4 Allied Powers and 2 Germanys to Meet Amid Chorus of Concerns : Reunification: Italy’s Andreotti sees Bush. He joins other European leaders calling for a larger role in deliberations.

The Bush Administration, reacting to concerns that the two Germanys are moving too independently toward quick reunification, announced Tuesday that East and West Germany will hold their first formal meeting on reunification next week with the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

The date and site of the sub-cabinet-level talks have not yet been announced.

Reflecting the concerns, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who met at the White House with President Bush, joined a growing chorus of European leaders demanding a larger role for their countries in unification deliberations.

“It’s not a problem that belongs to Italy,” Andreotti said. “I think that all the member countries of the Atlantic Alliance must handle together these problems” rather than just the six countries that will be represented at the talks.

Bush asserted that he will keep lines of communication open to other nations.

“Our dialogue is constant, it is substantive, it is productive,” he said of U.S.-Italian consultations.

The Bush Administration had initially proposed last month that the two Germanys meet alone to discuss reunification after March 18 elections, and only after that meeting would the Germanys meet with the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The “two-plus-four” framework was intended as a way of bringing the surging momentum for unification under control and protecting the interests of key parties involved.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Tuesday that the two-plus-four formula reflects the special status of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain as the four major nations that occupied Germany at the end of World War II. She conceded that other Western nations also have an enormous stake in the nature of the reunited Germany.

“We have said as far as the others, that we . . . are aware of all of their concerns, and will listen to their concerns,” she said.

Those concerns are mounting. Critics here and abroad regard the two-plus-four process as the dubious product of a strategy deployed too late and too timidly, allowing German interests to dominate.

“The Bush Administration felt the one error above all to be avoided was giving the Germans the feeling that they have no friends and that way head off any temptation on their part to take off on their own rather than stay within NATO,” said one North Atlantic Treaty Organization diplomat who asked not to be identified. “But the Germans saw this and still see it as giving them room for maneuver, and have used it to their advantage.”

Smaller NATO members complained that they were cut out by the two-plus-four formula, despite their major security interests.

In Brussels, according to the British news agency Reuters, NATO sources said the foreign ministers of the 16-member alliance are likely to meet there early next month to discuss the security aspects of German unification.

“Everyone now pretty much agrees that there is a need for a special meeting,” said one NATO diplomat. “There’s no formal decision yet, but it will probably be here in early April.”

Alliance foreign ministers are scheduled to meet next in June.

The situation was only made worse by German leaders’ “high-handed insensitivity,” said Rozanne L. Ridgway, president of the Atlantic Council and a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

She was referring in part to a snapping comment by Bonn Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher during a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Ottawa last month. When Italian Foreign Minister Gianni de Michelis said smaller nations with a stake in European security and the NATO alliance were being ignored, Genscher retorted dismissively: “You are not part of the game.”

In addition to the Italians, sources said, the Canadians, Belgians and Dutch are also angry. They have troops still stationed in West Germany and feel that they were largely ignored in the settlement when World War II ended.

The Soviet Union, which is seeking to slow the reunification process, has reportedly attempted to seize upon criticism of the two-plus-four approach by proposing to include the German neighbors left out, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands.

And even Moscow’s scheme, dubbed “two plus four plus nine,” does not exhaust the potential players.

Some Western diplomats want all 33 nations of Europe, and the United States and Canada, included in the deliberations. Beyond that, more than 50 nations went to war against Nazi Germany, including Paraguay and Uruguay, and they all may have to sign an eventual unification accord.

Senior U.S. officials, in announcing the two-plus-four concept last month, explained that the Bush Administration began seriously considering German reunification in December, a month after the Berlin Wall came down Nov. 9. To some experts, this was a month too late.

“There was a critical time between mid-November and mid-December when the process began to take off,” said one European diplomat. “The NATO alliance as a whole lost the opportunity to impose direction, pace and momentum to the reunification process.”

The British were “foremost” in recognizing the situation and spelling out the anxieties created by the prospect of reunification, according to British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd. But perhaps because Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was regarded in Bonn as an enemy of reunification, London’s initial idea of a conference of six nations--the two Germanys plus the four occupying powers after World War II--was not received with enthusiasm.

Washington began to move in earnest only after East Germany advanced its election date from May to March 18 in response to its mounting economic chaos and emigration to the West.

“Two plus four,” said a senior U.S. official, “is carefully constructed to note that the two comes before the four, the two being the two Germanys resolving the critical questions for their own internal decisions dealing with legal, economic and political matters. But also involving at an appropriate stage, the four powers, to deal with the external issues along with the two Germanys.”

Would the four powers supervise the reunification process of the two Germanys, he was asked.

“No, no, no,” he insisted. “Quite to the contrary. The two first, then involving the four on a series of issues that are left over.”

Times staff writer Jim Mann also contributed to this story.