NEWS ANALYSIS : Europe’s Fears of a United Germany Dissipate : Diplomacy: Leaders begin to acknowledge the benefits of reunification as talks open today.

Crucial talks on German unity begin here today in an atmosphere far more receptive than most had believed possible barely a few months ago.

The mixture of anxiety, anger and resentment about unification has receded from a peak in mid-March when a dispute over the Polish-German border threatened to poison the atmosphere between West Germany and some of its closest postwar European allies.

Although they are still anxious about the size of the future Germany, there is now a growing conviction among Europeans that unity carries potentially important economic and political benefits for all nations of the region.

France and Britain are among the most important of West Germany’s allies to undergo this shift of mood, although others, such as Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, have traveled a similar path in recent months.

“There was a lot of fear at the turn of the year that this was going to be a Germany that was going to be turning away from Europe and go its own way,” said William Wallace, a European affairs expert at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “This was an irrational response, and we can see that now.”

Nowhere was this change in atmosphere more evident than at last weekend’s European Community summit in Dublin, Ireland, where community leaders congratulated West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on his handling of the unity issue and Kohl himself spent the first five minutes of his news conference expressing effusive thanks to all involved for their warmth and understanding.

Only four months before, at a similar EC summit in Strasbourg, France, tempers had frayed over the same issue, with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti reportedly at one point threatening to walk out of a formal lunch and Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said to be equally angry and upset.

The more receptive mood in which German unity now unfolds is considered an important development by European political analysts.

“It’s essential,” said Dominique Moisi, associate director of the French Institute of International Relations. “At this decisive moment in their history, the Germans should feel supported and welcomed into the club of democracies without saying how much you fear them and having it become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

While relations with some eastern neighbors, especially Poland and the Soviet Union, remain extremely difficult, even here, hints of a possible thaw are visible.

Tension between Bonn and Warsaw, which rose sharply earlier this year after Kohl evaded Polish demands for an immediate treaty guaranteeing the present Polish-German border, appears to have eased in recent weeks.

Although anti-German feeling remains strong, Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski made a conspicuous diplomatic concession during West German President Richard von Weizsaecker’s visit to Warsaw this week by referring to what he termed “the bitter fate” of German expellees after World War II.

It was a rare acknowledgment by a leader of a nation that suffered terribly under the Nazi occupation that Germans, too, underwent hardship. About 11 million Germans were expelled from German territory ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union in the wake of the war.

Foreign ministers of the four victorious Allies--the United States, Soviet Union, France and Britain--plus the two Germanys are meeting here today and are expected to agree to the conditions under which Poland might attend the so-called two-plus-four talks.

There are also signs of a possible Soviet shift in Moscow’s hard-line resistance to a united Germany’s being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. After arguing for a united Germany that would be neutral, or nonaligned or somehow a member of both NATO and the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact, Moscow has reportedly begun to search for ways to accept a united Germany in NATO, according to recent European Community visitors to the Soviet capital.

The status of Germany is expected to be a key stumbling block in the two-plus-four talks.

The change in atmosphere, especially visible in Western Europe, has been largely the result of repeated West German reassurances, coupled with the awareness among Germany’s neighbors that unity is inevitable and thus must be accepted on the best terms possible.

Although all West Germany’s key allies had for years given lip service to German unification, the spectacle last November of Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall and massive crowds in the streets of Leipzig and East Berlin thundering, “ Wir sind ein Volk “ -- “We are one people”--clearly unnerved them.

By the time Kohl delivered a speech outlining a plan for short-term unification to the Bonn Parliament without advance notice to French President Francois Mitterrand or other European leaders, fears had risen further that unity was moving far too fast and that a united Germany might try to go it alone.

Mitterrand is said to have approached Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev during their December meeting in Kiev about ways of slowing Germany unity, while voices from the Netherlands and Belgium raised questions of reparations. Adding to the deteriorating atmosphere, European leaders, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Italy’s Andreotti, found themselves unable to conceal personal anti-German emotions.

In Andreotti’s case, the decision last February in Ottawa to shut all but the four victorious powers out of the German unity talks merely aggravated feelings.

Political analysts believe the shift toward conciliation came in mid-March, first with the East German election, which signaled the inevitability of a speedy reunification, then with Kohl’s statement at the European Community headquarters in Brussels backing accelerated European integration.

Within a few weeks, Mitterrand and Kohl had proposed a joint initiative calling for faster EC political union, a move that further eased European fears because it showed that Germany does not plan to renounce its EC commitments, but seems more firmly committed to them than ever.

Politically, Europe’s leaders also began to realize that trying to block the German public could eventually backfire.

As Moisi, of the French Institute of International Relations, put it, “Emotionally, a lot of leaders are (still) suspicious of a united Germany, but they have realized that politically, they have to hide it.”