Call on the Peacekeepers : Security: With NATO and the Warsaw Pact outmoded, the United Nations is the ideal candidate to step in and police the former Soviet satellites.

For 40 years, the division of Europe kept the peace on the Continent. Now, the Warsaw Pact is dead; NATO’s security doctrines are moribund. Armed conflict, even civil war, in Eastern Europe is possible. And we are nearly helpless to prevent or stop it.

Longstanding rivalries in Western Europe have been resolved after years of statesmanship, including such bold ventures as the European Community. Even the once unthinkable--the unification of Germany--can be discussed without splitting the West. Indeed, a sense of sovereignty for the 21st Century is emerging: Nations can best express their self-identities through the Community and its works.

By contrast, the Soviet-imposed Warsaw Pact and Comecon, its economic counterpart, succeeded only in repressing tensions within nations or between them. The problems of Transylvania, Macedonia or the Turkish minority in Bulgaria are no less deeply rooted than French-German rivalry in Western Europe. But unlike in the West, nothing was done about them. Indeed, precisely because there was no sense of political equality among the Soviet Union and its clients, the newly liberated nations of Eastern Europe assert their self-identities in the guise of 19th-Century nationalism.

This gap in style and substance between Eastern and Western Europe complicates the task of helping these countries shed their command economies. It also limits the capacity of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Romania and Bulgaria to band together along the lines of the Marshall Plan. Most critically, there is no mechanism for resolving such disputes as the future of the Hungarian minority in Romania.

In virtually every other area, institutional means exist to deal with problems created by the sudden retreat of Soviet power from Central and Eastern Europe. In theory, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe could step in and help settle conflicts in Eastern Europe. But the 35-nation forum, a product of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, has no permanent body and its cardinal rule--unanimity--gives Liechtenstein the same clout as the superpowers.

Certainly, neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact could be peacekeepers. The Soviets would surely not stand aside while Americans--even the British and the French--played sheriff in Romania or Yugoslavia. Similarly, no one in Europe would accept Moscow as sole arbiter. This attitude became evident last December when Secretary of State James A. Baker III said he would be willing to condone Soviet troops entering Romania, if need be, to protect the revolution there. Europeans were incredulous at what seemed to be America’s blessing of the Brezhnev Doctrine only weeks after Mikhail S. Gorbachev had scrapped it.

What’s clearly needed is an East-West association that transcends the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Since Soviet attitudes are changing, there is latitude for something more in East-West cooperation to prevent Eastern Europe’s tensions from escalating into fighting. The “something more” is the United Nations.

Just a few months ago, this idea would have been sheer fantasy. But Gorbachev’s new thinking has already led to greater Soviet support for U.N. actions than at any time since the U.N. Charter was signed. In Angola and Namibia, the Iran-Iraq war and now in Cambodia, the United Nations is beginning to fulfill its mission. So why not in Eastern Europe?

Four permanent members of the Security Council are directly involved in events in Eastern Europe, providing more relevant authority than the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The United Nations is broad enough to allow all views and interests to be represented. It has extensive peace-keeping experience. It is not dominated by an ideological legacy of European division. And its charter provides for a military staff committee that has yet to function.

Assigning the United Nations the critical role of keeping the peace in Eastern Europe until a new architecture of European security can be built is a worthy proposal at a time when the euphoria of liberation has given way to the task of building a secure and productive future.