North Korea is often portrayed as a 'rogue state' and 'unpredictable' but like any other state it has a history which has to be taken into account to make sense of its present. Throughout the 20th century, Northern Korea has been on the front lines between empires, and between imperialists and liberators. The end of the Cold War globally has not solved the Korean separation the way it solved the German one, though the ideological rhetoric has changed. North Korean leadership invokes this history regularly to explain and justify its positions, and this has to be taken seriously in any analysis of North Korea's 21st century development. Along with Imperialisms past and present, North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs are offshoots of 20th century processes of proliferation, in which weapons technology passed from state to state, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Perhaps more importantly, North Korea is drawing on the experience of disarmament over the last 25 years, a process that has not always gone well for states that surrender their nuclear weapons capacity. All this is true, but perhaps more importantly, it appears to be the foundation of the North Korean understanding of how we got to this point, and what matters in this moment: regime survival in the face of multiple hostile controlling empires. We are historical beings, etc.

1. North Korea:
Hangover of the 20th Century
Jonathan Dresner
Pittsburg State University
2017 Korea Semester
Missouri Southern State University

3. Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895

4. Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905

5. Japanese Colonial Territories and Spheres of
Influence, 1895-1912
Taiwan:
1895: Treaty of Shimonoseki
1898: Fujien region Commercial
Treaty
Korea:
1904: First Japan-Korea Treaty
1905: Second Japan-Korea Treaty
(Protectorate)
1907: Third Japan-Korea Treaty
(Internal Administration and
Military Disbandment)
1910: Korean Unification
Agreement
Liaodong Peninsula
1905: Portsmouth Treaty
1905: Sino-Japanese Portsmouth
Treaty Confirmation Agreement
Manchuria
1907: First Japan-Russia Treaty
1912: Third Japan-Russia Treaty
Sakhalin

7. Kim Il Sung,
1912-1994
Kim Jong Il,
1941-2011
Kim Jong Un,
1984-present

9. Nuclear Proliferation

11. Select Sources
• Yamakawa Nihonshi Sogo Zuroku [Japanese
History Maps and Charts Omnibus], 1985
• Nuclear Proliferation Map from New Scientist
• Kyung Moon Hwang, A History of Korea: An
episodic narrative, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Hyung Gu Lynn. Bipolar orders: the two Koreas
since 1989. Zed Books, 2007.
• Contemporary Korea map from U Texas Perry-
Castaneda Collection
• Kim family tree from Time. 24 February 2017.
• Asia map from Nations Online Project