Baker Proposes New Partnership for East, West

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, sketching out a bold post-Cold War future, Tuesday invited the Soviet Union and its former satellites to join an expanded Atlantic partnership that could stretch from the west coast of North America across Europe to the Soviet far east.

“Our objective is . . . a Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” Baker said in a speech to American and German dignitaries.

In a pointed reminder that such a structure is still only theoretical, Baker added that unless the United States and the nations of Western Europe include the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a broadened Atlantic community, ethnic strife and economic instability in the East might ultimately threaten the affluent West.

A senior State Department official said Eastern Europe is in “a race against time” to find its place in an integrated Europe before ethnic rivalries tear the region apart.

Baker chided Western Europe for failing to open its markets to the products of the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.

State Department officials said Baker’s speech was a sequel to an address he delivered in Berlin in December, 1989, outlining Washington’s determination to remain a major force in Europe even though East-West relaxation reduced the importance of the U.S. military shield.

Most of the steps he outlined then, such as NATO reorganization and formal U.S. coordination with the 12-nation European Community, have come to pass.

In an attempt to apportion responsibility for carrying out his latest plan, Baker said the United States should take the lead in assisting the Soviet Union while Western Europe should point the way in supporting Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania.

He warned that growing ethnic animosity in Eastern Europe could rekindle the pressures that provoked World War I, urging measures to “avoid the conditions and bias toward escalation that characterized Europe in August, 1914.”

“Our greatest challenge will be to extend the transatlantic community to the Soviet Union,” Baker said.

“The United States, for reasons of history, has a special role to play in supporting the process of change in the Soviet Union,” he added.

Although he said the West must reach out to the Soviet military and its defense industry as well as to reformers, Washington and its allies have a right to insist that Moscow adopt democratic politics and market economics as a condition for receiving any aid.

Elaborating on the speech, Baker told reporters: “It’s going to be a lot more difficult to extend the community if the decision were taken there (in Moscow) not to move toward political pluralism and economic reform.”

Baker gave only sketchy information about the sort of aid Washington might provide, and he did not suggest what it might cost.

However, he said U.S. experts might help the Soviet Union revitalize its energy development and food distribution system, two sectors which could provide a quick payoff to consumers.

He also restated President Bush’s proposal, originally made last December, to give Moscow an associate membership in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The United States had shelved the idea after a Soviet military crackdown on the independence-minded Baltic republics.

A senior State Department official explained that associate membership would permit the Soviet Union to take advantage of IMF economic planning, although it would not be eligible to receive loans from the fund.

Concerning the rest of Eastern Europe, Baker said the European Community’s “greatest external challenge is to reach out to the East. . . . It is a simple fact that the new market democracies will not be able to draw foreign investment, to privatize, to build competitive businesses that will create jobs--if they are not allowed to compete fairly for markets.”

Baker is in Berlin to attend a meeting, starting today, of foreign ministers of the 34-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Except for Albania--which probably will be admitted this week--the CSCE includes every European nation plus the United States and Canada. Geographically, the CSCE already stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok, but the organization has limited power because it can act only by unanimous agreement.

Meanwhile, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania sent their foreign ministers to Berlin to demand admission to the CSCE as sovereign and independent states. Their cause appears hopeless because the conference’s unanimity rule will permit the Soviet Union to veto the applications.

However, the three republics, incorporated by force into the Soviet Union in 1940, could score some propaganda points and could embarrass countries such as the United States, which have never recognized the annexations yet do business with Moscow anyway.