TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101590/1015005.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.3 KB | 142 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 60

DIPLOMACY

Ode to a New Day


With Germany united and a conventional arms-control agreement
in hand, East and West begin a different kind of collective
security

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by William Mader/London and J.F.O.
McAllister/Washington


    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.