Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World by Benjamin R. Young

Abstract

In From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), Elidor Mëhilli argues that Communism in Albania “engendered a shared material and mental culture across borders without ensuring political unity.” In Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader, Benjamin Young shows the extent to which policymakers and ordinary citizens in another prominent case of Communist heterodoxy— North Korea—drew from, and indeed tried to export, the “party central committees, recognizable slogans, surveillance techniques, censorship rituals, a mental map, and a new vocabulary” that were, for Mëhilli constitutive of the socialist world. Young argues that the relationships forged through the export of such techniques and ideas to Third World states fundamentally “shaped and molded North Korea’s national identity,” causing officials in Pyongyang to foreground autonomy and anti-colonialism as the “core principles” of their state (p. 11). Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader contributes to research on socialist internationalism by stressing that the Soviet Union was not always the one that laid down the ideological terms for such exchanges. Young’s work additionally reveals the occasional frictions and competition that occurred between Communist states for influence in the Third World. Fostering relations with Third World states was, Young shows, a strategic priority for Communist countries keen to enhance domestic perceptions of their global influence, their standing in international organizations, and their hard currency supplies. Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader sets out to recover the independent aspirations and impact of “small states” on the Cold War (p. 11). It should additionally be read by scholars interested in the blending of soft and hard power in Communist states’ Cold War diplomacy and the nature and limits of these same states’ autonomy from the Soviet Union. The book considers whether a special subset of Communist states existed—also including Albania—which had more in common with one another than with their nearer regional neighbors on account of what became their “renegade” status (p. 124). Young traces North Korean engagement with the Third World (defined “not [as] a geographic area but a global project . . . that prioritized anti-imperialism and anticolonialism”) from 1956 through 1989 (p. 1). The North Koreans first fostered bilateral relations with seemingly like-minded states such as Indonesia under Sukarno, Cuba under Fidel Castro, and Communist-ruled Vietnam. It then courted the NonAligned Movement (NAM)—which it joined in 1975—to promote the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. North Korean leaders quickly grew disillusioned, however, with what they perceived to be the NAM’s crippling lack of consensus. By the 1980s, North Korea turned toward newly independent states in the South Pacific to “extend its diplomatic presence and undermine South Korea” (p. 116). North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung simultaneously made a concerted effort to