Life after the Great Leader: North Korea now faces the hardline frying pan or the fire of reform, says Aidan Foster-Carter

IT IS HARD to imagine North Korea without Kim Il Sung. Similarly, for a moment in 1976, it was hard to imagine China without Mao, or the USSR without Stalin in 1953. Those moments passed; those states and regimes regrouped and survived. For North Korea this will be harder.

Political succession is one of the things at which Communist systems have not been very good. This is because of the tendency to a progressive concentration of power: monopolised first by one party, then by one faction, and finally by one absolute leader.

Kim Il Sung's death poses huge challenges to his successors. Buried contradictions and suppressed problems will emerge. Above all, the successors must decide how far to distance themselves from the leader's legacy, if this is perceived as negative.

Thus it took three years after Stalin's death until Khrushchev's famous secret speech to the party, which began to admit to his predecessor's crimes. A similar period elapsed after the death of Mao before Deng Xiaoping began a radical reversal of Maoist policies. And, of course, neither Khrushchev nor Deng was a designated successor. Both fought their way to the top.

Such comparisons are an essential starting-point for looking at the problems which now face North Korea. Too often, Pyongyang, the capital, is portrayed as though on some other planet. It is not. Rather, Kim Il Sung's North Korea was simply the last and most extreme representative of Stalinist Communism. Hence many of the problems that now confront Kim's successors have precedents. That said, there are some that have no parallel elsewhere: and that call into question the very survival of the state.

Let us start with the familiar. Of course there will be a power struggle, despite Kim Il Sung's unremitting efforts to designate his son Kim Jong Il as his successor. His best hope is that his status as heir apparent has been so relentlessly pressed as to make it very risky for any enemy to challenge him, since to do so would call into question the legacy of his father, and hence the entire political system. But he has a long list of enemies, who will strive to manipulate if not to oust him.

They start in his own family and include his uncle Kim Yong Ju, once himself groomed as successor to his brother Kim Il Sung, and who, after 20 years in the wilderness, made a striking comeback last year. There is also his half-brother Kim Pyong Il. Despite holding ambassadorships in Hungary, Bulgaria, and most recently Finland, Pyong Il has, unexplainably, been back in Pyongyang since April.

Then there is the military. Always the one institution that even the most totalitarian of regimes can never be sure of, the North Korean military have diverse reasons to dislike the junior Kim. These range from disgust at having this corpulent playboy foisted on them as commander-in-chief, to fears that he might turn out to be a peace-maker after all and cut back their budgets and influence.

Third, others in the political elite may simply fear that Kim Jong Il is too inexperienced or unreliable a hand. True, he has already been running day-to-day affairs of state for several years. But since this may include responsibility for the decision in March 1993 to pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - for which, it is rumoured, he was bawled out by papa and suffered a nervous breakdown as a result - in this instance experience does not necessarily betoken confidence.

But beyond the jockeying for power lies the more important question: to what use will it be put? For whoever emerges on top faces a series of acutely difficult policy dilemmas bequeathed by Kim Il Sung, over which the 'Great Leader' had in fact prevaricated. Making the wrong decision could prove fatal.

Top of the domestic agenda is the challenge of economic reform. North Korea's unreconstructed centrally planned economy, a powerful beast in its youth, is now in its fifth year of negative growth. On the face of it, the solution is obvious. Other Asian Communist regimes, in China and Vietnam, have in effect reinvented themselves by moving towards capitalism while not saying so - and thus given their ruling Communist parties a new lease of life. Despite much pressure from Peking, Kim Il Sung would not follow suit apart from a single special economic zone, as far from Pyongyang as possible.

Kim Jong Il is on record as rejecting such 'revisionism'. In this he looks not to the success of China or Vietnam, but rather to the debacle in the former USSR and Eastern Europe.

Like his father, Kim Jong Il is thus caught between a rock and a hard place. If he refuses reform, the economy will continue to decline, hunger will grow, and ultimately not even the obedient citizenry of North Korea will starve for their plump new leader. So staying hardline on domestic policy risks unrest, just as staying hardline on international issues, above all the nuclear question, would court UN sanctions or even US air strikes.

So why not join the modern world? The hope has to be that Kim Jong Il, or whoever, does have the courage to come in from the cold - and the luck to bring it off. One can sketch how it might be done: surrender of the nuclear card (for a very high price), bringing South Korean and Western aid and investment, an economic recovery, and a populace grateful for more food and fresh opportunities.

The great fear, on the other hand, is that the masses will soon learn that their southern brethren groaning under the jackboot of US imperialism enjoy a standard of living eight times higher than their own. Will they then thank Kim Jong Il if he embraces reform? Or will they curse him - and his father, and Communism - for grinding them down for so long?

That is Kim Jong Il's dilemma. And that is why Kim Il Sung's death may just be the first in a series of dominoes, which ultimately means calling into question the very existence of North Korea as a separate state. In the post-Cold War era of the Nineties, what can North Korea be? What could be its rulers' project these days, whoever they are? How will they legitimate themselves?

It could be that the strain of choosing between the hardline frying pan and the fire of reform contributed to the heart attack (if such it was) that killed Kim Il Sung. Now that he is gone, there is no guarantee that the state he created in his own image can outlive him for long. One would not wish to be in Kim Jong Il's Cuban- heeled shoes just now.

The author is director of Leeds University Korea Project.

(Photograph omitted)