Article Highlights

• A lot has changed since the Six-Party Talks with North Korea began almost eight years ago.

• For starters, Pyongyang has now conducted two nuclear tests, making its nuclear status much less ambiguous.

• Consequently, Washington must adjust its goals in any future negotiations with the North--especially its stance that Pyongyang must first denuclearize.

Originally created to deal with an earlier nuclear crisis in 2002, the multi-party negotiations were intended to replace, and improve upon, the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, which froze Pyongyang's fissile production program in an attempt to prevent the North from getting nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, whatever promise these talks first held vanished in October 2006 when North Korea decided to attempt a nuclear test. And any remaining shreds of promise disappeared completely last May with Pyongyang's second nuclear test.

So the North Korea we are dealing with today (i.e., a de facto nuclear weapon state) is much different than the North Korea we were dealing with in 2002 (i.e., a country whose nuclear status was ambiguous). Making matters worse, we have painted ourselves into a corner by vowing that we will never "accept" Pyongyang as a nuclear-armed state.

Escaping from this corner will require a delicate, but not impossible, diplomatic dance. We don't have to give up our ultimate goal of denuclearizing North Korea and bringing it within the confines of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But we do have to free ourselves from out-of-date thinking so we can actually tackle this challenge instead of merely posturing about it.

Without a doubt, in 2010, the diplomatic dance is far more difficult than it was before October 2006. The dilemma is that Pyongyang has likely concluded that Washington can neither wrest away its nuclear weapons status nor build enough international pressure to convince it to do so. Most critically, North Korea's two nuclear tests appear to have transformed the country's self-image and bargaining strategy. Pyongyang sees no reason to heed the call for negotiations explicitly designed to relieve the regime of what it worked so long and hard to achieve.

Put another way, the last eight years of talks may have convinced Pyongyang that Washington will never be able to force the North into giving up its tiny, but politically crucial, nuclear stockpile. This may also signal that the space for negotiations has narrowed, and that there is less room to find the golden midpoint: Giving Pyongyang enough of what it wants (i.e., prestige, security, respect, and/or material rewards) so that it will surrender its nuclear weapons.

Things never should have gotten so bad, but numerous failed policies since 2002 have produced consequences that cannot be erased by U.S. presidential cycles. In other words, simply because a new president is sworn into office doesn't mean the other players will blindly accept an offer to turn back the clock or indulge U.S. attempts to press the "reset" button.

So what do we do now? For starters, Washington needs to accept the reality that North Korea is a country with nuclear weapons; that there is--in the short term at least--little we can do about it; and that continuing to focus on denuclearizing Pyongyang gains us nothing. In fact, the only way to advance U.S. interests on the nuclear issue with North Korea is to admit that the ground has shifted. We don't have to shout it from the rooftops, but getting the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program cannot remain our overriding objective, as crucial as that might seem. Rather, it's time we refocused our work, keeping the nuclear problem on the agenda but not letting it completely dominate our approach.

To move forward constructively, we should first resume efforts by several U.S. administrations--from Reagan to Bush to Clinton--to prod the North into becoming a state more fully integrated into the global community. That will take years of hard work, conducted simultaneously on several fronts, but we had better get on with it. Next, we need to sit down and talk with the North Koreans to better refine our assumptions about what will work and what won't work.

Waiting around for significant political change in Pyongyang to solve our problems is the longest of long shots. North Korea as we know it isn't going to disappear any time soon, and the problems that flow from its anomalous policies won't lessen if Washington keeps banging its collective head against the same old wall.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe is pleased to announce the release of "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World" (Stanford University Press, 2010) edited by FCE Associate Director Roland Hsu.

Ethnic Europe offers accessible, comprehensive, and influential thinking on immigration, and the challenge of how we are to defend minority identity and encourage social solidarity in our world of global migration.  Focused on Europe as a destination for global immigration, eleven of the most influential social science and humanities authors address the increasingly complex challenges facing the expanding European Union—including labor migration, strains on welfare economies, local traditions, globalized cultures, Islamic diasporas, separatist movements, and threats of terrorism.  The authors confront the struggle shared in Europe and the U.S. to balance minority rights and social cohesion.  For the first time in one volume, these writers give startling insight into Europe’s fast-growing communities, taking the reader from global views to local detail.  From questions of high politics (If Europe includes Turkey, where does Europe end?) to local culture wars (How does McDonalds appeal to Catalans?), this collection engages theory, history, and generalized views of diasporas, including the details of neighborhoods, borderlands, and the popular literature and new media and films spawned by the creative mixing of ethnic cultures.

Roland Hsu, Associate Director of Stanford University’s Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, edited, and wrote the opening essay to make “Ethnic Europe” a foundation text and approachable guide to the experience of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion.  With his experience at the Forum bringing scholarship, policy, and public comment to bear of our most pressing issues, Hsu offers this book on “Ethnic Europe” as an approachable guide to the general and specific of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion. 

Roland Hsu earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and before coming to Stanford was Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Idaho.  Hsu currently teaches, in addition to his research and work at the Forum, in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Prominent Indonesian Muslim intellectual Nurcholish Madjid once declared “Islam Yes; Islamic political party No!” Voters in contemporary Indonesia seem to agree with this basic sentiment. Despite the recent Islamic revival that has dramatically increased public expressions of piety, Islamic political parties have failed to gain any significant electoral traction in Indonesia. In fact, between the 2004 and 2009 national elections, support for Islamic parties actually decreased from 38 percent to approximately 28 percent. Yet during those same five years, the Islamic political parties that failed to win at the ballot box mobilized enough political and popular support to pass one of Indonesia’s most divisive pieces of legislation—the Anti-Pornography Law. These seemingly contradictory elements of Indonesian politics provide starkly different impressions of Islam’s political role. Does a weak showing in the country’s electoral politics indicate the imminent demise of Islam in Indonesian politics? Or does the politically adept maneuvering of Islamists—who seek political power through legislation about bodily discipline—foretell gloomy days ahead?

Explanations for this paradox depend largely on where we look for “the political.” Political scientist Greg Fealy has described Islam in Indonesia as a mosaic. If we spend too much time focusing our gaze on one single area, he observes, we lose sight of other patterns elsewhere in the mosaic. To understand political Islam by ballot box alone is to miss the cultural undercurrents that have direct bearing on Islam and politics in Indonesia.

The anti-pornography bill was not only a political battle waged inside the parliament building; it was also a media drama that played out in the newspapers, televisions, and on the Internet. Human rights and women’s advocacy groups vehemently protested an early version of the bill, which stipulated that women would be prevented from leaving their homes during certain evening hours. From a different vantage point, the mostly Hindu island province of Bali threatened to secede, arguing that the article prohibiting “revealing” clothing in public would wreak havoc on the island’s tourism industry, still sluggish after devastating bomb attacks in 2002 and 2005. Whereas many non-Muslims worried about the “Islamization” of Indonesia, proponents of the bill lamented the “degradation of national morality.”

Popular Muslim television preachers were among the bill’s most vocal supporters. Eager to parlay their celebrity appeal into political clout, TV preachers Ustad Jefri Al-Buchori and Arifin Ilham helped to lead the so-called Million Muslim March to rally public support for the anti-pornography bill. Celebrity preacher and self-help guru Abdullah Gymnastiar led a sophisticated multimedia campaign to promote the bill through television, radio, the Internet, text messages, and public rallies. All of these popular preachers, in step with the political strategy of the Indonesian Council of Ulamas, invoked the religio-political language of moral crisis in an attempt to control the terms of political debate. Unable to win an election, Islamic groups flexed their moral muscle in the public sphere. From the pulpit of his Sunday afternoon television program, Gymnastiar characterized those against the bill as “having no shame” before God or country. Nearly every single political party, anxious not to appear “un-Islamic,” voted to support the anti-pornography legislation.

The political participation of a new generation of media-savvy religious leaders reveals a sentiment quite different from Nurcholish Madjid’s liberal aspirations. As one proponent of the Anti-Pornography Law put it, “Islamic political party No; Political Islam Yes!” Whereas utopian visions of the international caliphate may not resonate with Indonesian voters, it appears that political Islam—as played out on the public stage—is alive and well. What remains to be seen, however, is whether those who engage in the politics of piety also have the moral courage to champion Indonesia’s more pressing issues of poverty and corruption.

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