The Concept of the Intermarium and the Confessional Issue: Geopolitical Challenges to Belarusian Orthodoxy in ХХ – early ХХI century

Abstract

The article discusses the problems of merging geopolitics and religion. Using the example of Belarusian Orthodoxy, the author shows how religious institutions can become instruments for the implementation of geopolitical strategies, in particular the Polish foreign policy doctrine of the Intermarium. The influence of this doctrine on the position of the Orthodox Church in the Baltic-Black Sea region, including on the territory of Belarus, is analyzed. The author examines the specific historical conditions of the periodic actualization of Polish geopolitical projects in relation to Belarus. Using some examples, he shows the technologies of the United States working with the Belarusian anti-Soviet emigration and the technologies of using religious institutions to implement geopolitical strategies. It is concluded that modern interpretations of the Intermarium doctrine are directly related to the policy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in relation to the East Slavic territories associated with the Kiev Metropolis of the XV–XVII centuries. The assessment of the activities of the primate of the Orthodox Church in Poland on the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands in the first half of the 1940s is new for domestic and foreign historiography as an attempt to build a “church Intermarium”. The article contains unique materials about the anti-Soviet activities of the Belarusian emigration, its contradictions and splits. The findings actualize the issue of developing mechanisms to counteract manipulative influence against the Orthodox Church, carried out in order to achieve political benefits. Based on the results of the consideration of the problem, a recommendation is proposed regarding the need for planned systematic work to strengthen church immunity against external manipulative influence, fraught with disruption of social and confessional balance in the Republic of Belarus.