Gorbachev, Reassured by Thatcher, Offers Movement on German Unity : Europe: The Soviet president proposes linking NATO and the Warsaw Pact as partners.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev showed new flexibility on the key issue in Europe’s future, the status of united Germany, after British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher assured him Friday that Kremlin security concerns will be respected as its No. 1 military ally is absorbed by the West.

At a subsequent news conference, the Soviet president proposed the creation of new institutions linking a radically changed Warsaw Pact and NATO “as partners rather than as enemies” to hasten the end of the East-West divide epitomized by the two Germanys, now on the road to reunification.

In wide-ranging remarks at a joint news conference with Thatcher, Gorbachev also repeated his threat to act if Israel continues to allow settlement of Soviet immigrants on territories seized in the 1967 Six-Day War. But in a notable departure from what he said five days earlier in Washington, he did not specifically threaten to halt Jewish emigration.

Gorbachev stressed that he is open to new ideas on the future of Germany, though he noted that he still has the “same approaches.”

“I think I would not unveil any great secret by saying that there have emerged of late some specific things which are worth thinking about and discussing,” he said. His talks last week with President Bush in Washington and at Camp David provided “food for thought for both sides,” he added.

“My central idea is that we should not confine ourselves to one option, an option that would necessarily turn out to be one-sided,” Gorbachev told the packed auditorium at the Soviet Foreign Ministry Press Center.

Western diplomats said the Soviet leader’s remarks were highly significant for what they omitted.

“For the first time, he didn’t flat rule out Germany belonging to NATO alone,” said one who attended the hourlong news conference.

Gorbachev received the Conservative British prime minister as both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact were seeking a new role in a Europe where their reason for existence--the perceived threat from the other--has vanished or is fast disappearing.

In Moscow on Thursday, Gorbachev and the other Warsaw Pact leaders declared their intention to transform their seven-nation alliance, formed 35 years ago, into a chiefly political body by November.

However, as confrontation between the blocs recedes, Gorbachev has rejected Western proposals that a unified Germany be allowed to belong to NATO without also being a member of the Warsaw Pact, to which East Germany belongs. Last month, Gorbachev even said the West’s point of view could force the Kremlin to rethink its approach to all negotiations involving European security and disarmament.

British officials, however, said Thatcher, an outspoken advocate of NATO membership for Germany, discussed with Gorbachev a nine-point U.S. plan aimed at allaying Soviet concerns. In their two-hour conversation, she assured him that no NATO forces would be stationed in what is now East Germany and that Soviet troops could remain there for a “transitional period,” they said.

Thatcher’s aides said the meeting left her feeling more confident that the East-West deadlock over Germany can be resolved.

“The prime minister felt encouraged,” one official told British reporters. “People have not adopted fixed positions.”

At the news conference, Thatcher told reporters that she and Gorbachev “discussed the consequences of the unification of Germany. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact will require some assurance to be sure of their own security. We must find ways ahead to provide that assurance.”

She pointedly noted, however, that East Germany is moving toward becoming part of West Germany, and not the other way around. And West Germany, she said, is a member of NATO.

In an open difference of opinion with Thatcher, who first met with Gorbachev in 1984 before he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev called for a “new relationship” between the two alliances that would blur boundaries between them by giving these two offspring of the Cold War common institutions.

“If from yesterday’s statement there emerges a new Warsaw Pact and if NATO does not engage in maneuvers or pretenses, the emergence of new institutions is possible,” Gorbachev said.

He specifically mentioned the possibility that one alliance “would accept in its midst a country from another alliance.”

However, Thatcher, seated on Gorbachev’s left, said, “I do not at the moment see those common bodies emerging.”

The Soviet leader, with whom Thatcher has a clear rapport despite their vast ideological differences, smiled and said her reserve was because she is a “more cautious, more experienced politician.”

At the news conference, Gorbachev was asked by a reporter to clarify earlier remarks he had made about Jewish emigration. On Sunday, at the end of the U.S.-Soviet summit in Washington, he had said that the Kremlin might suspend its relaxed emigration policy and again prevent Jews from leaving unless Israel provides guarantees that Soviet citizens will not be settled in the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip.

Two days later, a senior State Department official said Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze had given assurances to Secretary of State James A. Baker III that the liberal emigration policy would remain in place.

A new Israeli government formed Friday specifically reasserted the right of new immigrants to choose where to live.

Responding to the reporter’s question, Gorbachev was vague: “We hope that Israel will listen to what was said in Washington. . . . If the situation is such that it is necessary to react, we’ll have to use our sovereign rights and competences to have an influence.”

That language appeared to reserve other options for the Kremlin besides shutting down Jewish emigration, a step that would chill improved U.S.-Soviet relations and endanger an upgraded U.S. trading status for the Soviets.

Greeting Thatcher in the Kremlin at the start of their seventh meeting in as many years, Gorbachev said he still felt jet-lagged from his visit to the United States.

“Yesterday, I almost fell asleep during the Warsaw Treaty meeting,” he said as he and Thatcher posed for photographers. Thatcher later said they had “very interesting, deep and friendly discussions.”

At the news conference, she praised Gorbachev for embarking on “the biggest changes, the most historic changes” in modern-day Europe, and singled out his program to inaugurate a range of market-style reforms to replace traditional Soviet central planning.

Those proposals have aroused widespread worry and concern as well as opposition from radical and conservative members of the Soviet legislature. Using the televised news conference as a forum, Gorbachev again called on his countrymen to be calm.

“I want to emphasize one thing: There is no need to be scared,” he said. He said economic need, and not an ideological veering away from socialism, was behind the shift to what is being termed a “regulated market.”

“Our main concern is that we have empty shelves,” Gorbachev said. “That is why we need a market economy.”

On the second day of a four-day visit, Thatcher also held talks with Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and the defense minister, Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov. Today she is to fly to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, to visit a British trade exposition.