Making New Pieces Fit an Old Puzzle : Europe: National interests will still guide the response of Western leaders to the newly democratizing states.

From across the Atlantic, West European responses to the revolution sweeping Eastern Europe may well appear confused and baffling. After two world wars and more than 40 years of division, old ambitions and fears--long considered dormant, if not dead--are re-emerging in all their historical complexity.

Viewed from Western Europe, the picture appears just as complex but less puzzling and certainly less surprising. While applauding the democratic upsurge in the East, Western European leaders have fashioned their responses to their own national interests.

For Britain and France, the question doesn’t seem to be so much one of seeking the most effective way to help former Communist states progress toward democracy; rather, it is how to fit this revolution with developments within the European Community.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sees events in Eastern Europe as part of the battle between freedom and central control that she has long been waging against supranational tendencies within the European Community. Her enthusiasm for proceeding rapidly with new forms of association between the community and the newly democratizing states stems in large part from the braking effect she thinks this should have on further integration of Europe. For her, widening the community takes precedence over deeper integration.

Paris takes a more cautious view of the pace at which the community should develop closer links with Eastern Europe. The French priority is for stronger integration of the existing members before widening the community’s reach. President Francois Mitterrand and his colleagues want to ensure that West Germany is more securely integrated before the attraction of its historical sphere of cultural, political and economic influence in Central and Eastern Europe starts exercising too strong a pull.

The West Germans themselves cannot afford to put European Community considerations above those of Eastern Europe, since the Federal Republic is pivotal to both. Understandably they contend that deepening their ties to the community is in fact vital for a wider association with Eastern Europe and important for closer relations between the two Germanys. After early loose talk from some West German politicians about the unity to which such ties should lead--and about the need for a four-power meeting on Berlin--Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher have gone out of their way to reassure colleagues that the Federal Republic’s energetic policy of rapprochement with Eastern Europe will lead neither to reunification nor to Eastward drift.

Such reassurances have also been directed at Moscow and Washington, which have recently played an unusually low-profile role--a development generally welcomed by West Europeans. They all appreciate the critical importance of perestroika in making it possible for the Eastern European revolution to occur. Yet they see the Soviet Union as being less and less able to contribute centrally to building the new Europe.

The United States is also seen as an important factor, yet not central to the resolution of new relations between the two parts of Europe. A few West European politicians complain about President Bush’s lack of understanding of the problems and his hesitant economic and political moves. For the most part, however, they welcome Washington’s encouragement of the European Community to deepen integration and develop a policy toward Eastern Europe. Thatcher is alone in her concern that all of this will lead to the political weakening of the North Atlantic Alliance. She is not alone, however, in apprehension that the Malta summit may bring proposals from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for the transformation of the Warsaw Pact into something like a real political alliance, which could force the pace of change in Western security arrangements.

Security issues will doubtless further complicate the already difficult problems of how to develop relations with Eastern Europe when the community leaders meet in Strasbourg. Yet it is important that the Western Europeans make rapid progress. To begin, the community and the wider group of 24 countries already channeling aid to Poland and Hungary should seek to expand what is still a very modest package and offer it in principle to other socialist regimes now trying to democratize.