Sometime in the nineteenth century, the term “geopolitics” was coined by non-Greeks. By then, the constituent elements—states and nations—of internationalism had changed. For one thing, men could now speak of the whole of earth, the whole world, and all nations in it. Exploration had covered the face of the globe. For another, enormous commercial empires—British, French, Ottoman, Austrian, German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese—and some minor ones—Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese—dominated the world scene, cornering the raw power of earth’s resources and the financial hegemony derived therefrom. The United States, neither a minor power nor a commercial empire in that society of nations, was still in the last stages of its own formation. Not until Woodrow Wilson boarded the George Washington for post-World War I Europe did the United States begin to flex genuinely internationalist muscles.
In this world situation, there had been born a certain homogeneity and overall standardization among nations and states. Internation relationships were more complex than ever before. Writers, thinkers and politicians, as well as bankers and economists, did think of that world as a loosely coagulated system of states regulated in their mutual relationships by some very generalized and generally observed rules of conduct. For a minute number of the very privileged classes, there was indeed a more developed form of the old Greek cosmopolitanism, but it remained an exoticism.
When the term “geopolitics” was used in reference to that world system, it implied the complex of relationships between all those world-spanning national interests and the “games” nations played, Kriegspiel and Staatspiel, the maintenance of peace and the conduct of statecraft in peacetime. Their peacetime was always defined in terms of an enemy. War was merely the conduct of statecraft and diplomacy in a more forthright way with that enemy. As the French cynically put it: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Because the monopolies in trade and finance as well as military might rested in the hands of the Great Powers, “geopolitics” was also used to include the relationships between all minor and major powers. That network of relationships—reproducing the internationalism of the ancient Greeks in a more sophisticated and definitely worldwide ambit—was built and maintained with one end in view: the balance of power between the Greats, and between their allies among the Minors. The clashes, economic, cultural, military, between the members of that international society concerned the pride of placement, and hegemony either in one part of the globe—Great Britain in Europe, Turkey in the Middle East—or internationally, say, in overall financial clout or naval supremacy on the seven seas.
Fundamentally, nothing had really changed since the Greeks. Internationalism had as its basic unit the individual politeia rooted in a particular state or nation, whether that was imperial Britain, republican France, democratic America or tiny protectorates like Sierra Leone or Sarawak. In a genuine, if limited, sense, the whole could be described as geopolitical; the word included all the political systems all over the earth.
Along that road of twenty-five centuries from the Greeks to modern times, there had been only two instances when the thought and concrete goals of some men went beyond this notion and practice of internationalism and approached the point where the reality of “earth” and “one political system” could be conjoined in one word.
The first in time was clearly enunciated and targeted as goal and ideal by a group of men and women who started off in the twilight of Greek civilization as the ragtag association of fishermen, servants, slaves, small merchants, dirt farmers, artisans and laborers—Jews and non-Jews—whom their enemies derisively called “Christians.” That name stuck. In the first days of their existence in and around Jerusalem, their self-description was of “one community with one heart and one soul, and holding all possessions in common.”
One of their earliest leaders in the first century of this first millennium, Paul of Tarsus, scrutinized the microcosm of nationalities and kingdoms, religions and cultures around him, and formulated the Christian refinement of the then regnant internationalism. He used his usual brilliant eloquence in doing this, but necessarily in terms of what he knew in his day as the society of nations. And, although the farthest west he personally ever reached was Spain, the farthest east and north was Greece and Turkey, the farthest south was Arabia, he spoke for all nations and peoples of the human race.
“You must now realize,” he wrote to the inhabitants of Colossae, a town located in what is now the Denizli province of western Turkey, “that you have become new men on account of the enlightenment you now have about your Creator and his preferred world, in which there is to be no distinction between Jew and non-Jew, Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian, fellow citizen and foreigner, known and unknown people, slave and freeman. For, now, Christ is all of us, and Christ is in all of us.” Paul’s inventory of differences and divisions that separated the people of his day into different and warring systems and groups finds exact parallels in our modern society of nations, states and peoples. According to Paul, all differences and divisions have been transcended by a new unity.
Nor was Paul speaking of a purely spiritual unity. He was laying down a blueprint for a new society of peoples and nations undivided by nationalism, racial origin, cultural diversity, wealth or poverty, political systems or religious hatred. Nor did he envisage the goal of that society of peoples to be a balance of power maintaining the equilibrium of greater and lesser. In his pregnant phrase, it is full-scale unity in Christ. A georeligion centered and dependent on Christ: This is what Paul presented as the underlying framework for the ideal internationalism. In his context, Paul could have justifiably used that hybrid word “geopolitics,” for he was speaking of a geopoliteia, one truly geopolitical structure for all mankind as one race.
Paul, as often happened, was the intelligent and perceptive formulator of a doctrine that would be taught and propagated to all peoples and nations by another man, Peter the Great Fisherman, and by his successors over in Rome. Despite his obscurity and cruel death, Peter had been given the Keys of authority to teach all men and women, and to establish thus the geopoliteia Paul had announced as God’s plan for all men. That authority was guaranteed by the blood Christ shed. Within the span of some three hundred years and the pontificates of thirty-two successors to Peter as Bishop of Rome and official holder of the Keys of this blood, the initial obscurity of the Holder’s office had been shed; Peter’s papacy now assumed an increasingly dominant role in the development of nations. The Pauline goal, the Christian geopoliteia, was the goal of that papacy.
It took that papacy and its institutional organization, the Roman Catholic Church, almost the whole of two thousand years to attain, in the concrete order, its status and condition of a georeligion. It took all that time and the ups and downs of 264 pontificates for the political philosophy and goals of that georeligion to be purified and purged of the cultural and civilizational accretions that along the road impeded the development of papal and Roman Catholic geopolitics.
At the close of two thousand years since Paul expressed the worldview of a genuine georeligion, the 263rd successor to the obscure Great Fisherman reigns and governs in Rome as the titular head of that georeligion housed in a genuinely geopolitical structure. For John Paul II is not only the spiritual head of a worldwide corpus of believers but also the chief executive of a sovereign state that is a recognized member of our late-twentieth-century society of states. With a political goal and structure? Yes, with a geopolitical goal and structure. For, in the final analysis, John Paul II as the claimant Vicar of Christ does claim to be the ultimate court of judgment on the society of states as a society.
One of the eye-opening factors enhancing John Paul II as a prime world leader has been precisely the striking appearance of a genuinely political capability on the part of his Holy See, hitherto—and for some hundreds of years—regarded as an institution that should exercise whatever influence it exercises exclusively in the strictly “religious” and “spiritual” spheres. A wal
l stood—or should stand—between “Church” and “State.”
The Noriega interlude of late 1989 was the most recent eye-opener. U.S. Army authorities, the Bush administration, and the ten or fifteen Latin American governments involved in that Caribbean standoff emerged from its successful conclusion with a totally revamped concept of John Paul’s Vatican. His Vatican men, clerics all of them, displayed not merely a detailed grasp of the issues clustered around the refugee Panamanian strongman, but a sophisticated approach to the diplomatic, military, governmental, and political problems that bristled around the Holy See’s Panama City embassy. Whether in regard to Papal Nuncio Laboa, his two principal aides there, or the relevant officers in the Vatican’s “Second Section” (for Relations with States)—Archbishop Angelo Sodano, the “foreign minister,” Archbishop Edward Cassidy, Vice-Secretary of State, Monsignor Giacinto Berlocco, special emissary, or the other in-house experts—the evolution in everybody’s concept of the Holy See was quite manifest. One of the chief military spokesmen, General Maxwell Thurman, on his first appearance before newsmen referred to Archbishop Laboa as “some sort of ambassador.” But, in the heel of the hunt, when announcing Noriega’s capitulation, the General referred deferentially and correctly to “Papal Nuncio Archbishop José Sebastian Laboa,” whose “professionalism” the General praised.
“These men didn’t go around sprinkling Holy Water and shaking Rosaries,” one military aide commented. “Actually, they led us to a solution.” In the end, all concerned—Panamanians in their fears and desire for vengeance, Latin American diplomats accustomed to the slippery slopes of compromise, the Americans bent on “Operation Just Cause”—uniformly agreed that John Paul’s men never allowed the moral issue to be lost in the scuffle between Noriega’s supporters, his Panamanian enemies, and the righteous wrath of the U.S. expeditionary force.
Nobody from all three groups even thought for a moment that John Paul’s Holy See “should have nothing to do with such purely secular and state matters,” as one Paul Blanshard-style East Coast commentator remarked.
The second thrust at a concrete goal beyond and transcending mere internationalism came from the brain of the most outstanding fanatic and zealot and the greatest organizing genius in ten centuries: V. I. Lenin. Conceived in that twisted mind, born in the carnage and cruelty of the Marxist takeover of Czarist Russia, that second attempt became embodied in the greatest hybrid political creation of all world history: the Party-State of the USSR.
Never a nation in any accepted sense of the word, nor an empire as we have known empires to be, the USSR was put together in the form of a state but uniquely designed and built to vehicle the Leninist-Marxist political takeover of all other states on the waves of an expectedly worldwide proletarian revolution. That is a thoroughly geopolitical goal, housed in a designedly geopolitical structure. Lenin and his successors built that geopolitical structure. Housing no religion, it houses an ideology that undeniably is a geo-ideology.
What many in the West find difficult to separate is the facade of national identity—the USSR as a member nation in the society of nations—and the Party-State of Lenin’s building and design that exists and operates behind it. It is a troika of the CPSU, the Red Army and the KGB. Its raison d’être and sole goal is not the well-being of the inhabitants of the USSR but the ideological aim of all loyal and genuine Leninist-Marxists: a Marxist geopolitical structure spanning all the nations and peoples of the globe.
The possession, the nurturing and the advancement of that geopolitical structure, in addition to the rather rare mentality it has engendered in the Soviets, constitute a first and important parallel between John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev. But the parallel goes further.
Not only are both of these men Slavs and both of them heads of the only models of geopolitical organization available for us when we examine the society of nations and states today in its trend to a new world order that must be something more than a merely Internationalist or even Transnationalist structure. Both of these powerful world leaders have chosen to gamble.
Papa Wojtyla decided very early on in his pontificate that the geopolitical should receive the burden of his attention and be the focus of his papal activity. He would hew out for himself a special place in world affairs, while tending to the shambles of his own institution in only a marginal fashion. He was and is gambling, not only on the durability of his Church—that it could survive the continually growing shambles—but on the objective he had chosen for his papacy—that he could play an integral part in the geopolitical formation of the society of nations.
Mikhail Gorbachev, for his part, has severely modified and adapted the Leninist Marxism of the USSR, no longer pursuing the strategy hallowed, as it were, by the two greatest figures in the seventy-three-year-old history of that Party-State, Lenin and Stalin; he has set out to mold the structure and goals of that Party-State to the form passionately recommended by Communism’s greatest but unsung hero, the Sardinian Antonio Gramsci.
No Marxist theoretician ever analyzed the proper geopolitical stance and strategy of the Leninist-Marxist Party-State more intelligently than he had done. Gramsci unerringly laid his finger on the only strategy that could possibly ensure a total victory of the Party-State through a worldwide proletarian revolution.
He purified the (to Marxists) sacred term “proletariat” of the nineteenth-century, outmoded meaning every leader from Karl Marx to Yuri Andropov stupidly accepted. Primarily, what is needed is not political penetration of capitalist countries, nor military superiority, Gramsci said, but corruption of their Christian cultural basis.
Gramsci proposed a new form of Marxization: Reduce all men’s expectations of any salvation from on high—in art, in literature, in science, in medicine, in social works, in politics, in finance, in commerce, in industry. Promise all men liberation from what ails them by means of heightened human—and only human—effort by intellectual, emotional, scientific, ethical, means. Instruct them that all hope of progress lies within themselves.
Unerringly, too, Gramsci brought into sharp relief the fundamental postulate of Marxism: its total and thorough materialism. But this, Gramsci pointed out, will provide the common ground Marxists can share with capitalists in the West. Join them, Gramsci exhorted his fellow Communists. Participate in their profit-seeking, in their social “do-gooding,” in their international peace-making and peace-keeping structures, in their art movements, in their literary efforts, in their efforts to raise health standards and living standards, and yes, even in their profession of ethical and religious goals. Become members of the global home they are building, genuine members of their human family, collaborating in liberating all men from slavery and the meaninglessness of daily life.
All this, but under one major proviso. Let the entire effort be solely by man for man’s sake. Collaborate to fill his belly with fresh food and to fill his mind with a fresh knowledge. But make sure he believes both food and knowledge are his creation, the results only of his own noble efforts. Make sure man never repeats the famous cry of German philosopher Martin Heidegger: “I know that only God can save us.” In 1989, the new leader of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, would tell his countrymen: “In organizational decrees, it is truly difficult to find that God is the only one who can save us.” Mikhail Gorbachev, as Gramsci’s disciple, would say: “Make sure no one listens to Havel.”
Gorbachev’s gamble is with the durability of the Party-State: that it can last through a period of territorial retrenchment and exposure to all the allurements of capitalism and Western democracy. The gamble is worth taking, he thinks, because of the geopolitical prize at stake.
Any worthwhile assessment and accurate estimation of these two men, Karol Wojtyla and Mikhail Gorbachev, must start from this geopolitical premise. Both men think and plan geopolitically. They do not see the world’s nations as diverse and divergent groups of men and women who are learning with difficulty to get along together, or merely as an assemblage of powers who must
modify and adapt their resources in order to survive. Each man, in his own way, presumes—assumes would be a better word—that the diversity and divergence are accidents of human history, that in reality all are finally being driven by a force greater than the force any one or several of them can muster. In his authentic Leninist Marxism, with its crass materialism, Gorbachev recognizes this force as blind historical destiny. In his genuine Roman Catholicism, Papa Wojtyla believes this is the power of Jesus Christ as head of the whole human race.
They differ profoundly on this fundamental point. But they are one in the vantage point from which they start: the totality of nations, their different tendencies and weaknesses as part of that totality. Without an appreciation of that unique geopolitical vantage point, it is not possible to understand the moves they make, the turns and twists in their strategies; and, because of their undoubted influence on international affairs, it would be difficult to plot the trajectory the society of nations will follow in the present decade as they progress toward what all envision as a new world order.
The two main vehicles of that progress are, obviously, the interdependence of single nations and the generalized decision and wish to undergo development. Distances, not merely geographical but economic and cultural, have narrowed between nations. For, every year, that economic interdependence intensifies as a means of development. To facilitate that interdependence, political differences and contentions are being diluted and weakened by enlightened self-interest. The current outstanding example of this necessary narrowing of political distances is provided by the 1988–89 changes in the political structures of the Soviet satellite nations and, to some small extent, in the political structure of the USSR itself. Even national prerogatives—say, a country’s currency—are being curtailed, modified, abolished, as presently planned for the European Economic Community of 1992 +. Already, it is safe to say that the outlook in the society of nations as a whole is more intensely oriented to the international side of life than ever before. Under the impetus of the desire for development, this international attitude is being transformed into a transnational and globalist outlook according as interdependence gives birth to joint efforts and multilateral participation in mutually beneficial projects.
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