There is no doubt in John Paul’s mind that the Western Globalists are true and powerful contenders in the millennium endgame; or that they are already determining certain contours and aspects of our global life. But that is not to deny specific and practical weaknesses of an important kind in the West’s position.
Of the three principal contenders in the struggle to form a new world order, the Western capitalists are the only ones who must still form a truly geopolitical structure. The most serious question they face, therefore, is whether there can in fact be an organic evolution of the democratic egalitarianism of the capitalist camp into a geopolitical mode.
In this vein, surely it was the recent democratic evolution in Eastern Europe that prompted Francis Fukuyama, a Harvard-trained official in the American State Department, to argue categorically that there can be no organic evolution of democratic egalitarianism into anything further of its own kind. To argue, in fact, that there is no evolution of political thought possible beyond the idea of liberal democracy.
So adamant is Mr. Fukuyama that his persuasion amounts to nothing less than an interdict. A serious argument taken seriously that human thought in the matter of democratic government has reached the outer limit. A serious argument that, if history can be defined not as a series of events, but as the living force of new ideas incarnated in political institutions adequate to vehicle those ideas, then the history of democratic egalitarianism is at an end.
The fundamental idea of democracy—government of, for and by the people, with its ancillary institutions guaranteeing both continuity in government and fundamental rights on the personal and civic levels of life—is inviolable in its structural elements. Take away any element—the right to vote, say; or the right of free association—and the entire structure loses its integrity. Tip the balance in favor of one institutional arm—executive over legislative, or legislative over judicial—and the orderly system is jiggered. Adopt only one proviso of democracy—take the right of free association again—or even three or four, and as Mr. Gorbachev is presently learning the hard way, you will not have anything resembling the democratic egalitarianism of the United States or Great Britain.
The fact of the matter is, however, that any geopolitical structure worthy of the name would necessitate an entirely different regime of rights and duties. In a truly one-world order, it would not be possible to regulate an election of high officials in the same manner as democratic egalitarianism requires. General referenda would also be impossible.
So obvious has this difficulty been—and for far longer than Mr. Fukuyama has been on the scene—that warning scenarios have long since been prepared in the democratic capitalist camp itself. Scenarios that show in considerable detail just how and why, in the transition to a world order, the various processes of democracy would have to be shouldered by select groups, themselves picked by other select groups.
It takes little imagination to see that such a situation is not likely to lead to egalitarianism, democratic or otherwise. Nor is it likely to lead to wide rolling plains and smiling upland meadows of popular contentment.
Even if the most dour assessments of the globalist structure that is likely to come out of the capitalist design are correct, that is not the only weakness faced by the West. Intent as they are on winning the competition, the Western democracies tend to conceal from themselves two additional problems that are paramount in John Paul’s assessment of their likelihood of success.
The first is the problem of time. There is not at the present moment a geopolitical structure—or even the model for such a structure—native to democratic egalitarianism or born from its own specific sociopolitical principles. Quite apart from the stark Fukuyama interdict, which indicates that such an elaboration of democratic egalitarianism is now impossible, there does not seem to be any leeway of time available for the champions of Western democracy to attempt such an elaboration. The speed and urgency of events, together with the ongoing geopolitical readiness of Gorbachevism, afford no leisure for cautious experimentation. A new world order is all but upon us, demanding a geopolitical structure in the immediate here and now.
The second is the problem of morality: of a moral base as the necessary mooring for any system of government, whether national or global. In and of itself, capitalism does not have, nor does it require for its specific functioning, any moral precept or code of morality. What currently passes for such a moral base is nothing more than moral exigency; pressing needs calling for immediate action are responded to on a situation-by-situation basis.
Speaking at Prague Castle on April 21, 1990, John Paul was pointed in his warning to the newly liberated Czechoslovaks that in getting rid of Communism, they should not replace it with “the secularism, indifference, hedonistic consumerism, practical materialism, and also the formal atheism that plague the West.”
Already John Paul sees that the exigencies forced by Gorbachev and Gorbachevism upon the Western democracies can and do evoke from them the same brand of ruthlessness and incompassion that the Soviets have long displayed as a daily behaviorism. He has already seen, for example, the United States’ attitude to the rape and genocide of Tibet; to the cruel oppression of democracy in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and in the PRC; to the Indonesian genocide of the East Timorese; and to the war of extermination Syria’s Hafez Assad has waged against Christian communities in his land.
It is sufficiently evident, therefore, at least to Pope John Paul, that as Mikhail Gorbachev elaborates his ideological position within the new architecture of Europe, the main trends of the new global society begin to take on the color of Gorbachev’s Leninist-Marxist design.
Put another way, it is sufficiently evident that, if Gorbachev’s greatest geopolitical triumph to date has been the creation of a new mind in the West that is compatible with his great Leninist design for the new world order, then the corollary weakness for the capitalists’ design lies in the fact that the Western Globalists think they are in charge of the forces of change.
Admittedly, there is little quarrel between Gorbachev and the capitalists about the need they both see to fill our bellies with fresh food, and our minds with fresh knowledge, and our world with fresh air and water.
The difficulty comes, however, with the Leninist proviso embedded within Gorbachevism that we must never more repeat the famous cry of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger: “I know that only God can save us.”
Even granting Western Globalists the necessary time to achieve their one-world design, therefore, the questions of structure and moral underpinning lead Pope John Paul, with many others, to anticipate the total effect of the Western Globalist model on the society of nations.
Good intentions notwithstanding, one can foresee the demise of democratic egalitarianism as we have known it. One can predict the rise of massive bureaucracies to govern every phase of civic development. One can expect the insertion of the statist element in all phases of private life, and the slow elimination of compassion; of good taste; of the wild hopefulness that has made mankind venturesome in this cosmos; and finally of truth itself as the basic rule of the human mind in its quest for knowledge.
Unfortunately for us all, the basic lesson is not quickly learned that on this new globalist plane, once a geopolitical structure is established, powerful forces take over that are difficult to change. As Czechoslovakia’s new leader, Vaclav Havel, has already observed, “In organizational decrees, it is truly difficult to find that God who is the only one who can save us.”
The contemporary world over which Pope John Paul casts his wide-sweeping gaze is not a tidy place. It is cluttered with all manner of groups, large and small, able to command greater or lesser publicity, all making their own globalist claims.
Well before Karol Wojtyla took up his own position in the geopolitical arena as Pope, in fact, many such groups had already claimed a place on the world stage. Some were inspired by the creation of the United Nations. Others who disliked that institution proposed their own f
orm of globalism. Still other groups, ancient and modern, elaborated extensive plans in the name of some religious belief or philosophy about human life.
Common to all of these aspiring globalist contenders is the fact that, of themselves, they lack even the most basic tools for practical geopolitical contention. They have neither an extensive, articulated organization nor even the means to network all the nations, much less the power to entrain the world in the globalist way of life of their choice.
Some of these groups have simply decided to wait out their own geopolitical impotence in the belief that someday they will somehow achieve a global status and capacity commensurate with their ambitions.
Of principal interest to John Paul in terms of their present influence, however, are certain more venturesome groups, who plan to piggyback a ride to global status and supremacy by straddling any vehicle that appears to be headed in their direction.
Such in particular are the thousands of New Agers in our midst. And such, too, are the so-called Mega-Religionists—those who are persuaded, and who work to persuade us all, that all religions of the world are fusing into one globe-spanning mega-religion of mankind.
The members and spokesmen of both of these groups wax poetic about their vision. In their imagined grand design, the new world order will be one great Temple of Human Understanding. The truly global home of all nations will still resound with the languages of every race and tribe; but they will all be harmonized into one. Their Temple of Human Understanding will be roofed over with the all-inclusive allegiance to the common good. Its walls will be decorated with the icons of the new values—peacefulness; healthfulness; respect for Earth and environmental devotion. But over all, there will be the great icon of Understanding. What divinity exists will be accepted as incarnate in man; divinity of, for and by—and only within—mankind. All other shapes and concepts of divinity will melt—are already melting; fusing gently and irresistibly into the Understanding of mankind’s own inherent and godly power to fashion its own destiny.
The chief interest of these groups for Pope John Paul is that they spend their days leeching off of the geopolitical power of others. Intent upon predisposing as many minds as possible to the task of achieving heaven on earth, they have developed infiltration to a high art. Chameleon-like, they are to be found basking at the height of power everywhere in the West—in Transnationalist boardrooms and Internationalist bureaucracies; in the hierarchies of the Roman, Orthodox and other Christian churches; in major Jewish and Islamic enclaves already dedicated to the total Westernization of culture and civilization.
Neither New Agers nor Mega-Religionists are any less helpless finally than the many globalist pretenders crowding at the edges of the arena where the millennium endgame has already developed into a game of power—power understood, power possessed and power exercised.
Beset by delusions of grandeur and illusions of a favorable geopolitical future for themselves, New Agers and Mega-Religionists not only lack a geostructure. They must go a-begging for bits of georeligion and pieces of geo-ideology; and they are totally bereft of a realistic and rounded geo-mind-set.
The important effect of these globalist dreamers in the geopolitical contest is the weight they add to the forces already intent upon disposing the world toward the idea of an earthly Utopia and away from any knowledge of the transcendent truth of a loving God who, as John Paul is convinced, has a very different design in store than any they are able to imagine.
Among the primary contenders dominating the economic and political moves to form and control the new world order, Pope John Paul stands apart in several ways.
He is, first, the only one of the three whose vision of the grand design for that world order has undergone an abrupt revision of the most major kind. And he is the only one who has, from the first moment of his assumption of power, faced a concerted effort from within his own organization—indeed, on the part of some of the most powerfully placed members of his hierarchy—to wrest his entire georeligious and geopolitical structure from his control as Pontiff. An entrenched effort to take the Keys from Peter, and to divide the spoils of power that lie uniquely within his authority.
By contrast, and for all of Mikhail Gorbachev’s genius as an innovative and imaginative geopolitician, the Soviet leader is heir to a mentality and an organization that remain committed to Leninist ideology and goals, however they are to be achieved. And, for all of his difficulties as he tries to steer the Soviet Union into the river of Western European progress—avoiding shipwreck on the rock of Stalinist hard-lining as best he can, while maneuvering around the hard place of implosion and disintegration of the Leninist system—he has never been at the mercy of forces within his own house that clamor for an end result any different from the one he himself is after. Neither the problems Gorbachev faces, nor the bold and unprecedented means he has adopted to overcome those problems, provide John Paul with realistic and persuasive evidence that Gorbachev’s vision for the ultimate grand design is at odds either with Lenin’s seminal vision or with the aims of the most powerful elements of his own Party. The quarrel in the USSR is not over the end to be desired, but over the means to achieve that end.
The Wise Men of the West likewise proceed in the same hope they have always shared that their animating spirit will be sufficient to propagate democratic egalitarianism into a coherent geopolitical structure, and never mind the nay-sayers. They are as one in their intent to give the lie to the medieval maxim “Hope is a good companion, but a bad guide.” Even the fact that they have been forced by Gorbachev into a deep revision of their earlier plans is not in itself a revolutionary change; for it has been true more often than not over the past seventy years that Soviet leadership has been the active agent in international affairs and that the West has made hay out of its role as a powerful reactive agent. There may be as many opinions in the West as there are in the Soviet Union about which path to follow in any specific situation. But about the end result that is desired and sought, there is no bedrock disunity. In that sense at least, the West is not a house that is irreparably divided.
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When John Paul started into the millennium endgame—when he initiated it—all of his moves were tied to his clear but decidedly long-range vision that he could supersede the plans of both East and West; and, further, that he could leaven and finally supplant those superpower plans with some system that would tie the condition of the whole world no longer to the success barometers in Moscow and Washington but to the legitimate and absolute needs of the whole of mankind.
Even had any of the world leaders in 1978 and 1979 known what John Paul had in mind in their regard, none of them would have ventured a guess that the Middle European hotbed of nineteenth-century politics and wars would become the actual arena of the late-twentieth-century contest for world hegemony. For, to all intents and purposes, those leaders accepted the Iron Curtain as a permanent element of international life; as a kind of reliable center they could count on as they moved forward with their contentious agendas.
It was expected by most that the United States, Western Europe and Japan would continue as the trilateral giants of their camp. It was expected by those giants themselves that, over time, they would be able to weave and extend a net of profound change in the conditions of life around the world. It was expected that, over time, such profound change would lead to the creation of a geopolitical house in which the society of nations would live happily ever after. It was expected further that, over time, as the West built the sinews of a new world on the foundations of its technological, commercial and developmental prowess, it would simultaneously wear down the Soviet Union by the same means.
John Paul’s program was intent upon sweeping all such plans aside. The suffering caused by the East-West divide was too intense—too urgent and too widespread—to be acceptable as the permanent center or the reliable element in anybody’s plans. He came to the papacy, therefore, certain in the knowledge that the old order had to go.
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Moreover, the Holy Father’s own certainty that the locus of change must lie within Eastern Europe was not mere whim or contrariness or personal will. It was not even luck or untutored intuition. It was based on the careful penetration of what the West had long regarded as the Soviet enigma. It was rooted in the facts of hard-nosed intelligence; facts he analyzed without the impediment of an ideology rooted in the motives of profit or seduced by the siren song of raw power.
Pope John Paul was not surprised, therefore, by his early victory in Poland in 1979. Nor was he surprised that it was not the West, but the Soviet Union—the constant catalyst of twentieth-century affairs—that saw its advantage in shifting the locus of significant activity away from the agenda that had been fixed by the trilateral allies for their own advantage, and toward Eastern Europe, where the USSR needed early solutions to grave problems.
First, as he planned it then, he would introduce step-by-step and carefully balanced alterations in the sociocultural forces already deeply at work in Poland, not as a governmental entity but as a nation of people. His aim was to provide a model the Soviet Union could follow to ease the mounting pressures besetting the Politburos in Warsaw and Moscow; and to do that without spooking them in the areas of their military security and political dominance in that key sector of Eastern Europe.
With that delicate purpose in mind, and with the on-site cooperation of Cardinal Wyszynski and his Polish hierarchy, who were already past masters at such activity, the first instrument the Pope fomented—Solidarity—was devised purely and simply as a model of sociocultural liberty. Pointedly, he did not demand or want for it a political role; nor did he envision for it any action that would precipitate a Soviet-inspired security or military backlash.
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