United Germany Must Confront Chaos Once Locked Safely Behind Iron Curtain : Europe: A unified Germany is part of Central Europe, not of the West. Its policies will reflect a growing preoccupation with neighbors to the East.

Publicly, the West has been calling for it for 40 years, but the prayers for German unity were like St. Augustine’s youthful prayers for chastity: “Make Germany one, Lord--but not yet.”

God heard the first half of that prayer. One year ago, German unity was a remote contingency, not expected for decades. On Oct. 3, the church bells will ring and the banners will wave from the Rhine to the Oder--the Fourth Reich will be open for business.

The good news first. German fascism is dead and there are no prospects for its revival. Nobody in German history has been as thoroughly discredited as the Man with the Mustache. He ruined Germany in 12 short years. In 1945, the German people were starving, occupied, hated and covered in a shame that, half a century later, has still not departed. Some lessons people learn. Fringe groups are with us always, but the overwhelming majority of Germans are sincere in saying they don’t want to go this route again.

Now for the news that may not be bad, but is a little less comfortable. A reunified Germany will be far more powerful than the old West German state, and it will use its power in ways that will sometimes make its old partners unhappy.

Some commentators argue that reunification doesn’t mean much. Germany, they say hopefully, is not a great power. For years to come it will be too absorbed in the expensive and divisive process of integrating its communist East and capitalist West to throw its weight around.

Wrong answer. The new German state is already a superpower. The Soviet Union and the United States are both trying to sponge off the Germans--the Soviet Union, to avoid disintegration; the United States, to prop up its shaky Middle Eastern position today, to prop up a shakier dollar tomorrow. The deutsche mark is the world’s second-most-important reserve currency, and it continues to gain on the dollar. If reunification goes badly, taking longer and costing more than even the latest set of escalating estimates, Germany will be restless and unhappy, but it will still be the richest and most influential country in Europe.

Germany’s new weight in the world doesn’t come from the addition of the five polluted and flea-bitten states of the old East Germany. It comes from the astonishing collapse of Soviet power, and the less rapid and complete, but no less real, decline in the U.S. position in Europe. The Soviet collapse has left a vacuum in Eastern Europe that German money and influence will fill. For countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, Germany will become their most important trading partner and most important source of investment capital. The Soviet Union is daily becoming more dependent on German credit. Germany’s diplomats and businessmen will loom large in the old Soviet Bloc--and that influence, in turn, will strengthen their hands in the rest of the world.

Washington hopes that the new Federal Republic of Germany will be just like the old Federal Republic of Germany--only bigger. West Germany was a stuffy, rich country firmly tied to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with the United States and to a European partnership with France--a kind of Greater Holland. The new Germany, says official U.S. opinion, will be more of the same.

Wrong again. The old Federal Republic, West Germany, was part of Western Europe. The new Federal Republic is part of Central Europe. There’s a difference.

While Western Europe was busy celebrating the “end of history” in 1990, Eastern Europe was descending into the maelstrom of chaos, depression and possibly war. Germany, as so often before in its history, is caught in the middle.

The Iron Curtain was, in its way, convenient for the West. Josef Stalin took the poor and quarrelsome half of Europe and imposed rigid discipline on it. That left Western Europe, composed of largely peaceful countries with subtle boundaries, an opportunity to develop new kinds of international cooperation without having to worry about neighbors to the East.

The end of the Iron Curtain means the end of Western Europe’s isolation from the messy and dangerous part of the Continent--and Germany feels this more keenly than anyone else. This situation in Eastern Europe deteriorates day to day. The Bulgarian government warns of famine and bloodshed; Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s own top economic advisers use words like catastrophic and cataclysmic to describe the state of their country. At market exchange rates, Soviet workers earn about $10-a-month. Bulgarians and Romanians are in much the same state. Even the Yugoslavs, the Swiss of the East, earn less in a month than Italians make in a week. Nobody talks about the magic of the market any more; nobody now predicts anything but further erosion of these standards of living.

Not surprisingly, polls show up to 30% of the Soviet people would emigrate. In one of the most ominous signs of the postwar period, Soviet Jews are banging at the doors of German consulates, seeking asylum. The Dutch minister of labor predicts between one and three million Soviets a year will come West looking for work in the early 1990s. Poles, Gypsies, Romanians, Bulgars and Serbs are also knocking at the West’s back door--which happens to be Germany’s eastern frontier.

In the age of the Iron Curtain, West Germany could believe that its major interests and concerns were with Western Europe and the United States. The new Germany still has important links with the West--but these aren’t its only major interests anymore. Trying to maintain good relations with its newly restless Eastern neighbors, and trying to bring some kind of stability to this region is rapidly becoming the No. 1 priority of the all-German government.

The first sign of the new German policy--and the first cause of trouble between the new Germany and its old Western partners--is the German drive to “totalize” the institutional network in Western Europe: To pull the blankets of NATO and the European Community over its neighbors to the East. This has led to some grumbling and blanket-snatching by its bed mates to the West; not everyone is convinced the new arrangements will keep them as warm as the old ones.

The United States worries mostly about NATO. Germany wants to replace the old Atlantic Alliance with the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a “Pan-European” security system that stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Maybe, says Washington. The European menagerie could certainly use a Pan-Animal Protective Society; but there were lions and leopards as well as rabbits and sheep in the zoo. The leopards say they are changing their spots, and the lions say they have sworn off red meat; the rabbits and sheep have heard this before. NATO worked as well as it did because it had a small number of members who shared a large number of common interests. Washington worries the 35-member CSCE will have more members who share fewer interests, and so be less effective.

France worries about the European Community for similar reasons. The EC works because it has a manageably short membership list--12--and because its members are at basically the same level of development. The EC has trouble even now with its less-developed members. Adding the poor and chaotic Eastern European countries will complicate--possibly derail--the whole process of European integration. The EC is now dividing between the “deepeners” who want to continue the process of integration among the 12, and the “wideners” who want to embrace the new democracies of the East. Not surprisingly, Germany is leading the wideners.

Germany doesn’t want to cause all this trouble, but it hasn’t got much choice. France, Britain and the United States don’t have borders with Eastern Europe. The Soviet collapse and the resulting situation there don’t hold the same opportunities and dangers for the Western countries they do for the Germans.

Reunification doesn’t happen until Wednesday, and already German policy is moving away from its postwar moorings. It won’t--can’t--follow the U.S. lead in security policy anymore, and it won’t--can’t--work as closely as it used to on economic policy with the French. Rich, talented and troubled, the new Germany is an important new player on the international scene. Like it or not, the other great powers must learn to move over.