Raising the Iron Curtain Means a Continental Shift : Geopolitics: The focus of the Continent moves east, from Bonn to Berlin, from Brussels to Vienna. The new Europe regains balance, reclaims soul.

German reunification and the rejection of communism by the East European countries will produce a shift of interest--economic and political--from the west toward the center of Europe: from Bonn to Berlin, from Brussels to Vienna.

The perception of this phenomenon is growing in Western Europe; its repercussions could deeply change the geopolitical configuration of the Continent.

From Bonn to Berlin. How can a unified Germany renounce the national, historic role of Berlin? This question is repeated again and again, almost obsessively, by my interlocutors in Bonn. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose Bonn as the capital of the Federal Republic against the wishes of many politicians who preferred Frankfurt. Adenauer said that the choice of a small provincial town would better underline the provisional character of the new capital. Provisional indeed, as the market quickly recognized: Real-estate prices have suddenly crumbled by nearly 40% in the last weeks.

From Brussels to Vienna. If Bonn is unsure of its future as the politico-administrative center of Germany, then Brussels, provisional capital of the European Community, watches the rise of Vienna as a competitor in the very heart of Europe.

Liberated from communism, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, look almost naturally to Vienna. Yugoslavia could disintegrate in the near future or considerably loosen ties between the states of the federation. In the meantime, Austria has again become the pole of attraction for Slovenia and Croatia, as it was when Vienna was the capital of the empire.

Perceiving this trend, the foreign ministers of four states of the region--Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy--have met routinely in recent months to discuss problems specific to their area. Poland, wary of a reunited Germany, has shown an interest in joining the initiative.

And Vienna--already the seat of several important international agencies and currently host of both the NATO-Warsaw Pact negotiations and the Helsinki accords talks--is also a candidate for hosting the organization that will verify compliance of arms-reduction treaties.

In time, the European Community might find that its Brussels base is so near the English Channel and so far from the center that at least some of its institutions should move eastward.

All of this, of course, presupposes a Europe not haunted by the specter of German reunification, nor by a fear of Germany’s hegemony--and an upsurge of territorial claims. This supposes a Europe of political harmony, some degree of economic integration and of resolved border anxieties and ethnic tensions. At present no one can predict such an idyllic evolution.

Indeed, the immediate concern on this side of the Atlantic is for the aftermath of today’s elections in East Germany. Since reunification now seems likely to happen sooner than anyone could have predicted, the pan-European summit planned for later this year has been devised not to prevent the inevitable, but to slow reunification until the elements of a new political settlement for the two Germanys--and simultaneously for Europe as a whole--have been assembled.

The trend is to favor a pan-European solution for the problems created by the collapse of the communist regimes. If the biggest of these problems--the surprisingly quick pace of Germany’s reunification--can be solved in a pan-European framework, the Continent will regain its geographical balance, long subverted by the Iron Curtain. It would gravitate more toward the center, to the heart of Europe, thus repairing half a century’s distortion.

Two generations of Europeans, brought up in two antagonistic parts of our Continent, have faint knowledge of a formidable patrimony the intelligentsia of Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Moscow contributed to Europe. The Russian writers, from Turgenev to Pushkin to Dostoevski, interpreted the desires, the anxieties, the deep sense of the infinite of the men and women of the entire Continent.

They were half of our soul.

We might recover it.