the US-China Summit” (in Korean), KDI Review of the North Korean Economy (May 2011).

I. Introduction

At the third Delegates’ Conference of the North Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), held on September 28, 2010, the third-generation hereditary succession of Kim Jong-Un, Kim Jong-Il’s third son, was officially declared. This news reignited the perennial debate between the collapsists (Noland 2004, 12-19; Litwak 2007) and the resilientists regarding whether the Kimist (Buzo 1999) autocracy will survive the presumably conflict-ridden process of leadership transition. Collapsists call attention to the structural vulnerabilities of the personalist regime. One scholar argues that as power succession struggles intensify, the “regime tends to crack along the lines of personal loyalties and ‘estate inheritance’” (Mansourov 2007, 51). On the other hand, refuting the predictions of serious disruption, resilientists emphasize the regime’s durability, buttressed by persistent ruling and coercive institutions (Kihl 2007, 3-33). As Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind (2010) note, the autocratic iron cage has been vigilantly guarded, with many effective “tools of authoritarian control.” It is thus expected that “despite all of the obstacles Kim Jong-Un must overcome as he ascends the throne,” the regime will nevertheless manage to maintain stability (Lind 2010). Another resilientist even believes that “the succession seems to be going smoothly” (Chinoy 2011).

The resilientists’ arguments are apparently supported by the earlier experience of the Kimist regime’s survival in the initial hereditary succession process after Kim Il-Sung’s death in 1994. However, before assessing the potential effects of the impending third-generation succession on North Korea, we first need to solve the puzzle of why no modern republic-style autocracy has ever completed a leadership transfer to a third-generation hereditary autocrat (Brownlee 2007b). As Jason Brownlee shows, of the hundreds of potential candidates, only a few autocracies have cleared the thorny hurdle of the first succession to second-generation offspring. Even those few that have proved their persistence by passing the initial test failed to survive long enough to complete the next succession to a third-generation dictatorship.

What makes hereditary succession so rare? What prevents second-generation autocrats from handing down their thrones to their offspring as their fathers did? The first suffocates the next. The succession from father to son makes infeasible the next hereditary succession of the grandson. The reason seems to be that the initial succession over-consolidates personalist regimes to such an extent that the continuation of hereditary succession is no longer feasible.

Hereditary succession is a counterstrategy employed preemptively to cope with a fatal crisis of leadership transition in newly founded autocracies. This succession is feasible only when two conditions are met concurrently. The first condition is that coherently organized ruling institutions should be present. Effective institutions enforce hereditary succession. Mobilizing mass support, a competent ruling party consolidates the elites and constituencies to promote the attainment of the collective action needed for the smooth transfer of power. This process also organizationally produces reassuring effects for the security of elites after the succession. On the other hand, cohesive military and state coercive agencies repress the opposition within and without (Foran 1993, 3-27; Slater 2003, 81-101; Bellin 2005, 21-41). The second condition is that power must be concentrated in the predecessor to such a degree that he monopolizes decision-making authority and mobilizes ruling organizations. Only a few extraordinarily powerful autocrats have been able to satisfy both conditions at the same time, wielding “the power to make decisions” and “to enforce” them simultaneously (Slater 2010, 138). Therefore hereditary autocracy is rare.

In implementing hereditary succession, a regime’s tendency toward personalization is exacerbated. The successor’s survival strategy accelerates the predecessor’s patrimonial drive to minimize institutional autonomy so that, while the retinues’ vulnerability to his discretion is maximized, the rise of rivals entrenched in ruling institutions is prevented. This process inevitably deinstitutionalizes the regime to such an extent that the latter can survive only with the presence of a dictator who personally acts out the functions of institutions. Absentee dictatorship becomes impossible. When a personalist program succeeds, institutions decay. When it fails, rivals prevail. Whether it succeeds or not, it is thus least likely that the given autocracy concurrently meets the aforementioned two feasibility conditions of hereditary succession, especially when the incumbent dictator is debilitated. In that case, no hereditary succession is feasible.

In order to test the explaining power of the proposed “Second-Time-Unlucky” hypothesis based upon an auto-destructive logic of autocratic hereditary succession, this paper mainly surveys nine cross-national cases of hereditary autocracies: the Trujillos of the Dominican Republic (r. 1930-61), the Duvaliers of Haiti (r. 1957-86), the Somozas of Nicaragua (r. 1936-79), the Chiangs of Taiwan (r. 1949-88, the Kims of North Korea (r. 1948-present), the Assads of Syria (r. 1971- ), the Lees of Singapore (r. 1965- ), the Aliyevs of Azerbaijan (r. 1993- ), and the Gnassingbés of Togo (r. 1967- ). In the last four cases, the incumbent second-generation hereditary rulers are currently in power. Of them, Kim Jong-Il alone has formally set in motion a third-generation succession plan. A review of the past trajectories of these regimes can also explore the explanatory validity of the hypothesis.

The cross-national selection and examination of the cases allow us to examine potential alternative explanations for the rise and demise of hereditary succession. The cases are selected naturally. Of “258 post-World War II autocrats who ruled for at least three years” (Brownlee 2007b, 597), only nine of them managed to hand down the throne to a hereditary successor. The selected nine hereditary autocracies had diverse cultural, religious, and historical (and colonial) legacies. They can be conspicuously differentiated by economic fragility, ideological orientation, and human development. Even if the lack of a strong civil society characterizes the nine cases, most nonhereditary postwar autocracies have weak civil societies, signifying that all the enumerated factors are not decisive in explaining the rise and fall of hereditary autocracies. Contrastingly, as proposed in the second-time-unlucky hypothesis, the nine hereditary autocracies started with a powerful dictator and an effective party with robust coercive institutions, concurrently meeting the aforementioned two feasible conditions of hereditary succession. Before their final dissolution, four of them had degenerated into “sultanistic regimes” (Chehabi and Linz 1998a, 3-25), with decayed institutions. The remnant five regimes currently ruled by the founders’ sons also display identifiable tendencies of institutional de-routinization or debilitated dictatorship, providing grounds for future testing. All suggest the relatively stronger explanatory, predictive, and falsifiable potentialities of the second-time-unlucky hypothesis.

The synoptic survey of the cases is then supported by a focused investigation of the case of the North Korean regime. Reinforced by an application of a structured contingency approach, which highlights reciprocal interactions between the institutional precedents and agential actors, we can map North Korea’s trajectories into and out of personal dictatorship, tracking the past transition from a Stalinist single-party system to “sultanistic dictatorship” (Huntington 1991, 112), which was triggered by the hereditary succession to Kim Jong-Il. Beyond the debate about regime collapse, it allows us to anticipate that, in the current context of “post-totalitarian” (McEachern 2010) decay, the impending third-generation succession could precipitate another transition. Analyzing the Kim Jong-Un ascension plan with balanced titrations of such factors as the patrimonial legacies and the distribution of power among major actors and agencies, more plausible transition routes can be discerned. Whether by negotiation or by violence, the next transition is likely to invite either a single-party-based oligarchy or a military regime, neither of which is likely to produce stability due to the country’s institutional lack of binding precedents and commitments...(Continued)