Oriente Médio: 2011, o ano de ouro do Qatar

Poucos países tiveram ganhos tão expressivos em 2011 como o Qatar.


O país foi escolhido como sede da Copa do Mundo de 2022 -- não sem polêmicas em torno da compra de votos no seio da FIFA --, e sua economia cresceu expressivamente em meio à crise financeira internacional.


Mais importante, o pequeno emirado estendeu sua influência política pelo Oriente Médio, por meio de dinheiro, de intervenções militares, de soft power -- leia-se Al Jazeera -- e de conexões com políticos (governistas e dissidentes) de toda a região. Isso só foi possível pela janela de oportunidade aberta pela Primavera Árabe e pela transição vivenciada nos três grandes Estados líderes do Mundo Árabe (Egito, Arábia Saudita e Iraque).




Não por coincidência, saíram duas interessantíssimas matérias sobre o assunto nessa semana, publicadas pela BBC e pelo La Vanguardia.




Qatar flexing muscle in changing world


By Michael BuchananBBC News, Doha

Qatar's military joined the Nato-led intervention in Libya, training the rebels

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the normally sober, orderly centre of Doha was transformed into a triumphant melee of noise and colour as thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate Qatar's National Day.

This year has been something of a coming of age for this small Gulf nation.

It strongly backed the rebels in Libya and has led regional criticism of the crackdowns on protesters by Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

"We have to contribute with whatever we have - politics, money or by supporting military action, whatever it takes to support other nations," said one Qatari reveller.

At the state-of-the-art studios of Libya TV in Doha, they know all about support from Qatar.

The station was set up in the early days of the Libyan conflict to counter the propaganda being broadcast on Libyan state TV by Col Muammar Gaddafi's supporters; it is still being completely funded by the Qatari government.

Qatar also joined the Nato-led military action in Libya, helped train the rebels, flew the injured to Doha for medical treatment and provided humanitarian aid.

It is estimated to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far on Libya.

Huda al-Srari, the general manager at Libya TV, denies the Qataris have any say in the channel's editorial output, and takes their support at face value.

"I have no proof that they are looking for something from Libya," she says. "They are looking for money? They are very rich. Maybe they are not looking for anything, just to help their sisters and brothers in Libya."

Region in transition

Unburdened by any threats or major concerns at home, Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani has been willing to step into the role usually occupied by other Arab leaders, and to use his time and money to reshape the region.

Qatar is one of the world's richest nations and its economy, heavily dependent on oil and gas, is expected to grow by about 18% in 2011.

"Some of the key big powers in this region - Egypt, Saudi Arabia - are in transition, so Qatar has found itself with the ability, the leadership and the money to play a role," says Salman Shaikh, an analyst at the Brookings Institute in Doha.

"I've often heard the lament in Qatar that the Arab world has fallen behind in terms of human development, in terms of technological advancement. So the hope is that we'll be moving towards a more stable and more development orientated region than it currently is."

In one of Doha's most distinctive districts, Souk Waqif, about 20 women were selling delicious homemade food one recent evening - stews, curries, spicy crepes and Arabian coffee.

All the women wore abayas - a traditional, long black Islamic garment - and most wore shaylas - a long scarf that is wrapped around the head - as well, a reminder that despite Doha's image as a glitzy centre of Western-style skyscrapers, Qatar is still a conservative Muslim society.

Like neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the royal family of Qatar and most indigenous Qataris follow the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, but society in Qatar is more accepting of the role of women, says newspaper columnist Reem al-Hamri.

"I can drive; I can hold any position I want. Everyone is equal, women can be leaders," she says.

"For me wearing this - the abaya and the shayla - if it's going to cover my body and my hair, it's not going to cover my mind, my ideas."

Long-standing relationships

Still, there are concerns in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt that Qatar is using the unrest to support and finance Islamist parties.

Following elections in Tunisia, won by the moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, a demonstration was held outside the Qatari embassy in Tunis bemoaning Doha's influence.

Some members of Libya's National Transitional Council have criticised Qatar's influence in the country, while in Egypt, Qatar has been accused of helping fund the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr Shaikh, however, warns against reading too much into the connections, saying Qatar is not embarking on some ideological push.

"Qatar for the last 20, 30 years has been providing a home for a lot of the individuals who had to run away from places like Libya and Tunisia. These invariably have come from Islamist backgrounds. As these people get elected, Qatar has long-standing relationships with them."

Qatar ended its recent National Day celebrations with a spectacular fireworks display, a further sign of the confidence and optimism that permeates the entire nation.

With its neighbours in turmoil and the West distracted by economic woes, this tiny emirate has the money, the connections and willingness to play a much greater role on the world stage in the coming years.

Documentário: The Death of Yugoslavia

The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC) (1995)

Episódio 1 - Enter Nationalism

Episódio 2 - The Road to War

Episódio 3 - Wars of Independence

Episódio 4 - The Gates of Hell

Episódio 5 - A Safe Area

Episódio 6 - Pax Americana

Russia: The Man Who Got Russa Right (Foreign Policy)

The Man Who Got Russia Right

Washington has a long tradition of misreading Moscow. As Putin teeters, it’s worth recalling George Kennan, the best Kremlinologist America ever had.

BY SUSAN B. GLASSER | DECEMBER 23, 2011

When mass protests broke out in Russia a few weeks ago, the breathtaking speed with which the country's generally complacent middle class turned on Vladimir Putin seemed most remarkable of all. For a dozen years, the KGB-trained tough guy in the Kremlin had been boosted by a stage-managed image of macho realism and the backstage machinations of a corrupt and heavyhanded state, fueling his wildly misleading popularity. When his approval ratings cratered after claims of vote-rigging in the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, it was as if a giant soufflé had fallen: Overnight, seemingly, Putin's poll numbers went from nearly 70 percent approval to a bare 51 percent.

It was so serious that even Dmitry Medvedev, the puppet president whose office Putin has said he plans to retake in 2012, was warning this week that the political system has "exhausted itself" and that without real change, Russia's rulers could find their rule "delegitimized." And that, Medvedev said, "would only mean one thing for our country: the collapse of the state."

The timing of Russia's latest political spasms couldn't be more fitting. It was exactly 20 years ago this week that the Soviet Union itself collapsed, a 70-year-old empire that evaporated in the weeks between Dec. 8, 1991 -- when Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared their independence -- and Christmas Day, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from the Soviet presidency, declared the office extinct and signed the government's death warrant. The events were so traumatic for many Russians of the old regime that, years later, Putin was moved to call the Soviet breakup "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

If you're bewildered by the new twists in Russia's famously contorted history, give thanks for George F. Kennan, who has been resurrected in a timely and authoritative biography by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. George F. Kennan: An American Life is out just in time to guide us through a Russia once again in the throes of political transformation.

Kennan almost singlehandedly invented the serious study of Russia by America's diplomats, and through his three stints in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he sent reporting home that was prescient and insightful even for today's audience. Consider this observation he made to his boss, the U.S. ambassador to Latvia, in 1932. At the time, the United States hadn't even recognized the Soviet Union, Kennan was several years short of 30 and he hadn't yet traveled inside Russia. But he was already immersed in its history, language and literature, and he foresaw the Soviet Union's internal decay -- at a time when others perceived a new superpower emerging to become one of the new strong men of Europe.

"From the most morally unified country in the world," Kennan wrote, "Russia can become over-night the worst moral chaos."

Based in Moscow a few years later, Kennan saw the historical contradictions that undermined the foundation of the Soviet regime -- while at the same time giving it a veneer of power. Russians were "used to extreme cold and extreme heat, prolonged sloth and sudden feats of energy, exaggerated cruelty and exaggerated kindness, ostentatious wealth and dismal squalor, violent xenophobia and uncontrollable yearning for contact with the foreign world, vast power and the most abject slavery, simultaneous love and hate for the same objects." Looking for an insight into the forces competing for political supremacy in Russia today, you could do far worse than Kennan's observations.

The quote comes from the draft of a 12,000-word essay Gaddis unearthed and which Kennan wrote for Ambassador Averell Harriman in the summer of 1944. Much of Kennan's genius about Russia is contained in it, from the notion that the Soviet Union, despite its enormous losses in World War II of some 20 million of its people, would rise as "a single force greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over" to the cultural factors that would eventually prove the communist state's undoing. "The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait," Kennan wrote. "But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer."

Gaddis captures why Kennan's dispatches deserved to be immortalized. "Contrary to what almost everyone else assumed at the time Kennan portrayed the Soviet Union as a transitory phenomenon: It was floating along on the surface of Russian history, and currents deeper than anything Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had imagined would ultimately determine its fate." Or here is Gaddis on Kennan again: "He saw what others saw but in different colors.... He had a historian's consciousness of the past, which gave him a visionary's perspective on the future."

In short, Kennan was a great reporter.

But Kennan's place in American history, and in Gaddis's biography, is assured not for what he saw in Russia but for what he told the United States to do about it. He was, as a million Google hits will tell you, "the architect of containment," the postwar strategy for countering the Soviet Union that was at the heart of the Cold War.

The notion of "containment" as a new form of Western grand strategy -- a third way to block the Soviets that involved neither capitulation nor another devastating world war -- built on Kennan's views about the internal weaknesses of Soviet power. It was a brilliant insight, and Gaddis spends much of his biography on Kennan's decades-long struggle (he died in 2005 at age 101) against the many ways in which his idea was used to justify a long, highly militarized contest with the Soviet Union, a contest whose particulars he often violently disagreed with.

Kennan's containment was rooted in his fight to get Washington to pay attention to Stalin's shift at the end of World War II, from allying with the United States and Britain to competing with them for mastery over postwar Europe. But the term itself has lost that meaning; it has long since become shorthand for all that followed: the costly, reckless nuclear arms race, the war in Vietnam, and the chess match in the Middle East and Latin America, all justified in the name of competing with the Soviet aggressor. Kennan was against many if not all of those and yet his name has been indelibly associated with them -- in part reflecting the much cannier Washington savvy of his rivals within the U.S. government, rivals more skilled at promoting the muscular form of containment backed by American military might that they preferred. Even today, Kennan's name is shorthand for a policy he mostly hated. Here was GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, just the other day, complaining of our current foreign policy. "We're still trapped," he said, "in the Cold War, George Kennan mindset."

Here is where one can at least gently criticize Gaddis's book, the sort of tome that is invariably called "magisterial" and in this case for the most part is. Gaddis subtitles his book -- an authorized biography nearly 30 years in the making -- "An American Life," and goes on at great length about Kennan's critiques of the country of his birth. But Gaddis makes a far less convincing case that Kennan was anywhere near the student of the United States that he was of Russia. Indeed, some of his early writings, as Gaddis acknowledges, show Kennan as a sort of misinformed elitist (and a highly intolerant, vaguely anti-Semitic one at that) who had contempt for the democratic politics of his homeland even as the twin totalitarian behemoths were taking shape in 1930s Europe. For much of Kennan's long life after his star-studded diplomatic career, he was writing and teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and arguing on the wrong side of U.S. political battles in a Washington he had always disdained.

Which is why I'd like to make the case here for more of Kennan the Russia hand and less of Kennan the American strategist.

It is because of Kennan's meticulous observations, incisive prose and deep knowledge of the country and its people that 20th-century Americans were lucky enough to have him as witness to the monstrosities of Stalin's Russia -- one who didn't merely throw up his hands in confusion, or succumb to wishful thinking or fellow-travelerism or any of the other diseases endemic to so much Western writing about the Soviet Union.

This is a relevant legacy of Kennan's, and one that we have yet to fully absorb. Indeed, the tradition of getting Russia wrong has a distinguished Washington lineage, and one that I witnessed while covering the rise of Putin for The Washington Post in the early 2000s. In those years, Putin was reconsolidating power in the Kremlin, taking over independent media, jailing or banishing potential political opponents, shutting down elections for governor and putting into place a new security-state apparatus from such remnants of the Soviet police state as had survived the 1990s. Yet back in Washington, there were those who persisted in believing for years that Putin was not exactly as he seemed. Remember when George W. Bush looked into his "soul" in 2001? He wasn't the only one. We encountered many, both at senior levels in the U.S. government and among the Westerners in Moscow, who were so eager to do business with a resurgent Kremlin that they were willing to rewrite the facts. The White House today faces a similar challenge as President Obama, who made a point of a "reset" in relations after the frosty U.S.-Russia standoff of the late Bush years, now leaves it to his secretary of state to lecture Putin on democracy. Will the administration read the Kremlin right this time?

Kennan knew well the perils of Washington getting Russia wrong, and this understanding makes for the high point of Gaddis's gripping book. It was Feb. 22, 1946, and Kennan, at home in his Moscow sickbed, was getting pinged from Washington about a speech Stalin had given a few weeks earlier. The speech -- given at the Bolshoi Theater and, as Gaddis writes, "meant, superfluously, to win him an election" -- said nothing much new to Kennan, who saw it as so routine he at first just summarized it in a cable home to the State Department.

But like any good reporter, he responded when his bosses demanded front-page treatment for the story. In the 5,000-word masterpiece that followed, Kennan let rip with a document that summed up everything he had seen in six long winters in Russia, from the poisonous fusion of Russian nationalism with international Communism to the weaknesses of a country overextended into an empire it couldn't fully absorb and with a people it could repress but not fully conquer.

This was Kennan's famous "Long Telegram," and it exploded in the American policy debate like a bomb -- not because Kennan had his pulse on the policy battles in D.C., but because he knew Moscow when it mattered. "It hit Washington," Harriman later recalled, "at just the right moment."

Source: Foreign Policy.




More on Russia:

Development: The rebirth of Russian foreign aid (The Guardian)

Analysis: The new Russian military doctrine: more of the same?

Asia: North Korea's Uncertain Succession (CFR)

North Korea's Uncertain Succession

Interviewee:	Scott A. Snyder, Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy, Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewer:	Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

December 19, 2011

Despite an outward show of unity in the wake of Kim Jong-il's death, there is much unknown about North Korea's succession process, says Scott A. Snyder, CFR's top expert on Korea. Snyder expects the North Korean leadership to focus inward to put its policies in order, but he questions whether the military leadership will remain loyal to Kim Jong-un, Kim's youngest son and handpicked successor, who turns twenty-eight next month. "Korea is a society that is attentive to age and seniority," says Snyder. "And so the idea of a twenty-eight-year-old who also commands the military is hard for outsiders to grasp, and it remains to be seen whether it is in fact sustainable."

With the death of North Korea's President Kim Jong-il, there seems to be a leadership plan in place in which his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, would take over. But Kim Jong-il's sister, Kim Kyong-hui is there in a senior position as well as her husband, Jang Song-taek. What is going to happen?

The initial focus is going to be on getting through this mourning period and the funeral. The funeral is going to be held on December 28. There already is a funeral committee and a kind of rank ordering of top individuals serving on the committee, and it is headed by Kim Jong-un. So that projects a sense of order to this process. Kim Kyong-hui is on the list as well as Jang Song-taek.

Do we learn much from the funeral list?

This list really flows in my view from the September 2010unveiling of Kim Jong-un (MSNBC) as the next leader at the Workers Party conference. And so far it looks like there are a lot of efforts to suggest a sense of continuity and a sense there is a collective process that is effectively functioning. What we don't know is what is happening behind the scenes and whether the process can hold in the absence of Kim-Jong-il, because he really has been the glue that has held the system together over the course of the past fifteen years.

Will North Korea become less militant, more willing to strike deals with the outside world, go back to nuclear disarmament talks or become more belligerent? Do you have any guesses?

I'm actually expecting kind of an inward turn and a focus on getting affairs in Pyongyang in order before things move forward. You know, Kim Jong-il actually observed a three-year mourning period [after his father died] in which he, even though everyone knew he was the successor, did not come out and perform any public functions or take any visible external leadership positions.

I anticipate that it is unlikely that Kim Jong-un is going to take an active role in the near term in managing state affairs.

That was back in what years?

That was between 1994 and 1997. There was the continuation of and resolution of the Agreed Framework [between the United States and North Korea] in 1994 so it didn't mean North Korea's diplomacy ground to a complete halt. But I anticipate that it is unlikely that Kim Jong-un is going to take an active role in the near term in managing state affairs. He will be involved much more in a kind of initial behind-the-scenes role especially as it relates to foreign diplomacy.

Any chance of provocation from the new leadership?

Because we know so little about the leadership, it also means we don't have a good grasp on the motivation in the event of provocations. And this is particularly complicated in a circumstance where a provocation could be evidence of fragmentation or divisions in the North Korean leadership. Or it could be a tactic used to signal to outsiders to stay away or it could be a tactic used by design to gain some kind of tactical advantage.

And I take it this funeral will not be attended by Western leaders?

That's right; it's all just a domestic affair. No foreign leaders invited.

In the last few weeks the United States has had diplomats in China meeting with North Korean officials. What was the purpose of those talks (NYT), and do you think those will continue or come to a halt?

Last week, the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, Robert King, had discussions in Beijing with his counterpart, Ambassador Ri Gun, on the issue of conditions under which the United States might provide food assistance to North Korea. There was also anticipation following the visit of Special Representative for North Korean Policy Glyn Davies to Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing-- that there might be a third round of U.S.-North Korean bilateral talks. There were press rumors that that set of talks might have even occurred at the end of this week. It is unlikely now that will happen.

The United States does have some interesting decisions to make regarding whether or not, in the context of this transition, it might want to announce provision of food assistance now-- especially since the talks have already occurred and presumably there was some level of understanding reached about the conditions under which the United States would be willing to provide that assistance.

Would such assistance be conditioned on North Korea's returning to the Six Party Talks concerning stopping their nuclear program?

The talks about food have been separated from the nuclear issues.

And, the new presumptive leader, Mr. Kim Jong-un, hasn't really made himself known to the international scene yet; has he spoken publicly?

No. He has met some international leaders but always with his father. And all of his public appearances so far had been with his father. So he was being groomed for leadership, but this is still the early stages. Now he is basically on his own, and we will find out if he can move forward. If he does, he is supported by some sort of collective leadership process that looks like it had been put in place. We saw something very similar to this following Kim Il-sung's death when Kim Jong-il took over.

There is another factor here that I have to mention. He is turning twenty-eight on January 8, and although he carries the title of General, Korea is a society that is attentive to age and seniority. And so the idea of a twenty-eight-year-old who also commands the military is hard for outsiders to grasp and it remains to be seen whether it is in fact sustainable.

Talk a bit about him.

He apparently was at a Swiss boarding school for a couple of years and also has had educational opportunities in North. But my impression is that really he may be the North Korean version of a home school product with the exception of his two years in Switzerland. It doesn't appear to be the case that as he was receiving instruction in North Korea, or that he had a lot of interaction with peers, for instance, at Kim Il-sung University or at some other North Korean university.

Kim Kyong- hui, who is the new leader's aunt and her husband, Jang Song-taek, are high up in the leadership. Some people speculate that Jang in fact might be the true leader of the military for the time being.

Well, it's complicated. Jang is actually lower down on some of the leadership lists, and he also was not highly ranked in the September 2010 party conference. But he has the greatest potential for cross-institutional experience or connections in various parts of North Korea's bureaucratic system. Jang is the one who at first brush appears to have more lateral contact than many others in the system.

Talk about the relationship right now between South Korea and North Korea. How tense is it?

The two Koreas have really not been on speaking terms over the course of the summer and fall. The new unification minister [for South Korea] Yu Woo-ik, appointed back in October, has been attempting to open some new channels. But the North Korean leadership has shifted its focus more toward who is likely to succeed the current South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, than on having dialogue with Lee. So that's a reflection of the poor quality of Korean relations. Lee has continued to insist on a North Korean apology for the 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval ship, Cheonan, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island near the North Korean mainland.

Is there an election scheduled in South Korea?

There are parliamentary elections that will take place in April of next year, and the presidential election takes place in December. Lee cannot run again so there will be a new president. At the moment it looks like it could be a fairly competitive race. There was a recent election for Seoul mayor, which was won by a progressive candidate, Park Won-soon, who beat a candidate from Lee's conservative party. So there is the possibility of a shift in power from conservative to progressive in South Korea.

Are the progressives more interested in closer relations with the north?

Yeah, they've been historically more interested in engagement.

It's arguable that there is nothing that North Korea would like more than for the U.S. to come in as a kind of strategic counterweight to China.

How are North Korea's relations with China and the United States?

North Korea is economically almost completely dependent on China and that has resulted in a closer political relationship, but as far as I can see it is because the Chinese are hugging the North Koreans. Not necessarily because the North Koreans are hugging the Chinese back. And in fact it's arguable that there is nothing that North Korea would like more than for the U.S. to come in as a kind of strategic counterweight to China. But the nuclear issue remains as a major, really inescapable sticking point. There is simply no prospect for the United States to improve diplomatic relations with North Korea without denuclearization.

And is it likely the new leadership will want to maintain this nuclear foothold?

There's no reason yet to expect that there would be a change in policy direction in North Korea.

Source: CFR.

Asia: Kim Jong Il's Death and North Korea's Transition (Stratfor)

Dispatch: Kim Jong Il's Death and North Korea's Transition

Source: Stratfor


Read more on North Korea:
International security: North Korea: Dear Leader, departed (The Economist)

International security: North Korea: Dear Leader, departed (The Economist)

North Korea

Dear Leader, departed

Dec 20th 2011, 0:20 by D.T. and G.E. | SEOUL and BEIJING

THE tyrant has perished, leaving a failing, nuclear-armed nation in the uncertain young hands of his “Great Successor”. His father, since 1994 the "Dear Leader" of one of the world’s most secretive and repressive states (iconic, to the right in the photo above), died on a train at 8.30am on Saturday morning, of a heart attack. North Korea's 69-year-old supremo had been in poor health: he had heart disease and diabetes, and suffered a stroke in 2008. Nonetheless his demise places sudden and extraordinary pressure on his third son, his designated but untested successor, Kim Jong Un (to the left, in the photo above).

Kim junior—recently dubbed the “Young General”—is now officially in charge of North Korea. His dynastic succession, which had been in preparation since 2009, was reaffirmed swiftly by the state media (as swiftly as the 51 hours it took to announce the elder Kim’s death). The machinery of party and propaganda are organised to support a smooth succession. That does not mean its success is assured. At just 27 or perhaps 28 years of age, the young Un, educated in Switzerland and a great fan of basketball, wants for both experience and proof of loyalty from the armed forces. He was installed as the country’s leader-in-waiting little more than a year ago. By contrast his father had been groomed for leadership for nearly 20 years, with careful attention paid to establishing for him a cult of personality in the image of his own father, the dynasty’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung.

That Kim Jong Un has no such background may be cause more for anxiety than for relief. His only qualification to lead the country is to be the son of a man who all but destroyed it, and a grandson of the man who built its disastrous brand of totalitarianism. In the 17 years Kim Jong Il ruled since the death of Kim Il Sung, North Korea teetered on the brink of collapse. A devastating famine in the mid-1990s killed as many as a million of his countrymen, while Kim Jong Il indulged his own appetites to excess and diverted massive resources to his dream, now realised, of building a nuclear weapon.

A third Kim may be a step too far. This succession’s viability may well depend on the work of a “regent”: Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, Chang Sung Taek. He and his wife, Kim Kyong Hui, appear to have accompanied the Young General’s elevation in lockstep, as those who might stand in his (and their) way have been pushed aside. The ruling elite around the family trinity might appear cohesive from a distance, but they are potentially vulnerable to intrigue. North Korea’s is a government of obscure and competing factions—the army, the Korean Workers’ Party and the cabinet being the greatest—and any uncertainty or crisis in the months ahead could upset the delicate balance behind the dictatorship.

In the very short term though, it seems unlikely that anyone will make a move. Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, argues that the cohort of officials who rose during Kim Jong Il’s reign “are now in power and have much privilege to protect”. Even those who privately oppose Kim Jong Un will proclaim loyalty for now. China, fearing instability, will support the succession in so far as it promises to maintain order and prevent a flood of refugees from spilling over its border.

Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, called Kim Jong Il “a great leader of North Korean people and a close and intimate friend of Chinese people”. Zhang Liangui of the Central Party School in Beijing however told Caijing magazine that China’s policy has been developed with regard for “North Korea the country, not Kim Jong Il the man”. For many years Chinese leaders tried in vain to convince Kim Jong Il to embrace Chinese-style economic reforms; they might yet choose to push those reforms with renewed vigour.

The optimists’ argument would be that the time is ripe for such an overture, and that the West should join with its own. The year 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, is supposed to be the year that North Korea becomes a “strong and prosperous nation” (kangsong taeguk). The domestic justification for reform could go like so: Kim Jong Il built the nuclear weapons that made his nation “strong”, regardless of whether North Korea might choose to give them up; now it is the time make the country “prosperous”. “Diplomatically, that’s where you want to engage with them,” says John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who watches China and North Korea. “Okay, you got strength, you’re secure. Now let’s work on prosperity together.”

Sceptics, a group who were proved right under the late Leader time and again, argue that the regime’s elite circles will be loth to abandon the systems of patronage and rent-seeking that have so enriched them. Moreover, any meaningful effort to open up the economy risks exposing the state’s ruling mythology. It has long been shielded from contamination by such inconveniences as facts.

Given a choice, the people might prefer facts to mythology, and real economic well-being over juche (loosely, self-reliance, or autarky). Local television reports are filled with the requisite footage of wailing on the streets of Pyongyang, where the more privileged and well-fed reside, but these images do not offer much insight into the reaction of the impoverished countryside. One NGO worker with extensive contacts around the country states that though they “lived under undeniable fear with Kim Jong Il as the leader of the nation, they are surely even more fearful with him gone.” Without even the barest infrastructure of civil society, lacking most of the tools of modern technology, the rural population of North Korea cannot be fruitfully compared to the victims of repression in the Middle East who are trying to make good on the Arab Spring.

North Korea's fate may depend in some measure, then, on how the rest of the world chooses to grapple with the new leadership, and vice versa. The death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 was quickly followed by the completion of an “agreed framework”, negotiated with the Clinton administration, that had seemed to sideline North Korea’s nuclear programme. Last week, immediately prior to Kim Jong Il’s death, there were whispers of a possible thaw in relations. North Korea is in desperate need of food aid, and the United States had reportedly offered to ship nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of "nutritional aid" on a month-to-month basis—on the condition that it would be allowed to verify that none of it ended up "on some leader's banquet table". There were even murmurs to the effect that Pyongyang might suspend its uranium-enrichment programme. There is something on which to build. Facing an election year of his own however, Barack Obama may find it difficult to pursue a new, softer line on North Korea, even with a new Kim.

Another approach could come from South Korea, but perhaps not until after its parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012. The sitting president, Lee Myung-bak, has defined his term in office with a hawkish stance towards the North. The South’s public reaction to Kim’s death was relatively muted: The KOSPI index of leading Korean stocks fell at first but then stabilised. Ordinary South Koreans have been debating whether or not condolences should be sent (as Pyongyang did when Kim Dae-jung, a former president of South Korea, died in 2009). Some have taken to criticising the country’s intelligence capabilities. The timing of Mr Lee’s visit to Japan on Saturday, December 17th, makes it seem plain that none of South Korea’s spooks were aware of Kim Jong Il’s fate until the official announcement was broadcast. That happened to fall on the president’s birthday; his party was cancelled at the last minute.

A spokesman for Mr Lee, Cho Hyun-jin, says that he is “cautiously optimistic” about North-South relations, and notes that he is in close contact with leaders in Japan, America, and Russia. Mr Lee’s term in office has been marked by severe tensions with North Korea. In November 2010, the North shelled a South Korean island, killing two civilians. Earlier in the same year it was accused of sinking a South Korean naval vessel with a torpedo, killing 46 sailors. Those may prove to have been the last two attacks to have been carried out at the order of Kim Jong Il. But some observers have attributed them to the “Great Successor” as rites of initiation.

Kim Jong Il’s funeral, which may provide the first opportunity for assessing the regime’s new pecking order, is to take place on December 28th. (Intriguingly, Mr Chang, the Great Successor’s chief regent, is ranked a lowly 19th on the official list of attendants.) The late Kim’s record, according to Mr Cumings, will be one of “failure at almost every level, except the critical one of maintaining maximum power for his family and the regime”. We will soon see whether or not Kim Jong Un—the youngest leader in the world to command a nuclear arsenal—has such staying power, or such unfortunate consequences for his people. The months ahead will be most telling. Mr Zhang, of the Central Party School in Beijing, makes a wry nod to his own country’s experience. Uttering the ritual platitudes of succession and actually carrying it out are two very different things. “Socialist countries are like this,” he says. “There's a certain distance between legal procedure and actual practice.”

(Picture credit: AFP PHOTO / KCNA VIA KNS)

Source: The Economist.