North Korea's Clash of Cultures

Abstract

IntroductionAccording to Samuel Huntington's widely discussed thesis of the clash of civilizations, conflicts in the post-Cold War era will be driven by differences in culture rather than differences in political ideology.1 Today, North Korea is undergoing its own domestic clash of cultures; in fact, this is the country's second culture clash in modern times, and it may prove to be the beginning of the end for the Kim regime.We two authors are not anthropologists, and we do not claim to be offering a definitive analysis of the cultures that contend in North Korea today. If we are covering ground that other scholars have already explored, we apologize to them, but perhaps there are others like ourselves who are not familiar with Korea's social science literature and who will therefore find this concept or our treatment of it to be not entirely redundant.Culture provides the framework in which people define themselves and pursue their life goals. Culture is usually taken for granted because it is shared by the people who live in it. Only when they travel to places in which different cultures predominate or meet people from those places, or when their own culture changes rapidly, do people take notice of their culture-and often rush to defend it. This not to say that everyone in a country lives in exactly the same culture: there are anomalies and variations from individual to individual and between people living in different subcultures.An important characteristic of culture is that it is an organized structure in which one part is compatible with another. For example, if the culture worships animals, it is not likely to be a meat-eating culture. If it highly values religion, it will have many churches. Culture is often viewed as consisting of values (what people think is good and bad), norms (written and unwritten rules about how to behave), and material goods (everything from food and household appliances to architecture). Although it is true that they usually change very slowly, cultures are by no means static. Perhaps the easiest way to see how cultures change is to compare the lives of the younger with the older generation. The youngsters often think and behave differently from their elders, and acquire different possessions. Yet even though young people may live in a somewhat different culture, they often gradually become assimilated to the established adult culture as they grow older, changing it less than one might expect.Three cultures coexist in North Korea today. The original culture is based on Confucianism, and this culture is largely overlaid by succeeding cultures. Beginning in the late 1940s, Confucianism (under Japanese colonial rule) was forcibly replaced by communist culture-specifically, Stalinism as interpreted by Kim Il-sung. Then in the late 1980s-Pyongyang's World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989 may mark the beginning-Western, or what communists like to call "bourgeois" culture, began to make an appearance, especially in the lives of younger citizens living in Pyongyang. In his long-running battle to eradicate bourgeois culture, Kim Jong-il has characterized its arrival as "imperialist pollution," blaming its coming on the evil designs of the United States and like-minded countries. Kim's battle against bourgeois culture has not gone well; every year it spreads further, replacing the communist culture.In the following pages we provide an overview of the arrival of bourgeois culture and how it is resisted by the Kim regime. We discuss why the regime fears bourgeois culture, why it is likely to replace communism, and what the implications of the new culture might be for Kim, the country, and North Korea's relations with the world.Traditional CultureThe principal characteristics of North (and South) Korea's traditional Confucian culture (or neo-Confucian culture, to include aspects of Buddhism and Taoism) are well known, even though the culture has largely disappeared. …