Diplomacy Ode to a New Day

By Bruce W. Nelan

At the stroke of midnight on Oct. 3, a mammoth black, red and gold flag rose in front of the floodlit Reichstag in Berlin, signifying that 41 years after its division, there was again one Germany. "We want to serve peace in a united Europe and the world," proclaimed President Richard von Weizsacker.

The dissolution of communist East Germany and its voluntary merger with the Federal Republic was a political event with no modern precedent. It was also a mighty spectacle as millions of Germans celebrated with beer and wine in places with evocative names like Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate.

Almost lost amid the hoopla was a meeting held on the same day in New York City between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. After five hours of discussion, capping more than 15 years of negotiation, the superpowers agreed "in principle" to reduce their conventional arms in Europe to the same level. Never before in history have two sides willingly agreed to destroy so many weapons.

The pact, which will make a surprise attack by either camp virtually impossible, limits NATO and the Warsaw Pact to a total of 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armored combat vehicles and 20,000 artillery pieces on each side in the area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. While the totals for each of the alliances are the same, the effect is immensely lopsided. To come down to those ceilings, NATO will have to destroy 2,900 tanks, for example, and no artillery. The Warsaw Pact, however, must scrap nearly 23,000 tanks and 26,900 artillery pieces. "Of course," said Shevardnadze with a smile, "the Soviet Union made all the concessions."

For months the U.S. had insisted that the conventional-forces agreement had to be completed before convening the proposed summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), scheduled to open in Paris on Nov. 19. That condition has essentially been met. The provisional agenda for the summit was drafted at still another meeting in New York City last week, involving 35 ministers and ambassadors in two days of talks. (Since the session took place before Germany unified, the East German Minister for Education and Sciences, Hans-Joachim Meyer, attended.)

With the breakthrough by Baker and Shevardnadze in an arms-control effort that began in Vienna way back in 1973 as the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks, the CSCE summit is firmly set. The completed arms treaty will be signed by the U.S., the Soviet Union and their allies. They will then turn their attention to launching a new security organization.

Up to now, CSCE, as its name suggests, has been simply a conference, its duties, membership and even its full title a mystery to most Americans and Europeans. CSCE includes all European states except Albania, plus the U.S. and Canada. It met first in Helsinki in 1975 -- at the height of detente -- to sign a nonbinding declaration of principles focused on nonaggression, human rights and economic cooperation. Since then, there have been three review conferences, but CSCE has never acquired a staff or even a mailing address. The foreign ministers agreed last week that the Paris summit should establish a permanent CSCE secretariat and create a conflict-resolution center to exchange information on military activities and possibly mediate disputes.

Where CSCE might go from there is a matter of intense debate in foreign ministries and think tanks. Last April Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel was among the first to propose that it become the core of a new all-European security organization replacing NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Moscow found the idea appealing because CSCE is the only organization that links Eastern and Western Europe -- and the U.S.S.R. belongs to it. German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been pushing a strengthened CSCE for a similar purpose: to keep the Soviets from feeling isolated and resentful.

Other players have their own reasons for trying to breathe life into CSCE in spite of its diversity and its unwieldy rule of unanimity. There is, to begin with, a widespread European weariness with confrontation and an eagerness to organize the Continent as a whole. Many on both sides hope to replace the old alliances with some form of collective security.

Even so, Central European countries like Hungary and Poland are still apprehensive about the intentions of their big neighbors, Germany and the Soviet Union. They want to keep the U.S. engaged as a counterweight, preferably through NATO. The Soviets, for their part, also want continued American participation -- and investment -- in Europe, but not through the framework of the Atlantic alliance that, as they see it, was created with the sole purpose of confronting them.

For Washington, that is the rub. George Bush, Baker and their advisers at the White House and State Department are still convinced that NATO is the most effective channel for American influence in Europe. They have resisted the European push for a stronger CSCE because they viewed it as a threat to NATO. But now that worry is fading. American policy makers are increasingly , confident that NATO will be needed and welcomed in Europe as long as the Soviet Union's future is so unsettled. In the meantime, says a senior official in Washington, the development of CSCE institutions "is the way to go, but slowly, slowly."

With a kind of multipurpose consensus developing, prospects for the Paris summit are looking up. There seems to be a role for CSCE in addition to NATO, the European Community and other existing organizations. If, with 34 equal members, CSCE in fact turns out to be little more than a talk shop, that might not be so terrible either. One of the felicities of post-cold war Europe is that many of its problems can now be settled by talking.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart; * Excludes G.D.R.; [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Estimates compiled by Arms Control Association; other sources are Department of Defense and Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies}]CAPTION: SETTING LIMITS

While precise terms of the treaty are still being worked out, some of its provisions have been announced. The same ceilings will apply to both alliances, and within those ceilings, no country can exceed certain levels.

With reporting by William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington