advertisement
Vietnam seemed like the perfect place for Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to meet in late February for their latest summit on denuclearisation.
At Hanoi’s posh Metropole Hotel, Trump hoped to convince Kim to abandon nuclear weapons in exchange for lifting US sanctions against North Korea, which would spur needed economic development.
Starvation remains common in North Korea, where 10.5 of its 25 million people are undernourished.
Meanwhile, Vietnam – once one of the world’s poorest countries – has prospered. Its communist government introduced free-market reforms in the late 1980s after the failure of its Soviet-style planned economy, permitting the private ownership of businesses and farms after years of controlling all markets.
Referencing Vietnam’s economic success story, President Trump wrote on Twitter on 8 February: “With complete Denuclearisation, North Korea will rapidly become an Economic Powerhouse” too.
As a historian, I disagree with Trump’s view that Vietnam is the blueprint for North Korea.
I am currently writing a college textbook on the history of Germany, my country of birth. The Vietnam summit came while I was focused on the chapter about East Germany’s transition, in the 1990s, from a Soviet-style socialist economy to a more free-market economy.
Both North Korea and East Germany were separated by communism from the other half of their once-unified nation. They are countries founded entirely on the rejection of their capitalist brothers.
The Korean peninsula has been split in two since 1945, when Soviet and American troops liberated it from Japan at the end of World War II. The Allies divided the peninsula along the 38th parallel, with the Soviets occupying the North and the Americans occupying the South.
This split deepened in June 1950, when the communist North tried to unify the country under its rule, invading the South.
Korea’s civil war turned into a proxy Cold War as communist China aided North Korea and the US sent troops to defend the South Koreans. A 1953 armistice has divided the Korean peninsula ever since.
Initially, East Germany’s centralised, planned economy was quite successful in rebuilding the country after the war. But by the mid-1960s, economic growth had slowed, resulting in a shortage of consumer and industrial products.
To reinvigorate the economy, East German leader Walter Ulbricht began relaxing the government’s grip on the economy. Managers of state-run enterprises were given decision-making power over what goods to produce, a role previously retained by the government, and allowed to keep some of their profits.
Banks got permission to extend loans to the businesses of their choice, helping them grow and invest.
It was not because they did not work. Rather, according to my research and the historian Joerg Roesler, East Germany began to fear that its liberal economy was starting to make it look dangerously similar to West Germany.
In 1968, the Soviets had invaded neighbouring Czechoslovakia, terminating its experimentation with both economic and political liberalisation. The East German government worried that its economy had become a little too liberal, too.
East Germany’s attempt to preserve communist rule by maintaining authority over its faltering economy proved futile. On 3 October 1990, Germany was reunified under West German control.
The economy has always been at the heart of communism. A planned economy is what set countries like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Vietnam apart from capitalist democracies. For communist leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro, it’s what made them superior.
Plenty of communist governments have managed to mix some free-market capitalism into their socialist economies without endangering the Communist Party’s monopoly on power – Vietnam, Cuba and China top among them.
The transition toward capitalism in those countries has come at the cost of social inequalities. Freer markets have created a growing class of wealthy entrepreneurs, while some more marginal populations have remained excluded from these new riches.
East Germany and North Korea differ from these examples. They are halves of a whole.
The planned economy doesn’t just inform their political system – it is the sole reason for their existence. East Germany and North Korea were born to offer an economic alternative from their capitalist compatriots.
My research suggests that denuclearisation, the lifting of US sanctions and a transition into market socialism would trigger an East Germany-style existential crisis for North Korea.
That’s because a prospering economy would eliminate the very reason for North Korean existence, obviating the rationale for Kim’s totalitarian policies, anti-American rhetoric and isolation.
Kim promised North Koreans better living conditions after succeeding his father, dictator Kim Jong-il, in 2011.
But what he really needs are economic reforms that boost the economy without threatening the communist character of North Korea’s economy.
No post-Cold War country has managed it yet.
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)