Keys of This Blood (110 page)

World banking and finance had its greats at Davos: the Federal Reserve's Wayne Angell; World Bank head Barber Conable; Otto Poel, finance minister of West Germany's Bundesbank; West Germany's Finance Minister Max Waigel and Economic Minister Helmut Haussmann; East Germany's Central Bank president, Horst Kaminsky, and Economic Minister Christa Luft; Daimler-Benz chairman Edward Reuter; Robert Jaunich of the multinational Jacobs Suchard; Rand Araskog, chairman and CEO of ITT Corporation; Robert Hormats, vice-chairman of Goldman-Sachs International; Henry Kaufmann, former vice-chairman of Salomon Inc.; Renault's vice-president for international affairs, Jean-Marc Lepeu; officials of GATT; and a slew of bankers, industrialists, finance and science experts from Europe, Asia and the United States.

Even more interesting and significant than this roster of truly important personages was the theme around which they gathered: Where were the emergent lines of the expected sea change leading them all? The question uppermost in all minds: How best could they facilitiate and pursue those lines? The concluding question, which nobody at Davos dared to examine too closely, much less answer: When the sea change was over and past, in what shape or form would the society of nations be?

For John Paul, the first and most unsurprising lesson to be learned at this globalist meeting in Davos was the confirmation of his initial analysis, ten years before.

His evaluation of globalists at that time had been starkly realistic. All of them claimed to be globalist, and, at least in general intent, they were that. But for a large proportion of them—Angelists, for example, as well as the historically frozen Eastern Orthodox, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jewish community—their globalism was at most a regionalism, if not a provincialism, that they yearned to establish on a global scale or, at least, to place in a secure and dominant position.

A few others—New Agers and Mega-Religionists—had elaborated global outlooks but lacked any obvious means for establishing those outlooks globally within the concrete order of things. Their sustaining hope and strategy was that they might piggyback a ride to the ultimate success of their ambitions.

A restricted number of those globalists, Internationalists and Transnationalists, did have within their grasp the means—government and corporate institutions, organizational capability, financial sinews, social
standing, drive and inspiration—with which to network the society of nations. But, as was clear again in Davos in 1990, the farthest that these were capable of reaching was what one member of the Davos congress called “global localization.”

For both Transnationalist and Internationalist were products of Western capitalist democracy and therefore dependent on that democratic egalitarianism for the legroom they needed in order to succeed in their transnationalist/internationalist ventures. They could not lift their eyes beyond the towers of the sociopolitical institutions and structures inherent in democratic egalitarianism. Globalism in its purity—a geopolitical structure—requires that greater overview.

Nothing therefore had changed in John Paul's initial classification. The “movers and shakers” present at Davos were almost exclusively transnationalist or internationalist in bent of mind and intent of will and choice of means to their preferred goals. The other claimant globalists had not really mattered geopolitically then, nor did they ten years later.

In his classification of his contemporaries begun ten years before, John Paul could ultimately classify only one of them as a genuine geopolitician, a man with a mentality, an intention, an organization and an overview that were geopolitical. This was Mikhail Gorbachev. He arrived on the world stage a few years after John Paul, but immediately assumed top place among contemporary globalists in John Paul's critical assessment.

This initial choice of Gorbachev was confirmed by one predominant characteristic of all the multiple discussions and proceedings and conclusions of the Davos congress: Although Mikhail Gorbachev was not present in the congress halls, he was invisibly and effectively there throughout. For the meat and substance of all discussions, and the overhanging assumptions of the common mind manifest in all the delegates, had been conditioned—one could say predetermined—by the geopolitical strategy and tactics of that one man, the Soviet president.

This invisible domination of Transnationalists and Internationalists by Gorbachev in the Davos discussions was highlighted by the presence of the newly chosen leaders from the East European countries, the former Soviet satellites: East Germany's Prime Minister Hans Modrow; Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel, Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, Prime Minister Marian Calfa and Deputy Prime Minister Valtr Komarek; Yugoslavia's Prime Minister Ante Markovic; Bulgaria's Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov; Hungary's Deputy Prime Minister Peter Medgyessey;
and Poland's President Wojciech Jaruzelski. As a sign of a complete reversal of things past and a new orientation to the sea change, Solidarity's veteran Adam Michnik was present; he even had a very fruitful breakfast meeting with the man who kept him in jail for six years, Jaruzelski. “If we do not adapt the people who led the old system into the transformation we are making, we would have to fight them,” Michnik commented.

These newly chosen officials represented a potential new market of 113.5 million people. Mikhail Gorbachev had made their presence here possible.

An even more evident influence of the Soviet president on the thought processes and methods of procedure in the minds of this company of capitalism's greats at Davos was clear in what the London
Economist
described as “the very strong sense at Davos of the centre of gravity of Europe moving east, of the European Community becoming the foundation of a larger and all-embracing East and West.”

The very idea that the East—meaning at least some of the former Soviet satellites, if not the USSR itself—should be considered a candidate for membership in the contemplated Europe of 1992+ was once an unmentionable subject in Western political and financial circles. Mikhail Gorbachev brought that outcast idea back abruptly into the light of day in 1988 and 1989. “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is the common home of East and West—this was his assertion. Now, less than a year later, the dyed-in-the-wool “Europeanizers” had accepted the idea and proposal. Why?

Quite simply because in the intervening time, the master player had shifted some geopolitical building blocks, rejected others, placed still others in a new configuration. He had “liberated” the Eastern European satellites, liquidated the Berlin Wall, allowed local Communist parties to declare themselves independent of Moscow's CP—even to change their name and stop calling themselves Communists. He had allowed free elections in the Soviet Union; put Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega on notice that he was cutting the leash and they would be on their own, more or less; allowed massive Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union; and even tolerated the beginning of autonomy and independence in the three Baltic States.

Thus, from the beginning there glistened on the horizon of the minds united at Davos a near-future possibility of a powerful new bloc of twenty-five European nations (some 500 million people). This was regarded as the inner circle of the future structure of nations. “If the Soviets go ahead with reforms,” stated West Germany's Economic Minister
Haussmann, “we should guarantee they are part of the European space.” That would be an enlargement of that inner circle—a second circle concentric with the first. Mr. Gorbachev, one can be sure, felt and still feels quite confident that he can satisfy the West's demand for reforms. Besides, he along with the other leaders now could see the outlines of their Grand Design for a new world order. And that was the object of John Paul's closest attention and scrutiny.

For John Paul, there were two facts about that Grand Design of the Western nations that indicated the watershed character of this decade of the nineties and the historic importance of the Davos congress in February 1990. First, it is carefully gridded on reality. Second, it will be largely the supreme achievement of Mikhail Gorbachev.

There is, first, the reasoned and humanly well-balanced grid on which its planners have laid out what appears to them to be the feasible evolution and realization of their Grand Design in successive concentric circles.

Despite some ineffectual objections from East Germany's Hans Modrow, and some doomsday reactions of a few U.S. investment bankers attending Davos, it was assumed by the vast majority that, come the end of 1990, the two Germanys would have achieved the political and economic unity of one Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev had made it known before Davos that he had no real objections to German reunification—“if pursued with care.” German reunification was taken for granted. Monetary union might even precede that reunification; but united once again the two Germanys will be. And that Germany will be integrated into the European community.

Everyone admitted that in this European community, the leading socioeconomic force—the critical mass—will be a reunified Germany. It will be a “European Germany” in a strongly “Germany-colored” Europe. For no one could dispute the giant economic stature of Germany.

Nor could John Paul or Mikhail Gorbachev cavil at the sentiments of the Germans. “We are not an island,” Helmut Kohl said, “we're not in a corner of Europe. We're in the heart of Europe.” Wolfgang Berghoffer, mayor of East Germany's Dresden, went even further in his remarks. “We [East Germans] were standing on a moral threshold, and someone had to break out and say: This [unification] is the way.” Furthermore, “the two German states have a responsibility for the process of democratization” in the East European nations.

But integration of a reunified Germany into Western Europe is only one major segment of the new circle. A second and necessary one is the integration of the former East European Soviet satellites into that Europe.
They must become working parts of the new “European economic space,” part and parcel of the “new European architecture.” Their accession to that integration, all agreed, must be facilitated; they all need safety nets in order to palliate the effects of their economic reform from centralized to market economies.

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.