Soviets Shed Superpower Role, Stress European Ties

A new European power will make its debut at the all-European summit meeting in Paris this week--the Soviet Union.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will not be attending the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) as the leader of one of the two global superpowers, except to end a role that the Soviet Union has played for four decades.

Instead, he will be anchoring his troubled country firmly in Europe, which he calls “our common home” and which his advisers describe as “the growth Continent.”

Moscow, to put it directly, is taking itself out of superpower politics and resuming its position as “a great European power,” in the words of Soviet foreign policy specialists.

The implications of this shift in Soviet policy are far-reaching, affecting the balance of power around the world, ending the bipolar Soviet-American rivalry, extending the unification of Europe and strengthening the development of international institutions.

While other important elements are also at work, the fundamental transformation of Soviet foreign policy in the past five years has been crucial to the recent international realignment, and Soviet foreign affairs specialists predict more changes, particularly in Europe.

“Europe is coming into an absolutely new stage of its history,” Alexander Churbanyan, a leading Soviet specialist on Europe, said last week in an interview. “In the next two or three years, we will be creating a new architecture, politically, economically and socially, for Europe, and not just for this decade but for the start of the century we will be entering.

“For the Soviet Union, this is of the utmost importance because it means our reintegration into a civilization from which we have been cut off, not just for the 45 years of the Cold War, but even longer. . . . And this reintegration will come, we hope and believe, at the point of ‘takeoff,’ economically and politically, both for Europe and for us.”

Although it retains a substantial nuclear arsenal and conventional military power, a special relationship with the United States and interests in Asia and the Middle East that befit it as a transcontinental nation, the Soviet Union considers itself very much a down-sized superpower today, lacking both the resources and the desire to play the global role it previously pursued.

“We never understood ourselves as a real superpower,” Sergei A. Karaganov, deputy director of the Institute of Europe, a leading Soviet think tank, said in an interview. “We saw ourselves as underdogs, in fact, and in trying to compensate we pretended that we and our allies were the equal of the United States and its allies. In fact, we overreached, and it brought us very few pluses politically and none economically.

“We are renouncing this status--that is one quite significant meaning of the Paris conference--and we are resuming the role that Russia has played historically, that of a great European power. Our efforts to match the United States as a superpower hastened our decline and masked that of Washington.”

To those who have advocated this basic rethinking of Kremlin foreign policy and attempted to turn the loss of its superpower influence into an advantage, this transformation frees the Soviet Union to concentrate its energy and resources on resolving its own multiple political and economic problems.

“This reduces the potential for foreign conflicts and gives us a freer hand in foreign policy,” Karaganov argued. “But the key thing its that it allows us to concentrate on what is really decisive for our security and prosperity--the restructuring of our economy and our political system. The Soviet Union’s difficulties are, in some respects, the concern of all Europe; certainly, they are the greatest threat to our security today. . . .

“If we resolve these problems, we may in time reverse our country’s international decline, which has been going on for some years. If we don’t, well, then we are really talking about the survival of the Soviet Union.”

But Karaganov, Churbanyan and others argue that the restoration of the Soviet Union’s place in Europe will have important consequences for the country’s political and economic reforms.

“The postwar division of Europe was a strategic disaster for the Soviet Union, a blunder of enormous magnitude,” Karaganov asserted. “Yes, we gained a buffer in Eastern Europe, and Stalin had the satisfaction of seeing socialism spread.

“But look at the hatred that brought the Soviet Union, the suspicion, the isolation. We were forced into alliances with weak countries. We were cut off from European civilization and the continental economy. Internally, it created a system of conservative politics and institutionalized the military-industrial complex. . . .

“To put it another way, 1989 brought our liberation along with that of Eastern and Central Europe,” he said. “With the reduction of NATO troops, particularly that of American forces on our Western borders, our security is enhanced. Our neighbors no longer view us as occupiers. The European Community is opening its market to us and investing here. Real changes are coming.”

And Soviet foreign affairs specialists increasingly are convinced that Europe is where their country should position itself. To them it means greater security, political stability, economic growth and cultural ties.

What they are now discussing is the “architecture” of this new Europe, hoping to shape it to Soviet needs.

“When we proposed the concept of a common European home, many in the West saw it as a tricky new Soviet attempt to dominate the Continent,” Vladimir G. Baranovsky, a European specialist at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, another prominent Soviet think tank, said in an interview, “and there were probably grounds for suspicion.

“But the pan-European movement has won wide acceptance. Hans-Dietrich Genscher (the German foreign minister) talks about the ‘new European political order,’ and President Francois Mitterrand (of France) speaks of the ‘confederation of Europe.’ The idea of the ‘common European home’ was ours, and we are happy to see others develop it because we will need a new framework to replace that (which was) built in the Cold War and now, thankfully, gone.”

The Soviet Union is pushing for the transformation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which for the past 15 years has been mostly a series of multilateral negotiations and occasional ministerial meetings, into a full-fledged institution of the new Europe to deal with the aftermath of the Cold War and the new problems likely to develop in the future. A key project is creation of a conflict-prevention center, but further arms-reduction talks are also a priority over the next three years.

“Problems are not going to disappear, the euphoria will quickly wear thin and the reality of this ‘new Europe’ will be harder than people think,” Alexei G. Arbatov, a specialist in security and arms control, commented in an interview. “And the ways in which we dealt with problems and with one another during the Cold War are no longer appropriate. . . .

“We still have huge standing armies, but it matters a great deal how we reduce them so we do not disrupt the stability we have achieved. We have the possibility of internal unrest that could now spill across borders. There is the issue of migration from the East, there is the potential for old rivalries and nationalisms to stir again and there is the possibility perhaps of an upheaval like the breakup of Yugoslavia. These could even make some yearn for the ‘good old days.’ ”

A senior Western diplomat, asking not to be quoted by name as he briefed journalists on the Paris meeting, said that the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are ready to support this transition.

“If the Soviet Union wants to use this process for legitimate security goals, let’s help them,” he said.

A senior Soviet diplomat, who also has been involved in the CSCE since the preliminary talks began in Helsinki in 1972, described its evolution as “a demonstration of flexibility, pragmatism and adaptability.”

“If there was the political will, this all-European process provided the way, and we are convinced that it will continue to do so and deserves to be institutionalized further,” he said, asking not to be quoted by name.

“This is a process that our country is quite happy with. It is productive, it enhances security, it encourages a multilateral approach to problems, it stresses cooperation rather than confrontation. The gains may have been incremental, but they now add up to quite a change.”