The Cold War’s Versailles : Summit: The arms treaty being signed in Paris next week closes an era and brings European issues to the fore.

Next week’s summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, at which President George Bush is expected to sign a treaty sharply reducing non-nuclear forces, is more than just another international gathering to sign an arms control treaty. It is the peace conference for the Cold War.

Like postwar meetings of the past--the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars, the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I and the meetings of the allied leaders at Yalta and Potsdam at the close of World War II--it sets the seal on a new political order in Europe. The conference will also offer a snapshot of the participants’ expectations, hopes and uncertainties about Europe’s future.

The fact that the post-Cold War military balance will be ratified at the CSCE is itself significant. All European countries belong to the conference, as do the United States and Canada. At past peace conferences, the great powers that had won the recently concluded wars negotiated the new political arrangements among themselves. During the Cold War, summit meetings were generally the private business of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The prominence of the CSCE signifies that the days of Soviet and American dominance in Europe have ended. The two will continue to be important, but by choosing the conference as the forum for next week’s sessions, the countries of Europe are signaling their common intention to play a larger role in the Continent’s political affairs than they did between 1945 and 1990.

The CSCE’s prominence underlines another important feature of post-Cold War Europe: the importance of human rights. In the decade and a half of its existence, the conference has become identified with the international effort to safeguard and promote the fundamental political rights enshrined in the United Nations Charter but too often violated in practice.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the great powers sought to reconstruct Europe on the basis of a stable balance of military power. After World War I, national self-determination--the idea that every national group was entitled to its own independent political community--dominated the victors’ deliberations. Now, respect for human rights, which means above all respect for democratic values and procedures, has become the organizing principle of the new Europe. Almost all the leaders who will attend the CSCE summit have come to their positions through free or at least quasi-free elections.

Some important questions about Europe’s future, however, are unresolved, and this, too, will be apparent in Paris. One involves the Soviet Union. Its president, Mikhail Gorbachev, will be there. But many of the country’s non-Russian peoples--the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, for example, and the Georgians of the Transcaucasus--deny that he represents them. They aspire to independence. The Soviet Union is unlikely to remain a single country for very much longer, but how many separate states it will become no one can yet say. Nor is it clear that the successor states of the Soviet Union will have peaceful relations with one another. The location of their borders is a potentially explosive issue, one that Europe isn’t prepared to face.

The main business of the three previous peace conferences was to redraw the map of the Continent. By contrast, the governments assembled at Paris are committed to respecting these borders, but the people they govern may not share their commitment.

How would the Europeans cope with such instability? Some have high hopes for the CSCE itself on this score. Proposals for a secretariat and a permanent parliamentary body will be presented in Paris.

Given its unwieldy features--the fact that all European countries, large and small, have an equal say in its affairs and that all decisions must be unanimous--the CSCE may never become powerful enough to control conflicts among its members. But the fact that the Cold War’s peace conference is taking place under its auspices is a sign that its successes and failures will be central to European affairs in the last decade of the 20th Century.