EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper No. 2

Author
Jihwan Hwang is an assistant professor of North Korean Studies at Myongji University, Seoul, Korea. Professor Hwang was a research fellow at the Institute for Unification Studies of Seoul National University.

His research interests include East Asian international relations and security studies, focusing on the North Korean nuclear crisis. His main concern is how to explain North Korea’s foreign policy in terms of international relations theories.

He published numerous articles, and his recent publications include “International Relations Theory and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” “Offensive Realism, Weaker States, and Windows of Opportunity: The Soviet Union and North Korea in Comparative Perspective,” “The Second Nuclear Crisis and U.S. Foreign Policy,” and “Rethinking the East Asian Balance of Power.” Professor Hwang received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Explaining the mindset of the North Korean regime has been a difficult, if not the most difficult, assignment for scholars and policy-makers who study North Korea. Without this understanding, negotiations often go nowhere and confrontations may escalate into a crisis because the situation is misread. Some have characterized North Korea as aggressive, reckless, and irrational (Downs 1999; Cha 2002; Bush 2002), while others have tried to pinpoint its unique internal logic and motives (Snyder 1999; Kang 2003). Although many have sought to explain Pyongyang’s perspectives and policy attitudes, they have still main-tained that North Korea is irrational by nature and have been unable to explain the North’s own version of consistency. Even though some try to explain North Korea’s behavior in a systematic way, they assume that Pyongyang has adopted a single national strategy—of either confrontation or engagement (Sigal 1998; see also Cha and Kang 2003). Some argue that North Korea has never departed from its rogue nature, because the real nature of the regime has not changed at all but remains confrontational and irrational. On the other hand, those who argue that North Korea is ready to change its course of action if the United States and South Korea move first do not really explain North Korea’s eccentricities for Western society. Although proponents of both arguments are concerned with Pyongyang’s behavior and policies, they have failed to read the North Korean mind and explain how North Korean leaders think and why they behave in a certain way as they do. Aside from the question of whether the real nature of the North Korean regime has changed or not, it is important to understand the main factors that determine Pyongyang’s internal and external perceptions and behavior in terms of its own concept of rationality.

This paper emphasizes the importance of the concepts of “saving face” and “reference points” in assessing North Korea’s strategies. The concept of face-saving has often been discussed in explaining North Korea’s negotiating behavior (Snyder 1999; Sigal 2006; Zissis 2007). It is said that because the North Korean people have great self-respect, they cannot tolerate humiliation. The North Korean regime is understood to be willing to fight, even in an unfavorable situation, because it prefers saving face to being bullied. This attitude is thought to somewhat explain Pyongyang’s aggressiveness and brinkmanship.

However, it is unreasonable to say that North Korea tries to save face at all costs. Al-though the North always wants to save face, it is not likely to sacrifice strategic values or a specific objective in all circumstances. It is, rather, a very practical regime and makes every effort to maximize its own benefit. This does not mean that Pyongyang is always ready to accept the risk of being bullied and losing face in order to win some benefit. Both face-saving and gaining an objective are important to the North Korean regime. Ideally, it would like to save face and gain an objective simultaneously, but there must be many occasions where the leaders have to sacrifice one for the other. How and why does the North Korean regime make these choices? Regime choices may look irrational by Western standards, but may be rational in terms of the North’s way of thinking. Thus, it is necessary to understand the North Korean point of view regarding its strategic environment.

In order to explain the North Korean mindset, I hypothesize that North Korea’s face-saving is closely connected with gaining an objective or benefit. A corollary is that the North Korean regime is more likely to feel humiliated when it believes that it has failed to gain the benefit that it originally sought or expected. To explore this hypothesis, I turn to the concept of a “reference point.”

A reference point is a cost that people view as the limit of what they can concede—that is, they can concede no more than the cost involved. When people gain more than they expect, they are happy. When the outcome falls short of what they originally anticipated, however, they are disappointed. This reaction may be particularly true of North Korea. If the North Korean regime achieves its reference point, it will be satisfied. But if its reference point is threatened or appears impossible to attain, the North is likely to be seriously provoked and become aggressive, because it may feel that it has lost face. Thus the identification of the reference point is critical in understanding Pyongyang’s strategic mindset. Further, the reference point helps us understand the North Korean regime not by its emotional features but by its rational calculation of costs and benefits. The regime may often display unexpected behaviors to save face, but most of these actions can be explained in terms of the reference point, that is, the costs and benefits for North Korea from its perspective.

In short, I posit that recognizing Pyongyang’s reference points provides a more accu-rate picture of North Korea’s internal and external perceptions and behavior. We can iden-tify the reference points by examining not only the North Korean regime’s objective situa-tion on the Korean Peninsula but also its official perceptions and statements in the North Korean media such as the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmum and the Korean Central News Agency. In the next sections, I will discuss the concepts of face-saving and the refer-ence point, and then explain North Korea’s strategic assessments in 2009. In the final section, I will survey the reference point gap on the Peninsula and provide policy recommendations to resolve the gap and move forward...(Continued)