PERSPECTIVE ON EUROPE : An SOS for Conflict Resolution : Long-suppressed internal antagonisms threaten peace and security in the East. But there is a solution at hand.

Debate about the future of Germany and the Soviet Union has obscured the principal threat to peace on the Continent: the reemergence of nationalism and unresolved ethnic and religious struggles in Eastern Europe. For every other security problem in Europe, there is an apparent solution. Lacking so far is some means to head off trouble and resolve strife in the volatile center of Europe that was the seedbed of two world wars.

In the West, wise leadership after the World War II helped ameliorate long-standing conflict between the western part of a divided Germany and its neighbors, especially France. Democratic institutions, the European Community, U.S. leadership and a generation of prosperity did their work, so much so that German unity has provoked far less concern than would have greeted this step even a decade ago.

Not so in the East, where Soviet power and communist regimes merely suppressed nationalism and age-old antagonisms. With the events of 1989, frozen relationships in Eastern Europe simply thawed out. Not surprisingly, national self-awareness allied itself with anti-communism, fostering political attitudes more akin to 19th-Century practice than to Western Europe’s 21st-Century merging of sovereignties.

A congeries of rivalries and suppressed hatreds has reemerged, from antisemitism to border disputes to the status of ethnic and religious minorities. Struggles long forgotten by the outside world have reappeared, with names out of pre-war days--Transylvania, Ruthenia, Carpathia, Kosovo, Slovenia. Turks in Bulgaria are repressed; Yugoslavia totters on the edge of dissolution; the country that is home to Czechs and Slovaks has twice changed its name in search of a mutually acceptable formula.

Balkanization has return to the Balkans. But there is a critical difference from 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ignited a world war. Then, the great powers either wished to exploit regional, ethnic, and religious strife or were unable to disentangle themselves from its consequences. Today, instability is the major powers’ common enemy, and all would welcome a means of containing if not resolving local problems until democracy and economic prosperity can help change underlying attitudes.

Obviously, none of the major powers is prepared to cede to others a unilateral right of action. Last December, Secretary of State James A. Baker III suggested that failure of the Romanian revolution might justify the introduction of Soviet troops. He quickly qualified his statement, in the process illustrating both the nature of shared U.S.-Soviet interests and the unacceptability of unilateral action. The same no doubt would hold true for U.S. intervention, say, to prevent civil war among Yugoslav republics.

Two developments point to a desirable course of action. During the past three years, the Soviet Union has significantly modified its attitude toward the United Nations, moving it in the direction envisioned when its charter was signed in 1945. The U.N. role in peacemaking and peacekeeping thus has a promising future. At the same time, the search for a new European security framework has highlighted the role of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. This 35-nation group, including the Vatican and San Marino as well as the United States and the Soviet Union, is clearly not able to provide a sure basis for security, but it has already gained stature as a rallying point for political arrangements spanning the Continent. Its significance is certain to grow.

CSCE would therefore be an ideal locus for efforts to resolve conflicts in Eastern Europe, to promote peacemaking, and--should engaged parties agree--even to undertake peacekeeping with troops from several European states, patterned on U.N. peacekeepers.

To undertake these duties, CSCE would need to become a permanent institution, with a headquarters and a bureaucracy. To avoid the requirement of unanimous action, which currently keeps it from being a serious framework for European security, CSCE would need to have a flexible membership for tasks like conflict resolution, as is already being done at the 23-nation Vienna talks on reducing conventional forces. Conflict resolution also requires a set of principles for acting: Among other things, there must be a basis for compromise between rigidly forestalling change in Eastern Europe and permitting each minority to constitute itself as an independent country.

Assigning these tasks to CSCE has one further benefit. At issue today is whether there can be a framework for security embracing the entire Continent.

One school argues that only NATO or a viable substitute can keep the peace; another argues that common goals of peace and prosperity can be the basis for building a new collective security. The proposal advanced here can be a test of the latter proposition. If peacemaking and peacekeeping work in Eastern Europe, there will be reason to take seriously radical departures from approaches to European security that have dominated the past four decades.