“The East Asian Frontier of the Socialist World: North Korea in the 1950s”

Abstract

The decade of the 1950s was a formative period for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk), one that shaped its integration into the international socialist system. This article examines the interaction between North Korea’s internal (institutional) and external (international) integration into the socialist system that, at this time, the Soviet Union and its East European bloc allies dominated. It argues that North Korea was more integrated into the socialist world than its nationalist ideology implied. The 1950s marked the culmination of the dprk’s connectivity to the international socialist world. The narrative begins in the second half of the 1940s with the building of North Korea’s socialist system. It then focuses on East European bloc aid to North Korea during and after the Korean War, as well as the dprk’s reactions to this fraternal assistance. By the second half of the 1950s, North Korea came to associate integration with dependency, generating nationalist impulses in dprk policy and laying the foundation for the juche (self-reliance) paradigm. North Korea’s nationalist ideology was part of a broader post-colonial nation building drive, but socialist interdependency also played a role in the dprk’s divergence, after the early 1960s, from the Soviet bloc and the People’s Republic of China.