Is North Korea really a monarchy?
Hi Reddit!
I don’t have any formal training in political science, I just am kind of interested in the subject. To me, an uninformed observer, North Korea looks a lot like a new monarchy, but everywhere I look online they call it a “hereditary dictatorship.” My question is…why??
According to North Korea’s constitution, the effective leader of the country is the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, and that role is meant to be fed by elections and served in terms of 5 years. However, since 1957, power has only ever really been held by three successive members of a single family: the Kims. Despite the fact that the country’s constitution nominally puts power in the hands of the Politburo, the Kims have managed to amass a degree of power that’s more or less absolute. Most people seem to describe this as a hereditary totalitarian dictatorship achieved through a one-party state.
Monarchy is a form of government in which power is concentrated in a single head of state, a monarch. Monarchies can be absolute (like Saudi Arabia) or constitutional (like the UK), hereditary (like most monarchies around today) or elective (like the Vatican). As I understand it, their main uniting characteristic is that the state is not just controlled by but embodied in a single individual, as articulated by Louis XIV when he said “l’état, c’est moi.”
For the purposes of comparing with North Korea, let’s look at the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE was an elective monarchy, but it was often functionally hereditary or at least dynastic. This happened most famously under the Habsburgs, but also under the Ottonians, Salians, Hohenstaufens, and Luxembourgs. In each of those cases, the dynasties did not control the state through simple succession; they did so through constant reassertions of their wealth and power that either won over the Prince-Electors or forced their hands.
The Kims, too, are frequently maneuvering to reassert their own power and ensure dynastic control of the state. If anything, their elections seem to be more of a sham than those of the HRE ever were. At least the Prince-Electors had real power, unlike
the WPK, which has been basically totally suborned. And as for the question of embodying the state, while it’s true that North Korea may not have a European-style divine right of kingship per se, I think the role the Mount Paektu bloodline plays in the Juche ideology serves a similar purpose. Not that there haven’t been plenty of monarchs across history who have ruled in the absence of a formal divine right, mind you.
So political scientists out there, can you help me understand what the differences between North Korea’s hereditary dictatorship and a true monarchy are? Despite these superficial similarities, why do so many people seem to insist that North Korea isn’t a monarchy? Is it the existence of term limits on paper, even if the elections are a total sham and those limits therefore don’t exist functionally? Is it the lack of a title equivalent to King or Emperor? If tomorrow Kim Jong-Un announced that he would henceforth be known as Gugwang, but everything about the function of the state remained exactly the same otherwise, would that make North Korea a monarchy? How do we decide where this line gets drawn, and on what side should North Korea really fall?