Winds of Change Carrying Europe Past Superpowers : East Bloc: While Bush and Gorbachev proceed cautiously, the revolution in Europe storms ahead.

The gale-force winds and crashing waves that swept over the seaborne summit here Saturday were more than a humbling demonstration that even the mighty are vulnerable to the weather.

It was also a symbolic reminder that even the nuclear superpowers are fast losing their ability to control a world that they used to bestride like the Colossus.

While President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev were taking up cautious--some said minimal--proposals for strategic arms control, conventional force reductions in Europe and support for the Kremlin’s efforts to modernize the Soviet economy, events in Eastern Europe continued to storm ahead as though driven by their own gale-force winds.

With that historically turbulent region now quickly breaking free from four decades of Soviet domination, one senior U.S. analyst acknowledged that “most Europeans are already beyond Malta--well beyond Malta--in trying to figure out how things will develop and what their role will be in the world.”

Even the meteorologists joined in underscoring the symbolism of the summit’s first day. According to Malta’s official meteorologists, the cause of the storm that sent naval cruisers reeling and flags ripping from halyards was “a high-pressure area centered on Eastern Europe.”

Indeed, the storm threw the summit schedule into such disarray that Bush and Gorbachev never got to the subject of events in Eastern Europe, though it is expected to dominate today’s second and final day of talks.

Bush came to the summit echoing Gorbachev on Eastern Europe, saying that “the lead is being taken by the people in those countries.” The remark reflected the superpowers’ rising respect for the emergent strength of “people power” in the region.

After Bush and Gorbachev’s first session on Saturday, the White House said the two leaders “recognized that economic and political challenges were ahead for Eastern Europe and vowed to consider the opportunities presented with sensitivity and firm initiative.”

These meetings in Malta had been ballyhooed as the most important of the 16 or so U.S.-Soviet summits of the postwar period. But there is palpable realization by the superpowers that, because of their reduced economic, political and even military strength, they are no longer able to force their views on Europe.

The division of Europe was dictated by the victorious Allied powers at Yalta in 1945, and virtually all of the subsequent summits were preoccupied with managing the Cold War that followed. In that potentially catastrophic confrontation, the one driving concern was always to avoid a clash between the two nuclear superpowers.

Now, with the likelihood of such a conflict apparently receding, priorities are changing. Yalta has now come unraveled and could not be reimposed even if the great powers wished it.

In fact, the 1986 summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland--when former President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev toyed with the idea of denuclearizing the world--was the last time the two nations considered imposing their models on the world. The outcry that followed made it clear that U.S. allies, at least, would not have stood for such unilateral action.

The United States and Soviet Union still have significant roles to play, of course, by virtue of their enormous nuclear arsenals and as occupying Allied forces in Germany. But the utility of nuclear weapons is increasingly dubious.

And, while the two nations may legally need to sanction changes in Germany, such as the reunification of East and West Germany, experts such as former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger have publicly wondered how Washington and Moscow would prevent such an action in view of their waning political-economic power.

“In years past, summits were seen in Europe as things beyond which a European could not see,” one senior U.S. official said. Now, the once-ritualistic pledges to take no action without consulting allies have become real.

“EC ‘92,” in which the economy of Western Europe will be completely integrated by 1992, clearly goes beyond whatever happens in Malta, the official said. So, too, are events that have occurred and are still playing themselves out in Eastern Europe, and the inevitable economic integration of that region into Western Europe.

But balancing this positive momentum is the fear that old enmities are returning and old scores are still to be settled throughout Eastern Europe--as in the age-old animosity between Hungary and Romania. Words spoken by their governments during the past year would have been sufficient cause for war half a century ago. Neither superpower seems inclined or capable of solving such conflicts.

So, ironically, while Saturday’s turbulent weather kept Bush and Gorbachev from turning their attention to the key issue of Europe, the delay is less important than it was when the superpowers ruled supreme.

History is going on apace without them as they waited out the storm on Malta. It is not “the end of history,” as some contend, that has been taking place in Eastern Europe. Rather, it is a return to history--to the big powers’ being influential but not overwhelming.