“North Korea and the Non-Aligned Movement: From Adulation to Marginalization”

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-71
Author(s):  
Nate Kerkhoff

Abstract The diplomatic history of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk) is intrinsically tied to Cold War politics, often in the context of the Communist versus capitalist paradigm regarding competition with the Republic of Korea (rok). However, North Korea’s actions outside of this scope were significant to understanding the full spectrum of its foreign policy of the Cold War era. This article explores the dprk’s relationship with the Non-Aligned Movement in an attempt to shed light on this largely under-studied aspect. As arguably the most important institution for the Global South during the Cold War, North Korea hoped to influence its members into isolating the rok politically and diplomatically. However, while it remains a member to this day, North Korea’s relevancy within the organization lasted for only a few short years. The following examination explores this phenomenon and argues that despite built-in advantages, North Korea’s own policy decisions led to its demise among significant voices in the organization and failure to achieve even any part of its overall goal.

Author(s):  
Viktoriia Rimovna Britova

The decades since the end of the Cold War, the foreign policy of the Republic of Korea has undergone multiple changes; besides the traditional commitment to maintain and develop relations with its military and political ally – the United States – the new vectors have emerged. . The Korean government turns attention to such directions as: international status of the country; its authority on the world stage; as well as autonomy combined with globalism and autonomy through neutrality. The subject of this research is the foreign policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan at the turn of the XX – XXI centuries. The object is the main foreign policy trends. As a result of the conducted research, the author determines the vectors in foreign policy of the Republic of Korea: orientation towards alliance with the United States; globalism with intention to form new alliances; pursuit of cooperative autonomy; and acquisition of autonomy through neutrality. The article reveals cyclicity in the shift of attitudes depending on the political affiliation of the leader of the country: conservative presidents aim to maintain the alliance, while democratic presidents strive for autonomy. Although, the recent foreign policy vector of the Republic of Korea, which suggests acquisition of autonomy through neutrality, seems impossible due to the existing responsibilities, it remains relevant.


2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-105
Author(s):  
Steven Hugh Lee

AbstractSince December 1997, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the United States have met in a series of talks aimed at promoting peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the region. According to a November 1998 U.S. Department of Defense report, the discussions have created a “diplomatic venue for reducing tensions and ultimately replacing the Armistice Agreement with a permanent peace settlement.”1 Amidst the tragic human suffering which has occurred in North Korea, there have been some encouraging developments on the peninsula. The 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea placed international controls on North Korea’s atomic energy program and cautiously anticipated the normalization of U.S.-DPRK relations. Since assuming power in early 1998, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung has vigorously pursued a policy of engagement with P’yo¨ngyang, known as the “sunshine policy.” Over the past decade, North Korea has also reoriented its foreign policy. In the early 1990s, the regime’s social and economic crisis led to a rethinking of its autarkic economic system. By early 1994, the state had created new free trade zones and relatively open foreign investment laws.2 By complying with the Agreed Framework, the DPRK has also shown a willingness to work with the international community on sensitive issues affecting its internal sovereignty and ability to project power beyond its borders.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.


2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vojtech Mastny

Efforts to document the full histories of the Nor h Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact are still hindered by key obstacles. NATO documents from 1965 onward remain closed to researchers, as do many War-saw Pact military records that were carted off to Moscow in 1991. Despite these gaps, newly declassified materials from both East and West have shed light on how the two alliances helped shape the Cold War. This article takes note of some of the more important recent scholarship on NATO and the Warsaw Pact.


2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN KRIGE

ABSTRACT In July 1949, and again in January 1950 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission shipped useful amounts of the short-lived isotope phosphorus-32 to a sanatorium in Trieste, Italy. They were used to treat a patient who had a particularly malignant kind of brain tumor. This distribution of isotopes abroad for medical and research purposes was hotly contested by Commissioner Lewis Strauss, and led to a bruising confrontation between him and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This paper describes the debates surrounding the foreign isotope program inside the Commission and in the U.S. Congress. In parallel, it presents an imagined, but factually-based story of the impact of isotope therapy on the patient and his doctor in Trieste, a city on the Italian-Yugoslavian border that was at the heart of the cold war struggle for influence between the U.S. and the USSR. It weaves together the history of science, institutional history, diplomatic history, and cultural history into a fable that draws attention to the importance of the peaceful atom for winning hearts and minds for the West. The polemics surrounding the distribution of isotopes to foreign countries may have irreversibly soured relationships between Oppenheimer and Strauss, and played into the scientist's loss of his security clearance. But, as those who supported the program argued, it was an important instrument for projecting a positive image of America among a scientifc elite abroad, and for consolidating its alliance with friendly nations in the early years of the cold war——or so the fable goes.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shane Hamilton

This chapter introduces the concept of the Farms Race and how it links to the weaponization of American supermarkets during the Cold War. The connections between supermarket retailing and industrial agricultural supply chains are introduced, highlighting the ways in which this book is not a traditional business history but is instead a history of capitalism that uses supermarkets as a lens into the workings of industrial agriculture. The introduction also explains why the book is not a military or diplomatic history of the Cold War, or a study framed primarily by the concept of “Americanization.” American supermarkets were machines for selling goods as well as ideas, for enabling as well as constraining the choices made by food producers and consumers. As such, they were instruments of power.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002252662110314
Author(s):  
Pavel Mücke

The long-term First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and later also President of the Republic, Antonín Novotný (1904–75), was popularly known as “Nice Tony”. As a communist politician and statesman, Novotný was well known as a great disciple and follower of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, famous for his personal and very contact-oriented diplomacy. The main contours of several of Novotný's official visits have already been analysed from political and diplomatic history perspectives. Based on archival research and available memoirs, this article tries to reconstruct the still non-visible and unknown view of transport history and, consequently, traveling and tourism history. It outlines the general contours and several aspects of V.I.P. communists’ international travels on the cases of several trips abroad which took place during the 1950s and 1960s of the Cold War era.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-132
Author(s):  
Andrew Jenks

This article examines the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 as an instrument of diplomacy and as a catalyst for East-West détente. The topic has received little attention in either the general literature on the Cold War—which has only recently begun to address the political significance of science and technology more generally—or in the literature on space history, which has focused mostly on the earlier race to land on the moon and has devoted little attention to the collaboration in space that has dominated crewed space missions from the 1970s, leading up to the International Space Station. The article connects two previously separate spheres of study—space history and diplomatic history—to shed light on the importance of space exploration in the bigger story of Cold War diplomacy.


Author(s):  
Ulf Bjereld ◽  
Ulrika Möller

This chapter examines the modern history of Sweden’s foreign policy and external relations through the lens of neutrality. Sweden’s commitment to neutrality has not meant that the country is passive in international arenas. To the contrary, neutrality has for decades dovetailed with “international activism” and the articulation of international law and collective action. The chapter describes the emergence of the Swedish policy of neutrality during the Cold War and the post-neutrality policy that has evolved since the collapse of the bipolar world order. It details the primary components of and main reasons for the somewhat overlapping yet otherwise different versions of Swedish foreign policy between the two periods.


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