NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Confident of U.S. Sway in the New Europe

President Bush is approaching the 34-nation European summit in Paris on Monday confident that the United States will achieve its goals in shaping new institutions to help manage the evolution of Europe in the post-Cold War era.

As the three-day parley gets under way, the United States already has won assurances on its two biggest concerns: Washington will continue to have a voice in European affairs and the new institutions that Europe creates this week will not diminish the role of NATO.

Triumphant as Bush may be in the short run, the Paris summit marks the symbolic beginning of the challenge of maintaining U.S. influence in the new European order that is emerging after more than 40 years of divisions between East and West.

In a real sense, Paris will mark the end of superpower domination of the Continent, many American analysts believe. Unless Bush and his senior aides are vigilant during this week’s sessions, the new order could still be fraught with long-term problems for the United States.

The changes overtaking European geopolitics are stunning. Instead of the Cold War Europe that was controlled from the periphery by Washington and Moscow, the Continent now will have a variety of power centers, not all of them congenial to U.S. interests.

For the Bush Administration, the Paris summit has been largely an exercise in damage control--making sure that the 33 other national leaders do not do anything that might diminish American influence, especially by weakening the primacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Measured by that limited standard, Bush is certain to be successful. The summit meeting of the little-known institution called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) will give only limited new powers to the organization. NATO’s position as the primary guarantor of security in Europe is safe.

So far at least, the heads of the major European powers have shown no interest in edging the United States off the Continent. To the contrary, they have made clear a strong desire for continued U.S. involvement.

Nonetheless, some American analysts warn that Washington’s welcome in Europe could gradually begin to erode, posing difficult long-term problems for the United States.

The potential for difficulties may be increased, they warn, if easy victories on specific points, and the distraction of the Persian Gulf crisis, lead Bush and his senior aides to underestimate the importance of this summit.

As the shock of cataclysmic events subsides, and Europe becomes more comfortable with the changes brought on by the rapid end of the Cold War, its leaders may assert their right to control their destiny without significant help from Washington.

“This is the topic in Europe,” said Rozanne Ridgway, former assistant secretary of state for European affairs. “There is a sense that Europe is coming into, at last, the management of its own affairs. Europe today is very introspective and looking at its own future.

“The (West) European public will be watching Paris with a great sense of history taking place,” Ridgway said. “And for East and Central Europeans, this is a coming-out party.”

Ridgway and others recently back from Europe caution that the United States should not fail to appreciate the importance of the summit to Europeans.

If Washington is careful in its approach to the CSCE, experts in foreign affairs say, the United States can use the CSCE process to dampen Europeans’ isolationist tendencies and help to lock in a U.S. role in European affairs.

“It is understood that the United States and Canada (the only CSCE members located outside Europe) are regarded as European powers in CSCE,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council analyst.

“It is another way for the United States to act as and be perceived as a European power.”

The Paris summit is the first meeting of all CSCE national leaders since 1975, when they signed what is known as the Helsinki Final Act, a treaty that locked in the post-World War II boundaries of Europe.

The Helsinki conference also adopted a list of human rights standards that, although largely overlooked at the time, set off a chain of events that 14 years later fueled the grass-roots revolution that toppled communism in most of Eastern Europe.

This time, the summit is expected to approve plans giving CSCE its first permanent bureaucracy: a small secretariat that will be headquartered in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The leaders also plan to create a crisis resolution center and an organization to observe elections.

Some European leaders wanted to give the organization far more power than that, but they backed away in the face of U.S. opposition. The Bush Administration wanted to keep CSCE relatively weak to make sure it would not upstage NATO.

“We do not want to create the illusion that we’re in the middle of a brave new world,” a senior State Department official declared.

Some experts outside the government believe the Bush Administration may have overdone it in keeping CSCE weak.

“The most significant threat to peace and stability in Europe comes from the ethnic, religious and national rivalries in the liberated countries (of Eastern Europe),” said Robert Hunter, a former National Security Council expert on Europe. “The CSCE summit will set up a conflict resolution center, but it is nothing but a talking shop. It has no capacity for conciliation, mediation or arbitration. That is woefully inadequate.”

Ridgway said it is beyond CSCE’s ability to resolve ethnic conflicts that, although suppressed by communism since World War II, have festered for centuries.

“It’s unfair to ask the CSCE to do that, but that is what many people will be using as the first judgment of whether or not CSCE is a worthwhile organization,” she said.

The crisis center, officially to be known as the Center for the Prevention of Crises and located initially in Vienna, is intended to exchange information on the movement of military forces by member nations.

A communications network will be set up to serve as a low-level hot line over which complaints about unusual or threatening military maneuvers can be immediately discussed.

In time, the center may take on efforts to mediate political disputes, especially ethnic and national conflicts in Eastern Europe.

Overall, CSCE will have a decided Eastern-looking focus. Western European leaders agreed to put the organization’s headquarters in Prague as recognition of the democratization process in the formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe.

Viewed from the West, CSCE is eclipsed by NATO and the European Community, both far stronger institutions. But CSCE is the only regional organization that has extended its membership to Eastern Europe. With the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact defense alliance, CSCE is about all the East Europeans have to hold on to.

The planned election monitoring agency is aimed specifically at Eastern Europe.

“Nobody is really concerned about monitoring elections in France and Germany; it pertains to states that are emerging from their Communist and dictatorial past,” Sonnenfeldt said.

Ridgway said that some Eastern European leaders are already referring to CSCE as a transitory organization, a way-station to a larger and more powerful Europe-wide organization. Under CSCE’s rules, it is difficult to see how the institution could evolve in that direction as long as Washington objects.

CSCE operates by consensus, meaning that all 34 nations must approve any action. Critics charge that the procedure--which gives veto power to such politically insignificant states as San Marino, Malta and the Vatican--will immobilize the organization, preventing it from taking on controversial matters.

The CSCE summit participants also must decide if the organization needs a legislative apparatus. Some European nations are proposing a new “Assembly of Europe” to include legislators from all 34 countries.

The basis for this is the existing Council of Europe, a largely ceremonial gathering of representatives of 21 nations--essentially the CSCE membership, with the exception of the United States, Canada, Finland, the six nations of the Warsaw Pact and the mini-states, such as Monaco and the Vatican.

A later meeting of lawmakers from all countries will decide the matter.