North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

to the throne. The State Council usually consisted of fewer than fifty noblemen, including three
supreme counselors, two royal personal assistants, six ministers, chief inspectors, military
leaders, and some provincial governors.
Any policy recommendation made by the State Council was always based on unanimous
consent. But, often arm-twisting and political intrigue were used to arrive at that unanimity. Then,
policy recommendations were submitted to the king for his approval. As a rule, the essence of all
major foreign policy and national security decisions was to hand the issue to the Chinese
Imperial Court for its own deliberation and final approval, which was only natural because Korea
was, after all, a tributary state of the Middle Kingdom. That was the decision-making process
followed by Korean rulers when they had to make up their mind as to how to handle shipwrecked
Western sailors who washed on Korean shores or whether or not and how to normalize
relations with Japan and the Western powers in the mid-19th century.
The Japanese colonial rule that lasted for thirty-five years contributed heavily to the
dislocation of the traditional Korean political system, its values, institutions, informal influence
networks, and policy-making mechanisms. Although the Japanese-installed Government-General
of Chosen was not empowered to deal with foreign policy matters, its impact on subsequent
institutional development in Korea was enormous, for it was the Japanese who for the first time
set up a modern, efficient bureaucracy in Korea, inculcated many of the post-war Korean
administrative beliefs, and left behind thousands of Japanese-trained Korean administrators,
managers, and officials after their forced and abrupt departure in August 1945.
The amalgamated communist party-state formed under Soviet tutelage after the liberation,
and cemented in the trials and tribulations under Kim Il Sung’s leadership during and after the
Korean War, was a localized replica of the Soviet communist party-state system, exhibiting
many features of the typical Stalinist political system and bureaucratic regime, emphasizing the
one-man-centered communist party monopoly rule, mass mobilization politics, repressive
security apparatus, unanimity, and centralism in policy decision-making.
Kim Il Sung founded a dynastic monarchy in the late 1940s, although officially he
proclaimed the establishment of the Cabinet-based parliamentary republic in September 1948,
which was later recast as a presidential republic in the course of the constitutional revision in
1972. For a long time, the President cum Great Leader relied on his personal Secretariat to set
national security priorities and formulate foreign policy goals. As the issues grew in complexity,
he began to turn for advice and support to the other senior leaders of the North Korean
government, most of whom were his former revolutionary comrades-in-arms. That collective
consultative process was officially legitimized when the 1972 constitutional reform set up the
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