EU-DPRK Relations-Engagement or Standstill?

elations between the European Union (EU) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) do not make headlines. If the EU’s role in re-establishing peace and stability on the Korean peninsula was marginal before last year’s nuclear revelations by North Korea, its influence will continue to be minimal while security and nuclear issues dominate the agenda. EU policy-makers and officials, conducting “quiet diplomacy”, make it a point to stress that the EU’s policies and initiatives will remain “complementary” to South Korea’s DPRK policy. Critics of “quiet diplomacy” on the other hand complain that EU policies and initiatives going beyond the hard-line approach of the US towards North Korea go largely unnoticed. Humanitarian assistance, food aid and technical assistance together with EU-DPRK political dialogue set up in the late 1990s are the main and only partly successful instruments of the EU’s engagement policy. The nuclear crisis is jeopardising the EU’s engagement course towards the DPRK. Whereas the EU is still committed to engaging North through humanitarian and economic assistance, the implementation of the EU’s technical assistance projects, scheduled to start in summer 2003, however, are being put on hold. The EU’s engagement seems to have turned into a conditional one. Worse, with the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsular unresolved, the EU’s engagement course might soon be replaced by a wait-and-see attitude eventually resulting in a standstill in EU-DPRK relations. The alternative to engaging North Korea through humanitarian and economic assistance and food aid is an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in North Korea and even a war on the Korean Peninsula. This paper concludes that the EU’s policy towards the DPRK is closer to standstill than to engagement although the EU’s decision to separate security from humanitarian issues is without a doubt proof that the EU is still committed to easing the humanitarian and food crisis in North Korea. The EU’s contributions, however, are neither sufficient nor able to fill the gap left by the U.S. and Japan’s decision to suspend humanitarian assistance and food aid to the DPRK.