35 Nations Vow to Help Bridge East, West : Europe: They see the Conference on Security and Cooperation as a vehicle for bringing the two sides together.

In a celebration of the end of the Cold War, the foreign ministers of 35 European and North American nations pledged Monday to convert the 15-year-old Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) into a stable bridge between East and West.

“Fifteen years ago, in a Europe divided East from West, the CSCE offered a vision of a Europe united, whole and free,” President Bush said at the start of a two-day foreign ministers meeting. “Today, with that new Europe within reach, the CSCE remains central to all that Europe can become.”

The meeting was called to prepare the way for a summit meeting in Paris in November of the conference, which includes the United States, Canada and all of the countries of Europe except Albania.

As the meeting got under way, the foreign ministers of the four victorious powers of World War II signed a document suspending all remaining occupation rights in Germany, clearing the way for East and West Germany to reunite Wednesday without restrictions on the new nation’s sovereignty.

Bush hailed the low-key signing ceremony as a moving event that “really ends a world of discord and division.”

The four powers--the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France--agreed to end all of their postwar rights and responsibilities in Berlin and the rest of Germany when they signed the “two-plus-four” treaty Sept. 12 in Moscow.

The measure signed Monday suspends those rights pending ratification of the treaty in the four national legislatures, a process that could take several months.

The CSCE, frequently called “the Helsinki process” because its first meeting was held in the Finnish capital, is the international organization that most successfully spanned the divisions of the Cold War.

The original CSCE declaration in 1975 appealed to the Soviet Union of dictator Leonid I. Brezhnev and his East European satellites because it ratified the postwar borders that transferred large tracts of prewar Poland to the Soviet Union and incorporated thousands of acres of prewar Germany into Poland.

But the agreement won the approval of the United States and its allies because it also established new standards of human rights. As it turned out, the human rights provisions contributed to the peaceful revolutions that last fall and winter toppled Communist governments in most of Eastern Europe.

Bush hailed the conference for its contribution to the fall of communism, which he termed “this monumental triumph of the human spirit.”

“Our challenge now is to keep pace with the tremendous political transformations that have changed the face of Europe--to create a CSCE that can consolidate these great gains for freedom and bring East and West together,” Bush said.

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze sounded a similar theme.

“As Europe moves from the Cold War to a new political era, a declaration of new, non-hostile relations between members of military-political alliances should, in our view, become a watershed between the two periods,” he said. “We have reached agreement in principle that we have to move toward a single Europe in the legal, humanitarian, cultural, economic and environmental areas.”

For its first 15 years, the conference survived without a permanent staff, headquarters or even a telephone to call its own. The foreign ministers agreed Monday that it is time to give the organization a bureaucracy and a home, although some differences remain over the amount of power that the reorganized conference should have.

The United States wants to establish a small permanent secretariat, possibly no more than a dozen individuals, to run the organization between periodic meetings of foreign ministers and heads of state. U.S. officials say the bureaucracy should be headquartered in eastern Europe, probably Prague, to dramatize the spread of democracy across the once Communist-dominated part of the Continent.

“Now, CSCE must deepen and consolidate the very changes it has done so much to engender,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III said. “We must build the means to ensure that the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe will always be a part of the mainstream of European life.”

On Wednesday, membership in the conference will drop to 34 nations from 35 because of German reunification. However, Albania, which opted out in 1975 because of its then-isolationist policies, has applied for membership and is almost certain to be accepted as a new 35th member.

The Baltic republics--Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--have also applied for membership as a dramatization of their assertion of independence from the Soviet Union. Baker and most other foreign ministers agree that the Baltic states should be admitted.

However, the conference operates by consensus and any member can veto any action. U.S. officials concede that there is no chance that Moscow will approve membership for the three republics, which it continues to claim as part of the Soviet Union.