NEWS ANALYSIS : The Rush to German Unity Proves Unstoppable

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s agreement Monday to accept a reunified Germany in the Western alliance is the latest and most dramatic example of the power of the idea of German unity.

Since Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn first opened the Iron Curtain last September and East Germans began pouring West, it is an idea that has pushed aside all in its way.

When West German Bundesbank President Karl Otto Poehl insisted one morning last February that a German currency union would take years, it required less than 24 hours for him to bow to the political realities--and only a few short months to implement that very currency union.

Worries about the power of a united Germany, most visible in the West among the French class politique and followers of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were swept aside in the rush to endorse the idea at a European Community summit last April.

In Germany itself, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s talk last November of a loose German confederation leading to eventual unification had by March become a call for all-German elections by the end of 1991. And these, by the end of last month, had been advanced to Dec. 2, 1990.

When the Parliament elected then holds its first session, Germany will effectively be one.

On Monday, Gorbachev became the latest to jump aside rather than be run over in the headlong rush, giving Moscow’s blessing to what a year ago would have been inconceivable: a united Germany as a full, integrated member of the Atlantic Alliance.

For some, it was as if an electric charge had cut the stuffy summer air in this Caucasus spa town as Kohl sat next to his host and calmly went down the list of Soviet concessions: NATO membership for a united Germany; withdrawal of Soviet forces in a relatively short period from what is now East Germany, while Allied troops stay in Berlin; a quick wrap-up of the rights of the World War II victorious powers in Germany, including those of the Soviet Union.

Despite the euphoria on the official Luftwaffe Boeing 707 winging its way homeward to Bonn, Monday’s agreement was far from a one-sided affair.

Gorbachev won a commitment from Kohl to limit the size of a future German military to 370,000 personnel, roughly one-tenth the Soviet Union’s troop strength, and renounce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

“This can’t be of disadvantage to the Soviet Union,” Gorbachev noted.

It is possible to argue that if anything, the accord on balance actually enhances Soviet security in the long term. Some analysts say the withdrawal of Soviet forces from East Germany will make little difference to Soviet security. Certainly, growing tension between newly democratic East Germans and Soviet forces stationed there makes Moscow’s continued military presence in the region a questionable asset.

If the terms agreed to by the two leaders become reality--and initial praise from President Bush and some other Western leaders indicate there will be little opposition--they will help outline the shape of a future European security order.

While it will be an order in which Moscow’s biggest single military contingent at present outside of its borders will eventualy disappear back into the Soviet Union, it is also an order in which a future united Germany is committed to a modest army.

It has the earmarks of a formula that reassures Moscow yet allows the two Germanys to continue their race toward elections.

After the news conference announcing the agreement, reporters filing out onto a patio spotted West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, sitting together on a two-seater garden swing sipping mineral water.

Both were smiling.