Description
North Korea is often perceived through the image that is portrayed by the Workers’ Party of Korea and its Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. It is often seen as a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that is hostile to the West, poorly governed and determined to destabilise East Asia. However, while not incorrect, this rather narrow view of the country fails to take account of the people of North Korea who live day to day in this complex and unusual place and who are almost always forgotten.
Glyn has visited North Korea almost fifty times across the last quarter century starting for the first time in 1997 when he was a Member of the European Parliament and Pyongyang was looking to the European Union to provide emergency food aid as hunger engulfed the country. Subsequently the European Parliament established a Standing Delegation with the Peninsula of which he was a member. After leaving the European Parliament Glyn continued to engage with the North and was asked by the International Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea to organise a political dialogue with European political figures. This was the background to his book Talking to North Korea. The dialogue was active until the arrival of the Covid pandemic and Pyongyang wants to see it restart in the near future. In this lecture, he will look at where North Korea is, how it got there and where it is going in light of recent events.
Glyn Ford was a Member of the European Parliament for 25 years (1984-2009). Much of his focus was on the International Trade and Foreign Affairs Committees, particularly with respect to East Asia. Glyn continues his engagement with Pyongyang through the Brussels based NGO Track2Asia. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of Polint, a consultancy specialising in EU public affairs and international relations and is a Board Member of the Pacific Century Institute.
