E. Germany Says It Would OK a Political NATO

East Germany proposed Sunday that a united Germany become a member of NATO if the Western alliance changes its “strategy and structures,” transforming itself into a political and economic alliance rather than a military grouping confronting the Soviet Union.

Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, completing a day of talks with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders, said he believes this approach could ensure the Soviet Union’s security and meet the West’s demands that a united Germany be anchored politically within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“NATO should create new structures and new strategies, and under those we could become a member of NATO,” De Maiziere said, focusing on what has become a key issue in the fast-moving process that seems certain to reunify East and West Germany shortly, after 45 years as separate states.

The Soviet Union, for which German unity is a political, military and economic problem of immense complexity and acute sensitivity, wants the reunified Germany to be neutral or nonaligned or, in ways not well explained, a member of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

De Maiziere, who was on his first foreign trip since becoming prime minister this month after East Germany’s first free elections, acknowledged that Gorbachev has not accepted his proposal. But he said he felt that the Soviet leader has not rejected the initiative and might agree in the future.

“I believe that the Soviet Union has not formulated its final position on this issue,” De Maiziere said. “That . . . makes it possible to find solutions in talks with the Soviet Union.”

Gorbachev said that the Soviet Union “remains negative toward unilateral, unbalanced proposals” for German membership in NATO, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported later.

“This attitude stems from political realism and a serious concern about prospects for Europe and new approaches to its problems,” Gorbachev told De Maiziere, according to Tass.

De Maiziere, acknowledging Gorbachev’s objections, said, “Our differences now stem from the fact that the rapid unification of Germany requires quick decisions on those issues.”

Gorbachev declared that “Germany’s entry into NATO is unacceptable, and another way must be found,” De Maiziere continued, “and we will not enter and we will look for another way.”

East Berlin now plans to place its proposal for the “fundamental restructuring of NATO” and subsequent German membership before Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States when the four victors in World War II meet with East and West Germany this week in Bonn to discuss the issues involved in German reunification.

De Maiziere, reflecting a growing German consensus between East Berlin and Bonn, argued strongly against both neutrality and membership in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact, as the two military blocs are now constituted, for the new German state that is likely to emerge from intense diplomatic and political maneuvering now under way.

“What is important is to obviate these blocs, to dismantle and do away with them,” De Maiziere told a press conference. “Neutrality implies division and confrontation. We in Germany do not want to play the role of a buffer. This is unacceptable to us.”

De Maiziere, articulating thinking that is as prevalent in Bonn as in East Berlin, said that he envisions fundamental changes in NATO so that its forces are sharply reduced, their structure changed to make them entirely defensive and the alliance reoriented from confrontation with the Warsaw Pact, with matching new strategies.

“We believe that NATO should change before we discuss the issue of our membership,” the East German leader reiterated. “That is our point of departure. We can then think about our future. Without that, negotiations are impossible.”

What Germans would like to see, he continued, would be a new European security system, emerging from both all-European talks and disarmament negotiations now under way, that takes into account the interests of both sides but ends the confrontation between the two powerful military alliances, their forces now concentrated on German territory.

When put into practice, this would mean, De Maiziere suggested, a NATO focus on disarmament as a principal goal of the alliance, a Soviet-American agreement to withdraw tactical nuclear weapons from German territory and an end to the forward-basing of NATO and Warsaw Pact troops under which both East and West Germany remain occupied territories.

De Maiziere said that NATO should make the first moves.

“Gorbachev said he is prepared to negotiate about the question of alliances only (after) new strategies and structures are in place,” he added.

The Soviet Union, which at first insisted on full German neutrality, appears to be shifting its position in advance of this week’s talks in Bonn. Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, spoke in an interview with the Irish Times on Saturday of a nonaligned status for Germany.

“The most important thing is probably to devise a military and political status for a united Germany that would not radically tip the (European) balance,” Shevardnadze said, according to an account of the interview by Tass.

“We believe that this can be achieved fully if Germany becomes a militarily nonaligned state whose armed forces would have a potential sufficient only for defense purposes.”

The Soviet foreign minister, renewing Moscow’s proposal for German membership in both NATO and the Warsaw Pact for a transition period, said the country could then become “a place where (the alliances) would be gradually dissolved” and replaced by security arrangements agreed upon in all-European negotiations.

“The present military and political structures on the European Continent . . . were shaped not for a united Germany but for two German states belonging to different alliances,” Shevardnadze said in his interview with the Irish Times. “It would be a mistake to destroy the existing security systems in the course of building German unity without creating new ones to replace them.”

Shevardnadze, meeting with Markus Meckel, the East German foreign minister, reaffirmed Moscow’s support of German unification, but with a warning that it must strengthen rather than undermine European stability.

“Now that history has given Germans a chance to build a united Germany,” Shevardnadze said, according to Tass, “it is important to act responsibly and in accordance with good sense. Legitimate interests of other nations must be taken into account in order to ensure controlled progress toward unification, coordinated with the all-Europe process.”

In their talks with De Maiziere, Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov all stressed the Soviet Union’s desire to continue its longstanding economic relationship with East Germany, which is Moscow’s biggest trading partner.