In chapter two, we examine North Korea’s post-war recovery and its extraordinarily rapid transition towards a modern industrial economy in the 1950s. Here we draw attention to the massive financial support that North Korea received from elsewhere in the socialist bloc in that decade. The existence of the more advanced ally of the Soviet Union and its generous developmental assistance underpinned Kim Il Sung’s ultimately erroneous belief that North Korea would not have to sacrifice living standards in order to pursue a strategy of heavy industrialisation. Developmental strategies were, however, mediated through ongoing domestic political struggles. The factional disputes of the 1950s were in part related to questions of developmental strategy and were a reflection of the exiled nature of Korea’s communist movement during the colonial era and the nature of the various factions’ international linkages. In this chapter, we also draw attention to the substantive nature of North Korea’s developmental policies in the 1950s, including that of the socialisation of production. We also examine the decline of international aid to North Korea towards the latter part of the decade, and how that led to increased emphasis on mass mobilisation campaigns. This chapter consists of original, unpublished material.

In chapter three, we examine the impact of the growing geopolitical tensions of the 1960s on the North Korean developmental model. The emerging Sino-Soviet split raised important questions regarding the reliability of North Korea’s socialist allies and further strengthened the impetus towards autonomous heavy industrialisation and the building of a strong independent military industrial sector. Furthermore, these geopolitical challenges were exacerbated by the establishment of a strong military regime in South Korea and the latter’s own national project of catch-up industrialisation. As a result, the negative economic consequences of militarisation became increasingly visible in the 1960s. This chapter also examines the emergence of Juche as the ruling state ideology in North Korea. Here, we engage with the existing literature on the topic by reinterpreting Juche as a particularly intense form of developmental nationalism aimed at legitimising the human mobilisation required to facilitate catch-up industrialisation. From the late 1960s, Juche thought was further transformed as an ideological justification to strengthen Kim Il Sung’s monolithic system, and as such, the previous emphasis on post-colonial catch-up development was diluted. Here, we draw parallels to the voluntarism of Stalinist and Maoist ideologies while highlighting the distinctiveness of this North Korean form of developmental nationalism.

We argue that the North Korean developmental regime can be understood as an outcome of multiple combined historical lineages, including Korea’s history of colonial modernisation under Japanese rule and the imposition of the Soviet model of catch-up industrialisation in the immediate post-liberation era. The factionalised politics of the exiled anti-Japanese resistance movement and the ultimate ascendancy of Kim Il Sung’s Manchurian guerrillas led to a virulent form of postcolonial nationalism that emphasised autonomous national development rather than enmeshment with the socialist international division of labour. Following liberation, the new state underwent a series of "bourgeois democratic reforms” including a rapid land reform that addressed longstanding peasant grievances and ensured a degree of initial popular support for the new regime. The success of the land reform owed much to the fact of national division and that many landlords were able to flee southwards. The democratic reforms also served to integrate the population into the emerging corporatist mass organisations. Understood as a process of what Antonio Gramsci referred to as “passive revolution,” this has significant implications as to the state’s ability to mobilise society around developmental goals and contain any potential opposition to the state and its project of national development.