Europe Takes a Look at Post-Communist Economies : Cooperation: Chancellor Kohl opens a 35-nation conference. ‘We are at a historical turning point,’ he tells delegates.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl opened a 35-nation economics conference here Monday that is intended to help shape the post-Communist economies in Europe.

“We are at a historical turning point,” Kohl told 600 delegates from Europe, the United States and Canada. “A Europe is emerging in which old and new democracies are coming together.

“As ideological and political antagonism is overcome,” added the West German leader, basking in the aftermath of the conservatives’ victory in the East German election, “there is a growing awareness of common ground in Europe.”

The three-week Bonn economic meeting is part of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe created by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and it is seeking to devise ways to respond to the momentous changes in Eastern Europe.

Members of the conference are all of the East and West European nations, except Albania, as well as the United States and Canada.

The current talks in Vienna to reduce conventional arms are being conducted under the conference’s overall aegis--but the Bonn meeting is the first for the 35 members to deal with economics.

The conference had been arranged before the upheavals in Eastern Europe in the latter half of 1989, and attention is now expected to focus on ways to assist former Iron Curtain countries to liberalize their economies.

As one U.S. diplomat put it here: “Our aim is to find practical measures that will support evolving market economies in Eastern European countries.”

Toward that end, members of the U.S. and other delegations include not only the usual government officials but also business people.

In Bonn, working groups will discuss ways to improve business conditions through practical measures, industrial cooperation through investment and cooperation and monetary policy.

West German Economics Minister Helmut Haussmann went as far as to call the meeting, long sought by West Germany, “the most important East-West conference of all time. The stage of confrontation is behind us, the stage of cooperation awaits.”

Looking ahead, Haussmann declared: “We have a great chance to map out a future built on free markets. The future belongs to a European economic zone, binding together and governed by rules of the market.”

And Chancellor Kohl added: “We need to take a large step toward creating the framework for a common European economic area. We are still at the very beginning of the development of economic links between East and West.”