As one of the most reclusive countries in the world, North Korea has long been closed to even the faintest whisper of an alien idea. Yet when a British passport holder recently went to the North Korean embassy in Beijing and expressed a desire to visit the Hermit Kingdom, he was warmly received. London does not have diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, he was reminded, but he was more than welcome to come in. Not only would the authorities take care of his visa; they would also confirm plane tickets, provide him with a hotel and meals, set him up with a guide. And since so many countries regard a North Korean stamp as a stigma, they would give him a detachable visa that he could throw away as soon as he left.
One week later, on the aging Chosonminhang airlines plane into Pyongyang -- the carrier runs only five flights a week, linking the capital to Moscow, Beijing, Khabarovsk and Sofia -- the Briton was the only sightseer in evidence. Most of the passengers were North Koreans (easily identified by the badge depicting President Kim Il Sung that every North Korean must pin over his heart) and Japanese businessmen, apparently undeterred by the fact that North Korea is the only country that Japanese nationals are not permitted by their government to visit.
The fact that capitalist foreigners were visiting at all suggests that the world's last great communist dinosaur is beginning to stir. As national alliances have been radically redrawn over the past year, the longest-running dictatorship in the world has found itself increasingly abandoned by the two patrons, Moscow and Beijing, that it has always managed to play off against each other. Pyongyang's sense of vulnerability was only sharpened when the Soviets, who account for 50% of North Korea's trade, established full diplomatic relations with South Korea in September. China, meanwhile, enjoys $3 billion a year of trade with Seoul, at least three times more than with its ostensible ally to the north.
With a 10% drop in foreign trade last year and an even more damaging cut to its almost bankrupt economy anticipated this year, North Korea is being forced to swallow its principles and make friends with the countries it has long loved to vilify. September saw the first high-level meeting between North and South Korea; a second round of talks was conducted last month. And just days before the Moscow-Seoul accord, Pyongyang asserted its eagerness to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan, its bitterest enemy of all since the brutal Japanese occupation of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
The man in the Pyongyang street, however, still proceeds as if no one has told him that the cold war is over. North Korea seems stuck in some vanished black-and-white era of dark, Soviet-made limousines and gray, featureless concrete blocks (when a visitor pulls out a camera, a local asks him, in astonishment, "Color?"). The dominant image of the capital is of neatly dressed people in groups walking soundlessly through silent avenues of empty high-rises.