NEWS ANALYSIS : Shaping New Europe a Complex, Historic Task : Diplomacy: East Germany’s vote increases pressure. The rush to unity may be more disruptive than expected.

The surprise landslide victory by East Germany’s moderate-right alliance in weekend elections puts more pressure on strategists already facing a task of historic complexity: shaping institutions of European integration and security to replace the outdated structures of the Cold War era.

The process has been compared in its importance to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which reordered a Continent left adrift by the collapse of the Napoleonic empire and molded its future for decades.

Modern architects of the “new Europe” taking shape after last year’s round of revolutions in the former East Bloc already faced the additional challenge of having their work covered live on television.

And now, since East Germany’s victorious Alliance for Germany campaigned on the promise of rapid unification, the timetable for German reunification, one of the three most crucial elements in the strategic equation, may be faster and potentially more disruptive than both the United States and the Soviet Union, among others, had expected.

There was already widespread agreement that a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, planned for late this year, would be a useful forum in which to discuss “some sort of new security structure for Europe,” noted James Eberle, director of London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, in an interview Monday.

The conference includes all the European countries, except Albania, as well as the United States and Canada.

Now, Eberle said, “there will be a renewed pressure to define the agenda for that conference rather more carefully and closely, and (to) bring up proposals that will be discussed as part of that meeting.”

The East German election results also lend new urgency to the problem of interim arrangements for the five years or so that it will take to negotiate a longer-term security solution, Eberle commented.

Those arrangements are part of the agenda of the “two-plus-four” talks under which the two Germanys are negotiating international aspects of reunification with the four major victorious powers of World War II--the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France.

“German unity has a potential of dividing the world or bringing it closer together,” said Michael Sturmer, director of West Germany’s Research Institute for International Affairs in Ebenhausen.

Referring to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he added, “Germany will make the difference between NATO reform and NATO breakup; between continuing East-West detente or a new confrontation, between an Atlantic security framework for the European Community or European impotence.”

Beneath the high-sounding verbiage, the talk here about a “new Europe” deals with fundamental questions of war and peace, of poverty and prosperity.

And it touches importantly on the debate in the United States over the so-called peace dividend from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, a debate that Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) told London’s Sunday Times will “determine the political and economic future of the country for 25 years.”

The Cold War may have created a balance of terror on the Continent, but it did yield a sort of stability. Now, if NATO and the Warsaw Pact become increasingly irrelevant, what institutions can prevent antagonism between two countries such as Hungary and Romania from getting out of control? What other mechanism would allow the nations of Europe to coordinate a response to an attack on one of their number by a Libya or an Iran?

Not only must any new or remodeled institutions pass the difficult test of keeping a united Germany committed to its integration in the democratic family of European nations, European strategists say; they must also minimize the continental aftershocks from the possible disintegration of an increasingly unstable Soviet Union. And they must maintain the stabilizing presence of the United States on the Continent against any temptation that Washington may entertain to withdraw in the same way it did after World War I.

The most urgent specific question facing the architects of the new Europe following Sunday’s elections is the status of a united Germany in NATO. But it is far from the only one.

Other alliance members and even a majority of the rival Warsaw Pact now say that a united Germany in NATO is either essential or at least preferable to German neutrality.

The Soviets say they want a neutral Germany and insist that NATO membership for a united state is unacceptable. However, in a possible sign of Kremlin flexibility, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said after an inconclusive Warsaw Pact meeting in Prague last Saturday that “this is a question which requires further discussion and clarification.”

Some analysts believe that the Soviets are holding out for a neutral Germany as a bargaining chip to be traded for Western concessions on other guarantees to its security.

But even if the Kremlin finally agrees to NATO membership for a united Germany, it will be at best a temporary reprieve, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.

“It’s almost inevitable,” Brzezinski told Czechoslovakia’s Institute of International Relations in Prague late last week, “that Germany will insist on changing its status from that of a military partner in NATO to that of only a political participant . . . . Germany, some 50 years after (World War II) will insist that it no longer wishes to be, in effect, a quasi-occupied country.” That would lead to the departure of both Soviet and Western forces from its soil, he said.

That prospect, Brzezinski added, points up the importance of “designing added, all-European security arrangements.” He argued that it is “counterproductive to advocate a slowing down in the process of German unification. . . . Rather than try to delay the unification of Germany, it is far more sensible to accelerate the process of creating an international framework for the new Germany.”

While West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on Monday depicted German reunification as forcing the pace of European unity, others raised doubts about its impact on the European Community’s drive toward economic and monetary integration.

The British Broadcasting Corp.’s Ceefax news service quoted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Monday as saying that a long transition would be required before what is today East Germany is drawn into the European Community. She said that subsidized goods could not be allowed to flood into the Common Market for fear of undermining Western businesses and that there would have to be major changes to the community’s agriculture and fisheries policies.

Belgian Foreign Minister Mark Eyskens had warned previously that the European Community is in danger of “unraveling” under the pressure of the revolutions in Eastern Europe. And Jacques Delors, president of the community’s Executive Commission, has described himself as “haunted by anxiety as well as by hope” over the impact of German reunification on the European integration process.

The heads of government of the community’s 12 members have called a special summit meeting April 28 in Dublin, Ireland, to discuss the implications of German unification on the community.

“A society only has a certain amount of political resources that can be concentrated on internal or external problems,” commented John Roper, director-designate of the West European Union’s new Institute for Security Studies. So what he calls the “deepening” of European union “may take second place to matters of inner-German development in the next five years.”

That doesn’t mean European integration will be reversed, Roper stressed. But it does suggest that “we won’t be able to accelerate the process.”