The global media remain fascinated with North Korea's supposed weirdness. ‘Common knowledge' portrays a monolithic state and society that is hermetically sealed from knowledge of the outside world. The government controls a robot-like ‘million-man army' willing to sacrifice itself for the ruling Kim family, which is further protected by its willingness to use nuclear weapons as a first-strike capacity in mad policies of aggression. The omniscient government thinks nothing of starving its population and callously diverting foreign aid from the hungry and the vulnerable to the affluent and the privileged. The entire state is little more than a criminal enterprise. North Koreans are unlike any other people in the world in that they believe everything their government tells them and indeed constantly express heartfelt devotion to the ruling family for the poverty in which they live.

Yet, on the face of it, the North Korean government is neither uniquely authoritarian nor the population uniquely economically badly off. From Laos to Turkmenistan in Asia; Equatorial Guinea to Zimbabwe in Africa; and Syria to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, political dissent is brutally suppressed and freedom still to be won. In economic terms, North Korea's gross national income per capita of $583 in 2012 made it the twentieth poorest country in the world but it was not uniquely povertystricken. North Korea's military and security apparatus remained opaque to outside scrutiny but that was not unique to North Korea. The military and the security sectors remain more or less closed to public scrutiny, even in democratic societies. Why then is North Korea considered so exceptionally difficult to understand? Is North Korea really unique?

In the end, it is the North Korean government that benefits from the perpetuation of the myths of North Korean strangeness. Myths of military superiority, fearsomeness and unpredictability help in persuading adversaries to take them seriously. The perpetuation of the ‘common knowledge' assumption that North Korea is uniquely inexplicable inhibits more sober analysis that would expose the vulnerabilities, weaknesses and frailties of the regime.

Ethnically based cultural conceptions of what it is to be Korean constituted the primary identity marker of the North Korean population in the Kim Il Sungist period and the era of military-first politics. These cultural conceptions of national identity were partly a product of historical consciousness in the population and partly a result of the relentless promotion by North Korean governments of ethnic identity as fundamental to Korean political identity. North Korean governments promoted the development of revolutionary consciousness as a normatively appropriate aim for individuals but these ideas of what constituted the appropriate way of life for individuals were justified through and subordinated to ethnic conceptions of national identity.

North Korea shared with South Korea an understanding of Korean national identity. This was underpinned by a distinctive ethnic identity arising from a unique and special cultural patrimony constituted by a common history, culture, founding myths, language and homeland. North Korea also shared with South Korea a story of the constitution of modern Korea as the product of a more or less linear development traced back into ancient history, for at least five thousand years. Historical Korea is understood by both states as having a recognisably common geographical heartland south of today's border with China and covering the whole of what is today understood as the ‘Korean' peninsula. Also shared is the understanding of the Korean nation as having been historically vulnerable to foreign predations that threatened to eradicate core aspects of Korean identity as well as to take over the national territory.

Northern historians assert the distinctiveness of northern history in their claim that states and leaders from the northern half of the peninsula historically provided leadership to the Korean nation in the struggle for political independence. North Korean governments interpret Korean history to demonstrate northern superiority over South Korea in respect to historical, cultural and political claims to represent the Korean nation.

The goal of military-first politics was regime survival. The idea was to embed regime security against dissent at home and threats from abroad in a new system of politics in which the interests and survival of the Kim family were institutionally folded into the interests and survival of the military. Military-first politics was a response to instability generated by the famine and economic collapse of the mid-1990s, although, in an effort to secure legitimacy for military-first politics, some North Korean publications read back the foundations of military-first politics into history, at least as far as 1960. Other North Korean sources are more accurate with one Pyongyang publication attributing the first articulation of ‘Songun' or ‘military-first politics' to a 1995 New Year's Day speech made by Kim Jong Il to a military unit.

Military-first politics provided the means to achieve and operationalise regime security priorities. For the first time in the brief history of the North Korean state, the military assumed executive authority over the political sphere. Communist institutional models that conflated state and Party were maintained but the government stressed that military-first politics was a new form of political organisation. Constitutional changes in 1998 and in 2009 embedded military-first principles in law. There was no question of a switch to a democratic system based on multiparty elections. Military-first governments did not engage in structural reform of the judicial or penal system although some modernisation of the criminal law took place.

Military-first economic planning aimed to reconstruct the old command economy founded on the resuscitation of heavy industry for the same reasons that underpinned Kim Il Sungist policy. The aim was an economy that could support a military capacity that could deter or, in the worst-case scenario, defend against military intervention from abroad. Military-first era governments remained ideologically opposed to implementing a radical ‘marketisation from above' but in practice relied on the de facto marketisation that had emerged ‘from below' to deliver key priorities, including food security.

In the early 1960s, policy changed from the rapid reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure that had characterised the immediate post-Korean War period to that of prioritising ‘economic and defence construction simultaneously'. The objective of economic policy was to secure regime survival by building a self-sufficient, modern military capability to act as a deterrent against foreign intervention and to use as an offensive force if required. Self-sufficiency meant minimising external dependence and maximising the use of internal resources. The major internal resource was the physical labour of the population organised by way of the ‘mass line' that was constituted by a top-down command structure and a political system that did not permit opt-outs by individuals. The model was not entirely self-sufficient as it relied on allies and supporters to fill crucial resource gaps, including advanced technology and oil, but it was autarkic in that external players did not have much of an impact on Kim Il Sung's strategy and policies.

Initial results were stunning. The economy grew rapidly and the population benefited from improved social welfare provision. The problem was that the model did not bring self-sustaining growth and it suffered from intrinsic flaws including the skewing of investment to the military sector. Economic strategy never fundamentally changed during the Kim Il Sung years and structural problems were not resolved. The worst of these was the inability to produce sufficient quality and quantity of consumer goods. The most serious weakness was that economic strategy never delivered food security for the population.

Self-reliance: the military imperatives

Economic policy aimed to establish national self-sufficiency in industry and agriculture so the DPRK would not become a dependency of either the Soviet Union or China. The intention was that an indigenous heavy industrial capacity would provide the motor-force of an integrated industrial, agricultural, consumer goods and, most importantly, an armaments and military materièl manufacturing sector.

The Kim dynasty remained at the apex of the restructured social hierarchy but the social structure over which the Kim family presided became more fragmented and less stable. The formal occupational structure remained similar to that which existed in the Kim Il Sungist era but there was no longer a reliable correlation between occupational and social status. Party members found that political status still counted for something in North Korea but, in the context of market realities, perennial food shortages, low incomes and high prices, economic entrepreneurial skills mattered more.

Women as a social group remained in low-status, physically arduous and dirty jobs; over half a million women worked as labourers in 2008. A minority secured good jobs and high-status positions but low pay pushed many women into the marketplace to supplement their income. Formerly high-status groups found that they were no longer privileged economically and socially. Professionals, the industrial working class, farmers on agriculturally productive farms and the ranks of the armed forces saw their fortunes plummet. A new class of nouveau riche emerged whose ostentatious lifestyle was based around the capacity to privately accumulate wealth.

The government viewed young people as the social group most likely to become politically disaffected and refocused mass mobilisation policies to an almost exclusive concentration on young people. Military-led command-and-obey organisation supplanted previous Party-led techniques that had offered rewards as well as penalties for participation in mass mobilisation into the military, civil defence and economic construction. Forced mobilisation served to keep young people occupied and managed but could not hide the obvious failings of the government. Inefficacy of the propaganda machine and greater understanding of the outside world only confirmed the bankruptcy of government policies.

The fragmentation of the old elites

During the military-first era, a narrowly based, non-accountable and interdependent civilian and military elite continued to preside over the state and society. Power and politics continued to coalesce around a network of oligarchies, the most important of which was the Kim Il Sung dynasty.

The Kim family leadership perceived the end of the Cold War in Europe as providing the opportunity for the exercise of untrammelled power by the United States and feared military intervention from abroad to secure regime change. The government attempted diplomatic engagement with South Korea but also engaged in a nuclear development programme so as to provide the option of building a North Korean nuclear weapon. Kim's policies were challenged by the United States administration of President Clinton to the point that both sides understood the outbreak of war as imminent in mid-1994. Only a last-minute intervention by former United States President Jimmy Carter de-escalated the conflict and allowed for bilateral negotiations that continued after Kim Il Sung's death, in July 1994 aged 82. The North Korean political establishment continued to negotiate with the United States to produce the ‘Agreed Framework', sometimes known as the Geneva Agreement for the location in which it was signed, in October 1994.

The diplomatic crisis of the early 1990s consumed government attention to the extent that the economic crisis, triggered by the decision of the Soviet Union and China to end subsidies to the DPRK, was initially treated by the North Korean government as similar in scale to crises of previous eras. The population was urged to do more with less and muddle through. The government made defence cuts but these were not substantial enough to have much of an impact on the expanding economic crisis that developed into a national food emergency.

Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il initially appeared paralysed by the scale and scope of what turned into a catastrophe for North Korea's population, as both continued to prioritise regime security over economic policy. Industrial and agricultural production plummeted. Most of the population had few alternatives to state provision as private production was minimal and markets were undeveloped. When the state's food distribution system finally collapsed in the mid-1990s, starvation ensued and the resulting famine killed up to a million people between 1993 and 1998.

North Korea is mad, bad and sad. The government is uniquely evil, malevolent and belligerent. The North Koreans are planning to fire missiles armed with nuclear bombs on Alaska. North Koreans are politically indoctrinated robots whose highest ambition is for their children to serve the fatherland in a life of endless privation and unsmiling devotion to a God-like figure in the person of the state leader, Chairman of the National Defence Commission, Kim Jong Un.

The conception of the Democratic People's Republic ofKorea (DPRK – more commonly known asNorthKorea) as so far off the planet that itmight as well be in outer space prevails in almost any report aboutNorthKorea in the so-called quality press fromround the world. This is despite the fact that many of the claims about North Korea are as bizarre and illogical as the picture they are supposed to portray. There are over 24 million North Koreans – do they really all think the same? The dominance of the ‘conventional wisdom' on North Korea drowns other perspectives to the extent that it would be surprising if the average, reasonably well-informed member of the public did not automatically view North Korea as alien and inexplicable.

Yet North Korea is far from unique and not a very difficult country to explain. North Korea has an authoritarian government that rules over an economically struggling society. North Korea is not a pleasant society to live in if you are poor, old, ill-connected, religious and/or a political dissident. Should North Koreans be brave enough or foolish enough to engage in political criticism of the government, they face brutal treatment, including imprisonment and internal exile.

North Korea, like many other countries in the early twenty-first century, is undergoing a transition from socialism to capitalism. This fitful and somewhat reluctant process nevertheless represents a very profound transformation of society. The country's economy is irreversibly marketised even though the government's political philosophy and rhetoric hangs on to some vestiges of its foundational socialist rhetoric.