34 ‘Equals’ Will Gather at Summit : Europe: Big powers fear that unless the CSCE structure is changed, tiny nations with equal status and veto power could become mice that roar.

Question: What do San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta and the United States of America all have in common?

Answer: They all issue postage stamps. And they all have equal status and veto power in the historic 34-nation summit meeting that convenes here Monday to mark the end of the Cold War.

With some dramatic exceptions, the unusual equality among member nations of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe has not been a major problem.

That is because the CSCE, which consists of 32 European states plus the United States and Canada, generally has stuck to harmless, sweeping endorsements of world peace and human rights.

On Wednesday, the CSCE summit participants including President Bush, are to sign another such document, entitled “A New Era of Democracy, Peace and Unity,” which has been hammered out after months of negotiations in Vienna.

The trouble is that some European leaders, notably French President Francois Mitterrand and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, would like to see the organization’s role enlarged and enhanced. They want it to replace the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the main guarantor of security in the West.

Needless to say, the proposal has its critics--the United States and Britain, to name two.

Unless the organization is redesigned to give greater weight to the big powers, wary U.S. and British officials say, microscopic but veto-capable countries such as the hilltop hermit haven known as San Marino (population: 22,361) and the Alpine yodel capital named Liechtenstein (population: 30,000) could become mice that roar.

And that doesn’t include vetoes in the hands of potential new members--ministates that would be produced if the Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries should splinter, producing new, pro-Western nations.

The Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for example, have all declared their intent to leave the Soviet Union and have said they want CSCE membership; so has the Ukraine. The western Yugoslav republic of Slovenia wants to be a part of the organization so badly that it held a mini-CSCE summit last week in its capital city, Ljubljana, for various ethnic entities left out of the CSCE process.

“The fatal weakness of the CSCE is what its boosters see as its main strength,” the London-based Economist magazine observed in an editorial. “It is a regional club that everyone can join. Nobody can be thrown out; everybody has a veto.”

Defenders of the CSCE, created in 1975 as a forum for continuing East-West talks on security and human rights, argue that the strict equality of all nations--big, small and nearly invisible--has been the key to its success. They argue that in the darkest days of the Cold War, when NATO and Warsaw Pact automatically rejected almost all proposals from the other side, it was the smallest of small countries that acted as tireless mediators.

In fact, the nine “neutral and nonaligned” countries--Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Malta, Cyprus and Yugoslavia--are given much of the credit for turning the CSCE into an important vehicle for breaking down Cold War antagonisms.

“The little countries were really the motors of the whole process,” said Helmut Petsch, an Austrian lawyer who represents San Marino, a tiny republic, reputedly 1,600 years old, nestled under Mt. Titano on the Adriatic side of Italy.

San Marino, where the main industries are tourism and stamp production, claims to be the oldest continuous democracy in the world. It is so small and inconsequential that it was left unmolested by the Mussolini Fascists and managed to use its sovereignty to protect 100,000 refugees, five times its normal population, during World War II.

Under the CSCE charter, no country is given precedence over another. The order of speakers at meetings is determined by a drawing. Liechtenstein, a narrow principality wedged along the upper Rhine River between Switzerland and Austria, is allotted the same amount of office space as the United States.

Even the smallest CSCE countries--the smallest, the Vatican, occupies only 109 acres in the heart of Rome--take their turns at chairing meetings. In fact, sitting in the chairman’s seat Tuesday morning at the Kleber International Center in Paris, when the summit opens its most important day of meetings, will be a 37-year-old high school teacher from San Marino named Gabriel Gatti.

Gatti, who also serves as the country’s secretary of state for political and foreign affairs, is attending the summit partly to avoid the protocol complications caused by San Marino’s unusual system of dual heads of state, called captain-regents.

The two captain-regents are elected by the republic’s 60-member Parliament for six-month terms. They have equal powers and, according to Austrian lawyer Petsch, an expert on the region, enjoy a special reverence among nearly all the people of San Marino during their half-year tenures.

However, they seldom attend international meetings such as the one in Paris, Petsch said, because of the “nightmarish” problems in protocol caused by the dual rulers.

For example, if the Paris summit organizers were to respect the San Marino system, they would have to provide the micro-country two chairs at the big summit table instead of one. And who would be introduced first, Captain-Regent Cesare Gasperoni, a health department employee, or Captain-Regent Roberto Bucce, a union organizer? Which one of the two would give the 15-minute speech allotted to heads of state? Or would each one give a 7-minute, 30-second talk? Would each man get his own motorcade through the streets of Paris? Would each have his own motorcycle police escort?

The possibilities are endless.

“Anyway,” said Gatti, who will lead the 14-member San Marino delegation to Paris, “they never get involved in political matters.”

The CSCE carefully avoids the word veto in its official documents. But a de facto veto power exists because no document can be issued by the CSCE unless it has been approved and signed by all the organization’s members.

U.S. and British officials have made it clear that in their view this consensus veto is taking equality among nations a bit too far. Theoretically, in fact, the Cold War-ending document that is prepared for signing Wednesday morning could be blocked by any one of the members at the last minute.

During final preparations of the document in Vienna last week, tiny Liechtenstein played just such a role to get its way in a 40-year-old feud with Czechoslovakia.

After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the ruling family and other nobles in Liechtenstein, the world’s No. 1 producer of false teeth and synthetic sausage casings, lost lands and castles in Czechoslovakia’s Bohemian countryside. Since then, the Liechtensteiners have had a special grudge against the Czechoslovaks, who refused to negotiate the return of the property.

The chance for revenge finally came last week after the Czechoslovak government asked the CSCE membership to approve Prague as the permanent site for the organization’s new secretariat headquarters. The secretariat is something that Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel and his government desperately want.

When the consensus vote to select the site was held Thursday, Czechoslovakia had all delegates on its side except Liechtenstein’s, Count Mario von Ledebur.

Liechtenstein would withhold approval, Von Ledebur insisted, unless Czechoslovakia proved it was willing to discuss restoration of the confiscated property. Czechoslovakia, reversing four decades of policy, quickly yielded. The veto was lifted after the two countries exchanged letters agreeing to open diplomatic talks on the subject.

“Until today,” the count recounted proudly in a telephone interview, “they had never recognized Liechtenstein because it is so small.”