Warm cold warrior: the Pope against the soviet empire.

WHERE were you when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope? The question is not a flippant one because if you remember, you may also recall what a very different world you were living in. The differences went far beyond bell-bottom trousers and those curious male hairstyles that looked like melting helmets. Our assumptions about the world had been set by events such as OPEC's oil-price hikes, the conquest of South Vietnam by the North, the sudden presence in several African countries of Cuban troops, and the "stagflation" that was enfeebling Western economies. It definitely seemed like--in Cyril Connolly's phrase--"closing time in the gardens of the West," which was reeling under attacks from Communist guerrillas, oil monopolists, and Middle Eastern terrorists. Soviet leaders and theoreticians speculated confidently that the international "correlation of forces" had shifted against the West decisively. What realist would then have thought that a pope--a pope!--could make a difference to these decisions by the God of Historical Inevitability?

Not me, I will confess. As it happens I saw the emergence of Pope John Paul II on a television set in a Hong Kong hotel. If I was slow to recognize that something of great historical significance had happened, that was perhaps because of the drama of the previous pope's election and sudden death. Italian friends had told me he was a strong anti-Communist. His death suggested that even that slender source of resistance to the general European drift leftward had been removed by fate.

Also, I was in the middle of a month-long visit to Asia, which then seemed to be the preserve of non-Christian faiths. Rome was far away. What I noticed mainly was how nations like Thailand were gradually shifting their political orientation. A tourist guide in Bangkok fed me the official line: Thailand, which had historically maneuvered to retain its independence from European colonists, now had to reflect the U.S. defeat in Vietnam by shifting toward Hanoi and Peking. Visits to Burma--a ramshackle and corrupt leftist military dictatorship--and Taiwan demonstrated the clear superiority of free-market capitalism over Asian socialism. But would Asia be allowed to choose freely? Or would Communist China draw all into its economic and political sphere of influence?

When I arrived back in London, I found great excitement about the new pope. But it was a curiously apolitical (and even areligious) excitement. The very fact that he was a vigorous and active prelate--he was rumored to ski--seemed to be the basis of his popularity. The additional fact that he was Polish was then felt to be as much a threat to the Vatican's Italian bureaucracy as to the Kremlin.

In almost all other respects nothing seemed to have changed. The intellectual and moral atmosphere of the West was exhausted and defeatist. This was the age of "malaise"--no, Jimmy Carter never used the phrase; he didn't need to; he embodied it--and of "limits to growth." We were about to run out of every raw material our industries used, except for those we might be allowed to buy at sky-high prices from vengeful Third World monopolies. Either way, we would have to accept a steady reduction of our standard of living. Living in these reduced circumstances, the U.S. would necessarily have to abandon its "inordinate fear of Communism" and learn to live with Brezhnevism.

In Europe the latest political fashions were similar: "Ostpolitik" in Germany and "Euro-Communism" in Spain and Italy. The first meant accommodating to the permanence of Soviet rule in central and eastern Europe. Progressive politicians such as Willy Brandt (and, as we now know, Gerhard Schroeder) accepted that these regimes enjoyed significant popular support and thus legitimacy; as declassified Soviet archives have shown, they even came to see the Communist regimes as political allies against a resurgent Right. "Euro-Communism" was the domestic equivalent. It meant accepting the legitimacy of Leninist parties as democratic contenders for power and even partners in a coalition government. (Such parties actually entered government in France and Spain, but too late in the geopolitical cycle to matter. By then the "correlation of forces" had--surprise!--shifted against them.)

Even the Catholic Church had been flirting with Marxism in various ways. "Christian-Marxist" dialogues were scattered through European academia with bishops' support; liberation theology and "guerrilla priests" were thought to be flourishing in Latin America; the Italian episcopate supported the aperture a sinistra in Italian politics that gave the Christian Democrats permission to form progressive coalitions; and the "preference for the poor" adopted by Latin American churchmen was misinterpreted to suggest support for socialist and protectionist economic policies. Not much came of these initiatives, but they diffused a general impression that the Church had made its peace with the Kremlin and was increasingly hostile to something called capitalism.

The pattern of Western decline was first disrupted and ultimately disproved in Poland. The Pope's visit to Poland revealed that the USSR's satellites enjoyed no popular legitimacy: They were puppet regimes hated by their subject populations. But Pope John Paul went further. He demystified the power of those regimes. With his words, his presence, and his injunction not to feel afraid, the Pope was for a while the real government of Poland. The official government faded into the background. And though in later years it cracked down with martial law against the independent Solidarity trade union that the Pope had helped to inspire, it never again had the moral self-confidence to rule by brute force and to reestablish the social fear that had been its postwar foundation.

Eastern Europe as a whole saw this phenomenon and acted accordingly. In retrospect one can now see that during the 1980s the anti-Communist dissidents were growing in courage and daring, and the Communist apparatchiks were calculating how much they could safely impose on their now resistant subjects and how much they could salvage of their power. A senior Hungarian party official told me in 1985 how the Hungarian Communists would hold multi-party elections, lose power, transform themselves into a post-Communist socialist party, and win power again democratically at some future election. Hundreds of such apparatchiks were making similar calculations throughout the Soviet bloc--and the Pope's visit to Poland was the root cause.

Thus, the geopolitical atmosphere that Thatcher and Reagan discovered on their respective elections in 1979 and 1980 was subtly different from that of only months before. The Soviet bloc was in trouble. The West's economic recovery and the U.S. military buildup were still required to break the power of the USSR, but the subjects of Soviet power were now active and useful allies in that struggle. Reagan sent supplies to Solidarity; Thatcher visited the Gdansk shipyard; and the Pope continued to encourage the people to hope--until in 1989 Eastern Europe turned hope into practice. If the Soviets had succeeded in assassinating the Pope in 1981, they might have delayed this outcome. But the demystification of Communist power and the awakening of "people's power" were too fundamental to be altogether halted. And what worked those fundamental revolutions was not the material supplies that the Pope, Reagan, and Thatcher quietly directed to the Solidarity resistance--helpful though they undoubtedly were--but the public inspiration that they provided in their speeches invoking freedom.

This turnaround in the major postwar struggle between the USSR and the Free World revolutionized all other international relationships. The Pope was an observer of many of these developments--but a close one because he visited almost every country in the world. In part as a result, most Christians now live below the Equator, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Asian Christianity--including in China is now expanding almost as fast as Asian capitalism. The Pope developed a more sophisticated understanding of capitalism as a result. Leftist critics have concentrated on his strong condemnations of materialist consumerism--and these were both trenchant and necessary. But he also preached that capitalist entrepreneurship was a vital form of human creativity and that its free expression required a free economy as well as a free polity. This was radically different from the "corporatism" of earlier popes--and from "liberation theology," which shriveled during his papacy. Two years ago I sat again in front of a television set--this time in Hanoi--watching an Asian business--news program in which the First Minister of Singapore quoted Mrs. Thatcher to the effect that hard work, education, and enterprise were the only sure route to economic success.

Pope John Paul II began this process in 1978 by liberating the spirit of Poland. Reagan and Thatcher applied his spiritual lesson of freedom to politics and economic life. The Pope then adapted Church doctrine on economics to the results of those experiments. Now it is up to the next pope to get the Catholic Church to respond to the new world of Christian freedom that is arising in the old mission territories--and sending back missionaries, as well as textiles and computers, to the West.