The Perils of National Stalinism: Regime Affinity between the DPRK and Ceausescu's Romania.

The North Korean regime under Kim Il-Sung and later Kim Jong-Il has been widely regarded as an inexplicable anomaly shrouded in secrecy, even among communist regimes. Such a perception of the DPRK as sui generis is clearly not conducive to theoretically relevant research based on contextualized comparisons. This paper argues that as unusual as the DPRK may seem, there is striking regime affinity between the DPRK and Ceausescu's Romania. Both were pariah low-status communist regimes with highly personalistic dictatorships that attempted to blend a strong nationalist ideology with a rigid Stalinist developmental model. The source of this rather peculiar nation-building strategy could be traced to both regimes' weak initial legitimacy and their insignificant status in the international communist movement. Both regimes nevertheless persisted despite relentless repression and appalling living conditions their citizens had to endure. In the case of Romania, the Ceausescu regime was the last to fall among non-indigenous Eastern European communist regimes, and it was the only instance of violent regime transition in 1989. This paper argues that unlike in most reform communist regimes, in both Ceausescu's Romania and the DPRK, the role of strong anti-liberal ideology that combined both far left and far right nationalist elements was highly significant in sustaining the regime and therefore should not be underestimated. While the Gorbachev reform and the revolutions elsewhere in Eastern Europe effectively deprived the Ceausescu regime of potential nationalist cards it could play and thus precipitated regime change in Romania, the DPRK regime was able to hold on to power by using imagined and real external threats, such as the recent nuclear and missile crises, to justifying its ongoing domestic repression and reinforce its nationalist claims. Consequently, it could be predicted that short of a total economic collapse, the North Korean regime is unlikely to break down very soon and is instead likely to survive for some time as long as there is no dramatic change in the international environment that facilitates internal regime change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]