So how, apparently against all the
odds and so many theories and understandings of how the world is supposed to
work, has North Korea continued to hang on? According to Jay Ulfelder, a
Washington, DC-based political scientist and blogger who studies regime stability, North
Korean-style one-party dictatorships are adept at insulating and perpetuating
themselves. "These really closed authoritarian regimes that don't have a
history of recent coup activity stick around for a long time," Ulfelder told me.
For such a unique system like North
Korea's, the recent history of apparently similar countries (remember Manning's
reference to Romania?) has little predictive power. Take, for instance, the belief
that North Korean reformists were capable of changing the character of the
regime. "The whole body of theorizing about democratic transitions from the
late '80s and early '90s made the claim that those transitions always began
because of splits between hardliners and soft-liners," says Ulfelder. "People
took that as a predictor when in fact it really was just descriptive." Even the
most authoritarian governments have reformists somewhere in their ranks. But, for
Ulfelder, "the question is what are the conditions under which that reform-minded
group becomes powerful enough to win the eternal fights and enact reform-minded
changes?"
The consequences of North Korea's
collapse would be incredibly messy, possibly even catastrophic. As Kaplan explained,
it would mean integrating 25 million very poor North Koreans into much richer South
Korea, winding down decades of propaganda that told North Koreans to hate and
fear the world, dismantling one of the largest political prison systems in the
world, and liquidating an enormous, nuclear-armed military. Perhaps, Ulfelder
suggests, analysts might be unintentionally inflating the chances of North
Korea's collapse precisely because its consequences would be so severe -- a
feedback loop that psychologists refer to as an "affect heuristic."
"With North Korea, we're so scared of
the country falling apart that this 'affect heuristic' drives people away from
a more data-based forecast," Ulfelder says. "They make the mistake of treating their
level of uncertainty as the level of probability of the event happening ... we
have a tendency to substitute how scared
we are of that happening with an estimate for how likely it is of that
happening."
If this is in fact what's happening,
then couldn't that actually be a good thing? Had the worst-case happened and
North Korea actually fallen in the mid-'90s, the world would have been that
much more prepared, thanks to the scholarly literature and expertise fueled by
the the world's fears. The "effect heuristic" might partially explain the many
false (or maybe just premature) predictions of North Korea's doom, but it also
means we'll all be a lot readier if and when it actually happens.
But this is North Korea, and there isn't
really such thing as a best-case scenario. For now, those 25 million North
Koreans are still living in an impoverished totalitarian state, and the
millions more in South Korea and Japan have still got a twitchy, nuclear-argued
rogue state next door. As
the Crisis Group report makes clear, North Korea is a regional and domestic
catastrophe whether it changes or not.