Market economics must be introduced. The East Europeans must give Western creditors guarantees of effective use of foreign capital and create “real money” through monetary reform. Comecon, the former—and miserably failed—Soviet answer to the European Common Market of the West, must be reformed: in effect, abolished. Mikhail Gorbachev had acquiesced in this, too. The East Europeans must be helped to undertake this rapid economic reform of Central and Eastern Europe without destructive social upheaval. Investments and credits must flow to the Central and Eastern European states according as the new form of their association with Western Europe is worked out. Already in Davos, everyone knew that on March 19, the day after the East German election, there would be a three-week conference of European political and business leaders to discuss economic cooperation and technological exchange between Eastern and Western Europe. “Building the European space”—this was what they called it at Davos.
The human balance in the achievement of this first circle in the plan was enhanced by the apparent absence of the old competing ideologies that created the dreadful “East-West” coordinate John Paul deplored. “The old European notions of right and left just don’t fit what is happening in our region now,” Adam Michnik stated. “Not only is socialism dead, but the language of that kind of politics is dead. What remains are values, not notions of right and left.”
For John Paul’s consolation, too, there is the fact that his beloved Poland had become an economic and political laboratory, and the preconditional sine qua non for economic recovery in the East European nations, so that they could stabilize their political situation. No one saw the Red Army as destabilizing; only economic catastrophe could now destabilize. Poland had demonstrated that. That was Poland’s present and near-future importance.
The second circle of the nations’ Grand Design involved Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR. The USSR, in Gorbachev’s pregnant phrase, “stands on the edge of the abyss” of economic death, wholesale anarchy and possibly the death throes of a horrible war. This did not need to happen, the USSR participants at Davos assured everyone. “We’ll climb out of this abyss by ourselves, but we need help from you,” Vitali Korotich asserted. But “nations can die of solitude.” The USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev must find some bridge between the Soviet centralized economy and the normal market economy. That is the essence of Gorbachev’s perestroika.
But that perestroika depended on the new political configuration of the USSR. There must be and will be a certain disaggregation of various parts—the Baltic States, certain Soviet republics. Even to Georgia and Armenia some form of autonomy within a Soviet/Russian federation will have to be conceded. All this would have to go hand in hand with perestroika. And the progress of perestroika depended on closer association with the European circle of Western and Eastern European nations. The ultimate aim must be a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” and over to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. The greater European economic space!
Already, Gorbachev had taken his geopolitical dispositions. He had agreed to remove 400 medium-sized missiles from Soviet Asia; China and Japan could feel more secure. He had guaranteed a withdrawal of 200,000 troops from the Far East. He forces were, in bulk, out of Afghanistan; and he was pressuring the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. He was in the process of reducing his Pacific fleet by a third and withdrawing his forces based at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, and all over Asia. The Southeast Asian “tigers,” Thailand and Singapore, together with South Korea and Taiwan, could breathe easier. He was working on the West-hating North Koreans to desist from their threat to South Korea.
With all the pawns at his fingertips, he was free to move them, reconfigure them, relocate them, reconstruct them, in line with his geopolitical intentions and goals.
He still benefited from the diplomatic connivance of the United States. For Americans, as for the majority of Davos participants, Mikhail Gorbachev must be helped. There would be no strident clamor from the U.S. that the Soviets get out of the Baltic States immediately, or abandon Afghanistan’s puppet government. Not even when the Soviets crudely violated the conditions of the already signed INF medium-range-missile treaty would there be any great brouhaha. At the Votkinsk missile plant, when the violations took place and American technicians moved in to verify the violation, the Soviet guards drew their sidearms and threatened the Americans. There would be violations and confrontations of this kind on March 9 and 10, 1990. But there would be no public denunciation of those gross violations.
“I don’t want to do something that’s going just to inadvertently affect the peaceful evolution of a self-determined Lithuania,” President Bush said. If he violently protested the Votkinsk outrage, “would that contribute to the peaceful evolution, or is it better to take a couple of shots for being underemotional?”
The same attitude was manifest in Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney’s announcement of troop withdrawals from South Korea. It was the U.S. effort to back up Gorbachev’s “softening” of North Korea’s bellicose behavior vis-à-vis South Korea. Secretary of State James Baker openly endorsed South Africa’s ANC (African National Congress), and had accepted the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) of Yasir Arafat as fully representative of the Palestinians. Both the ANC and the PLO are clients of Mr. Gorbachev.
Thus, being able to count on the patience and forbearance of the U.S. administration, and being still the master of the fate of the Eastern and Central European states, Mikhail Gorbachev could push for the ultimate (and not very far-off) integration of his reconstructed USSR into the “greater European economic space.” His geopolitical acumen was clear, and his goals were obvious.
At Davos, of course, the participants already contemplated the third circle of the Grand Design, the one that included North America. All agreed that while the decade of the nineties will be the “decade of Europe,” the twenty-first century will see the emergence of the “Pacific Rim” as a potent member of the great grid. For the Asia/Pacific countries were already bent on capitalizing on the “new European economic space.” Of course, as West Germany’s Helmut Haussmann said, the European nations will compete with North America and “Pacific Rim” economies. But the new Europeans must integrate with the economic grid of the Asia/Pacific nations. In other words, the twenty-first century will not be a “European century” or a “Pacific Rim century.” The term “geopolitical” was rather rarely used at Davos, but it is the only term adequate enough to cover that third circle (along with the first and second circles) of the Grand Design. The twenty-first century will be the century of the Geopolitical Earth.
At Davos, for the first time, a representative group of the society of nations did peek beyond the traditional limits of international politics and transnational globalism, just long enough to etch the bare outlines of a geopolitical world to come—the new world order, the world of the Grand Design of the nations. And as Helmut Kohl stated soundly, the new Europe must have as its goal the grand vision expressed by Thomas Jefferson: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
When the delegates to the Davos congress departed from that mountaintop, all were aware of the proximate steps that would be shortly taken toward their stated goal. After the March 19 talks on the economic and technological integration of Eastern and Western Europe, there would follow the all-important Conference of European Security at Helsinki in June. There the candidacy of the Eastern European states would be ratified, and the concrete lines worked out for the integration of the USSR into the “greater European space.”
Sometime before or shortly after that June meeting—Mikhail Gorbachev had been given the option to choose the exact date according to his political convenience—there would be a summit meeting of Gorbachev and President George Bush. Among other things, both leaders hoped to ratify and sign two important treaties concerning strategic missiles and conventional forces.
In the autumn, the “two-plus-four” process would take place. The two Germanys would formally agree to be reunified, to become on
e political unit once again. Then they would sit down with the four original Allies—the United States, France, Britain and the USSR—who had separated them in 1945 and hammer out a peace treaty, thus setting post-World War II Germany on its feet again as a sovereign state. And thus the onetime political dwarf of Europe would assume a stature commensurate with the giant proportions of its economic sinews; and the socioeconomic heart of Europe would start beating again.
All would be in place and geared for the next few steps toward the projected Europe of 1992+, the “greater European space.” As John Paul had sensed all along, so now he perceived the quasi-inevitability of all this; and along that road to this point, and down that road from the autumn of 1990 onward, he could see the emerging forms of his only two geopolitical contenders: the Western capitalists with their “greater European space” and the USSR of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Officially, of course, the “Europeans” and Gorbachev were seeking integration, both, supposedly, within the Grand Design devised by the capitalist West. In actual fact, and insofar as realism prevailed, nobody ever believed that Mikhail Gorbachev had ceased or would ever cease to cherish and promote his own Grand Design, the Leninist-Marxist plan. In that plan, the Leninist-Marxist ideal would finally prevail over Western capitalism. The real competition between that Leninist-Marxist design and Western capitalism would be a silent, almost underground thing until the crucial moment arrived for a naked and open declaration of intent on his part. Antonio Gramsci would be Gorbachev’s patron saint during that first step. For Gorbachevism, as John Paul could see, was Gramscian tactics transposed onto the geopolitical plane by Gorbachev. In the slow evolution of the “greater European space,” the fundamental supposition and theme of Marxization would be all-pervasive.
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The third contender in the competition will be John Paul II himself. He will not compete, as the other two do, in the fields of economics and finance, nor for that matter in the field of raw politics. His weapons are those of the spirit, in the area of men’s wills and minds. Even there, his actions will be confined to exhortation, to advisement, to discussion and argument. He will move in churchly surroundings and along the avenues of diplomacy. On the strength of his developed ties with government circles, he will be au courant with the twists and turns of all major events, will even be able to intervene by way of advice, of warning, of positive suggestion. For already he has entrée to the inner councils, and his influence is enormous, but he will remain within those limits.
For he is not the originator or the developer, but merely the Servant of the Grand Design he claims is of God. He has already put all nations on notice as to why their most elaborate plans for a “greater European space,” for the “common European house from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and for the totally “new world order” will not and cannot succeed.
The Grand Designs of his two fellow contenders are built, as he stated to the United Nations Assembly, on “certain premises which reduce the meaning of life to the many material and economic factors—the demands of production, the market, consumption, accumulation of riches, and to the demands of the growing bureaucracy with which an attempt is made to regulate these very processes.” Within the scope of those designs, man is subordinated to one single conception and sphere of values, and “sensitivity to the spiritual dimension of human existence is diminished to a greater or a lesser extent.”
Instead of the former sinful structures he excoriated in the “East-West” coordinate of tension, there will be, he maintains, a series of new sinful structures. They, like the sinful structures born along the hateful “East-West” and “North-South” coordinates of the past forty-five years, will be created out of greed, pride, power-seeking and an exclusivist reliance on man-based values, inspired and motivated by the nowadays commonly held persuasion that man can go it alone into the darkness of a quite unknown future.
For Europe in particular, John Paul has almost pronounced a lament.
Europe, in the millennium endgame, has an importance and a centrality out of all proportion to its present economic status, its natural resources and its military power. Economically, it is dwarfed by the United States and Japan. It has manifestly fewer natural resources than the U.S.A., the USSR, Africa or Brazil. Militarily, it depends completely for its security on the United States. Yet no Transnationalist or Internationalist has hesitated to make Europe the starting site for digging the foundations and raising the initial structures of the intended world order.
What Europe has that makes it a focal point in modern history and development is its tradition. It was the cradle and the luxuriant garden of what is called Western civilization. From Europe came the philosophy, the law, the literature and the science that have gone into the makeup of our modernity. Europe’s influence is still enormous in its potential. Besides all that, for over forty-five years Europe has been divided in two, the Eastern half housing an ideology and a sociopolitical system that constantly threatened the rest of the world.
Precisely because of Europe’s powerful tradition and its sharing half its territory with the “evil empire” of the Soviets, it is the logical crucible in which the lethal contention between the West and the Soviets has to be resolved, if it is to be resolved peacefully. From the Soviet point of view, also, Europe had inversely the same function. If the victory of Leninist Marxism was to come, it had to come first in Europe, all of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals. But seventy-three years of Soviet effort failed in this respect. Just one half of Europe, bolstered economically and protected militarily by the United States, outstripped the USSR and by the eighties was beginning to flex muscles that prefigured the girth of a coming superpower. Gorbachev the geopolitician saw all that and made his known decisions. Few commentators have alluded to Gorbachev’s chief nightmare: that he would wake up and find himself faced with a new superpower in the West, at his back Communist China and across the seas the U.S.A., all three far superior economically to the USSR and militarily strong enough to make war an act of suicide for Leninist Marxism. If nothing else, the leadership of world Marxism would pass to the Chinese—a sacrilegious violation of a deep-held Leninist-Marxist principle and belief.
But the rising Western Europe was the focal point. There he had to begin. Western Europe, Europe as a whole, really, became for him the building block it already had become for Western capitalism.
In these circumstances, John Paul’s lament is understandable. Europe’s origins, its rise to power, its contributions to civilization, its glories, all were marinated in Roman Christianity. In fact, Europe became Europe under the close tutelage of the Roman popes. Its tradition was thoroughly Christian. “Europe,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “was the Faith. The Faith was Europe.” That tradition of profound moral, spiritual and intellectual excellence was built on the power and according to the laws of Europe’s Christian origins.
Now that, in the Gorbachev era, Europe was going to be renewed and, at least in the intention of its renewers, to become one again, surely the tradition that made its great strength would be the basis of renewal, would come to the fore, reassert itself? It was a vain hope, if John Paul or anybody else ever really cherished it. There was absolutely no sign of such a renewal, no revival of the genuine tradition of Europe.
John Paul could not find any sign of such a renewal of Europe. If it had begun, it would have begun, he said, “in the hearts of individuals, above all in the hearts of Christians.” But it has not begun there. Europe’s “culture is in crisis,” he continued, and “its common values are slipping into the oblivion of past history.” Europe is no longer the Faith, and the Faith is no longer Europe. The current Grand Design for the new world order is going to be built, according to transnationalist and internationalist plans, within the first circle of the “greater European economic space.”
It is concerned with the material conditions of man’s life and habitat, and with the “human values” needed to ensure its pleasantness, exclusive of Christianity’s
moral law, deriving none of its motivations from Christian beliefs and incorporating none of the practices Christianity has always regarded as essential and obligatory for men and women.
Briefly and graphically put, nowhere in the intricate plans for the new or the renewed Europe is the God of Christians affirmed, adored and cultivated. The planned Europe is godless, just as, already, large segments of Europe’s population over wide areas are godless and religionless.
Many observers surmised, on the election of the Polish Pope in 1978, that the first thing Papa Wojtyla would do—possibly the only or the chief thing—would be to attempt to revive Catholicism in Europe. Such would be expected from a Pole of Catholic Poland. They expected a crusade on John Paul’s part. There was none. Instead he launched his papal career in a totally different direction. At first it was misunderstood, then it was explained away; now finally it has begun to dawn on all that this is a geopolitician-pope, that all along he has been walking on a geopolitical plane, with geopolitical goals in mind.
This is why John Paul never undertook a crusade for the re-Christianization of Europe, any more than he tackled a real reform of his decadent Church structure. In his analysis, the die had been cast in both instances. Europe was beyond the reach of re-Christianization by the normal means. Reform of his Church could not be achieved by the customary ecclesiastical means. He tackled neither.
What is difficult for many to understand is his reason for not tackling those problems head-on. For the reason is, as should be expected, geopolitical. That is difficult enough for many of his contemporaries, for the simple reason that few people think geopolitically or understand such implications. An added layer of difficulty is added by the distinctly Polish and Roman Catholic character of John Paul’s geopolitical outlook.
For nearly two centuries, Catholic Poles were denied all participation in national politics. The Polish nation did not exist; the Polish people existed as a function of other nations, and their fortunes were tied to geopolitical factors. Besides, as a nation, Poles had—literally for centuries—identified their national politics with the georeligion of Roman Catholicism, specifically tying Poland inextricably with two elements of that georeligion: the universalism of the Roman Pontiff, and the universal queenship of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. One emphatic trait in Wojtyla’s mentor, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, was that universal Marianism. Mary figured as a georeligious and therefore as a geopolitical fact for Poles.
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