Speaking at a forum cosponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, Hazel Smith, a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and a consultant to major NGOs providing relief to North Korea, took on the common notion that the DPRK is a rigid society wrapped in layers of secrecy.

“I’m arguing that we can study this country like we can study others,” Smith said, adding that when studied, it becomes clear that North Korea is much less rigid than it may appear.

Experts generally do not give much attention to social change in North Korea, partially because the country’s tightly controlled political system gives the impression of total stability. Before the onset of the food crisis in 1994, virtually no reliable information on North Korea reached the outside world. At the time, United Nations’ officials didn’t even know the names of all of the DPRK’s counties. Today, after a decade’s worth of fieldwork by NGOs, the situation is vastly different: thousands of documents, rich with information on the North, are easily available through the U.N.’s web site.

The social change documented by these new sources is profound. Once a devoutly socialist economy, the famine forced many to engage in free enterprise just to survive. Mid-level bureaucrats, especially those outside Pyongyang, were the first to start buying and selling necessities. Other segments of society, which saw the bureaucrats as local leaders, followed them into trade, and soon the practice was so widespread the government had no choice but to accept it.

In this new economy, the burden of social welfare has shifted to individuals. The educational system has been devastated as teachers have left their jobs to forage for work and food. The state no longer provides effectively for the elderly and sick, family units do. A new class of wealthy entrepreneurs is snapping up once forbidden consumer goods like DVDs and secondhand Japanese cars. Waiters and waitresses who serve foreigners, and have access to their hard currency, are better off than many party officials.

Certain aspects of North Korean society, such as its prison system, continue to be opaque. Still, the influx of foreign aid workers into North Korea since 1994 has brought out so much information that DPRK government officials are starting to take notice. Recently, North Korea has taken a more assertive stance on NGO operations and Smith believes it’s because the government feels too much information on the country’s problems is getting out.

David Kang, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, began his presentation by noting that Americans have lately been asking what’s become of the U.S.-South Korea alliance that once had the two countries marching in lockstep. This central question is usually accompanied by two others. Why do South Koreans place so much trust in North Korea? And why are they so ungrateful for American sacrifices during the Korean War?

But those are the wrong questions for Americans to ask themselves if they want to get useful answers. Gratitude and trust are both emotions, Kang continued, and the growing differences between the U.S. and ROK result from structural causes, not emotional ones.

The most important cause is regional. Though many analysts use nineteenth century Europe as a template for predicting the geopolitics of twenty-first century East Asia, Kang believes that the region’s future will resemble its own, pre-colonial past. China is steadily climbing back into its historical role as Asia’s predominant power, and Japan is being pushed to the periphery. South Korea is looking to establish a position for itself in the new order. This explains its supposed ingratitude. On a working level, China and Japan are both more important to South Korea than the U.S. is, thus it only makes sense Seoul would tend to its relationships with them, and its own regional interests, at the expense of its alliance with Washington.

South Korea’s relationship with North Korea, characterized in Washington as overly trusting, is another example of structural change. The U.S. remains in a Cold War mindset, concerned about the implications of North Korea’s military strength. South Koreans, however, have recognized that North Korea’s weakness, and potential instability, represents a greater threat than all its tanks and artillery. Thus their respective approaches to the North diverge. The U.S. counters its fears by trying to intimidate Pyongyang while South Korea counters the threat of instability by providing economic aid to the North that can bolster its state capacities.

If the U.S. were to come around to South Korea’s approach and embrace economic transformation in the North, Kang predicted the U.S.-ROK relationship would improve substantially. However, he doesn’t expect U.S. policy to become any more accommodating in the near future. Most likely the strained ties between Washington and Seoul that have endured in recent years will continue on course, without either a dramatic schism or recovery.

“In the short term,” Kang closed, “the way forward is more of the same.”

Evans J.R. Revere, a Northeast Asia specialist with the State Department and the current Cyrus Vance Fellow in Diplomatic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, posed a question that has been popping up in policy circles in Seoul and Washington lately. After all the United States and South Korea have accomplished together, why don’t both sides feel better about their relationship?

Then he suggested several possible answers. Generational changes in South Korea have seen the old political establishment give way to new actors and new thinking. The sense of U.S.-Korea solidarity, forged during the Korean War, has faded and the days when Seoul reflexively looked to Washington for leadership are gone. In the defense sphere, while U.S. forces continue to weigh heavily on the strategic scales, South Korea is assuming more and more responsibility for its own security. Additionally, Korea’s rise from “economic basket case” to economic powerhouse has imbued the body politic with new confidence. From this more self-assured outlook, South Koreans regard North Korea as an object of pity, not of danger. The U.S. assessment of North Korea has stayed static. That difference has undermined the shared threat perception that has been the foundation of the alliance for five decades.

Paradoxically, as their self-confidence has risen, South Koreans have grown more ambivalent about their relationship with the U.S. Many feel that there has never been a better time to lay the groundwork for Korean reunification, making them especially sensitive to any U.S. words or deeds that seem unfriendly to the process.

The U.S. has already taken some positive steps to assuage South Korean sensibilities, such as committing to the withdrawal of the headquarters of USFK from central Seoul, where it has become a lightening rod for critics of the U.S. presence in South Korea. And presidents Bush and Roh have made progress in drawing the two nations closer, vowing at the November 2005 APEC summit in Pusan to begin a new strategic dialog.

For the alliance to continue to thrive, however, Revere said that the U.S. has to affirm its support for Korean unification in ever clearer terms, and both parties need to find a justification for their partnership that’s not based on what they have done together in the past, but on what they can do together in the future.