Lessons from the Thirty Years of Postcommunist Regime Transitions and Democratization for the Future North Korea.

Scholarly attempts to see North Korea's future political change from a comparative perspective have been rare largely on the ground that the North Korean case is regarded as so unique that it has no comparable case to study with. However, the dictatorship of the past communist parties in the postcommunist Europe during the late twentieth century was no less harsh than that of today's North Korea. Most of all, how do we know that they are incomparable until we actually compare them? If they are so different, in which aspect and how much are they different? This paper aims to fill this lacuna by discussing the possibility of regime change and democratic development in North Korea by means of systematic comparisons with the past 30 years' postcommunist experiences. The comparative analysis finds that, despite an array of dissimilarities between the cases, the role of South Korea as an economic and democratic supporter should be critical in inducing North Korea to make a political change and keep on the track of political reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]