Regional Outlook : Europe’s New Wall: The Rich and the Poor : * A Continent once kept apart by ideology is now divided between those that have and those that don’t.

At a small open market a mile east of the German border, Krystyiza Sikorski and her husband Andrzej sell butter. They sell it for 50 cents a pound, exactly half the $1 charged in food stores across the Oder River in the other Europe.

Around her, other Polish traders push an array of goods from Swiss cheese and wicker furniture to counterfeit Levi jeans and cigarettes at similar discounts.

“Even at this price, they say it’s too expensive,” she said, nodding toward the river and the Germans who make up the bulk of her customers. “There’s very little (money) in it, but what else can we do?”

In Poland, as in most of the former Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, the Sikorskis’ struggle is not unusual. Polish professors, judges and schoolteachers have been found working illegally as manual laborers in Germany in recent months because the pay is better.

Only in eastern Germany, where unification has brought the gifts of a rich Western country--a stable currency, liberal government benefits and a massive capital investment program--is there hope that a transition to affluence can occur in the foreseeable future.

Little of that hope exists east of the Oder and Neisse rivers that form most of the German-Polish frontier.

Indeed, a Europe kept apart by barbed wire and ideology for more than 40 years has emerged from its anti-Communist revolutions only to find itself separated by a prosperity line that today divides the Continent’s “haves” from its “have nots.”

On one side, a Western Europe, rich, free-wheeling, confident, stable, successful and smug, flexes its muscles and searches for a greater global role. On the other, an Eastern Europe, gray, poor, tentative, economically depressed and politically unstable, struggles to overcome the economic failures of its Communist past and to contain emerging aspirations of volatile nationalist groups.

At the heart of this divide is a 265-mile long Polish-German frontier that separates Eastern Europe’s most populous nation from Western Europe’s richest; a political line where the world’s juiciest, single consumer market--the European Community--ends, and the wreckage of the Soviet empire begins.

“It is the Rio Grande of Europe,” said Heinrich Vogel, director of the Institute for East European and International Studies, a Cologne-based, government-financed think tank. “Like it or not, there are strong economic and social parallels.”

The disparity of living standards between the two Europes and the pressures it generates flies in the face of those who talk grandly of a continent without borders. “It’s the usual contradiction between politicians who are partly dreamers and economic realities,” added Vogel.

While Germany swallowed hard and opened its frontier with Poland to visa-free traffic last April, every vehicle remains subject to control, and authorities in border towns have so far been unable even to operate local bus lines between nearby Polish and German towns because of customs and immigration snags. (Because Germany now has completely open borders with five of its western neighbors--the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy and France--access to Germany is a ticket to much of Western Europe.)

Today, the border between Poland and Germany is a frontier of affluence and opportunity subject to the same pressures of smuggling, illegal immigration, organized crime and social tension that have plagued America’s border with Mexico.

But the potential consequences of Europe’s divide are far more dangerous.

For amid this mix of economic failure and nationalist aspirations in the East, a superpower with thousands of nuclear warheads, a large army and restless population is disintegrating.

The catastrophic failure of economic reforms to take hold in the Soviet Union was the overriding cause of last month’s coup attempt against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and poor economic conditions are likely to stimulate further instability.

Any large-scale violence or further economic collapse could trigger an avalanche of refugees westward that would push the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe into still deeper trouble. Such developments would also almost certainly spill across Europe’s prosperity line, threatening Western Europe, analysts say.

In a television interview only hours after Gorbachev’s dramatic return to Moscow, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pointed directly to the dangers inherent in Europe’s vast disparity in living conditions.

“It is unthinkable that we in Western Europe, in the European Community, can maintain our prosperity over the long term, while next to us, directly on our border, things don’t develop well,” he said. “More than before, we’ve become one world. . . . “

The sleepy communities that line both sides of the Oder and Neisse river valleys may seem peaceful in the warm of late summer, but their calm hides a series of bubbling human dramas that spell trouble for Europe as a whole. None is more compelling--or, for the Germans, more worrisome--than the influx of illegal immigrants, drawn by the prospect of work, hard currency and a better life.

So far this year, Polish and German officials have detained more than 6,000 people trying to cross surreptitiously into Germany. The only certainty is that more will come.

A few miles west of the Slubice market, at the Frankfurt headquarters of the German Border Protection Force, deputy commander Heiko Knorren recently listed the catch of the previous 24 hours: 17 Romanians, three Poles, two Bulgarians and four of undetermined nationality.

How many slipped undetected through the strengthened border patrols is pure speculation, Knorren said, although German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble recently estimated that for every illegal immigrant caught, four others get through.

German border control officials cite mounting evidence that organized gangs now smuggle people into Germany, mainly in areas where either the Neisse is so low that it is possible to wade across or along a 30-mile stretch where there is no river border at all.

“They operate in the market places, selling directions through the border and sometimes arrange transportation on our side to places like Berlin,” said Dieter Otte, who commands the German border forces at Goerlitz, a city south of Frankfurt.

Often, it’s a bad investment.

A group of 32 illegal Bulgarian immigrants was discovered north of Goerlitz recently by police who stopped the transit van in which they were traveling because it was riding so low to the ground. Adults had paid $120, children $60, according to police reports.

Occasionally, would-be immigrants jump from trains as they cover the mile and one-half distance between the border and the Frankfurt main station. Although less dramatic, it is the same sense of desperation that last month led thousands of Albanians to clamber aboard an overcrowded ship for Italy.

Immigration pressures can only grow when Soviet citizens obtain the right to free travel, analysts here are convinced. Originally planned for 1993, the collapse of central authority will likely accelerate rather than delay this development.

Sometimes, gangs advise immigrants to declare for political asylum, a declaration that, under German law, means they cannot be immediately deported. Although more than 90% of the asylum-seekers are rejected, proving their claims are false can often take years. In the meantime, they can be eligible for temporary residence.

Valintin Jorclanescu, 34, and his 9-year-old son, Sorin, from Bucharest, were two of the 1,000 asylum-seekers living at a former police barracks in the German border city of Eisenhuettenstadt, 20 miles south of Frankfurt.

Although he complained about police harassment, it seemed clear Jorclanescu simply wanted a better life for himself and proper medical attention for his partially crippled child. He said his job as a chauffeur earned him roughly half of what was required to subsist in the Romanian capital. “I’d like to stay here and bring the rest of my family if I can,” he said.

With Germany’s rising unemployment and a social welfare system laboring to support nearly 2 million east Germans who are either jobless or working short hours, there is little room for people like the Jorclanescu family.

An active anti-immigrant press campaign among mass circulation German newspapers has also made it increasingly difficult for the country’s political leaders to make concessions on the issue.

The atmosphere is similar in other West European countries.

For Germany, there is an added dimension to the immigrant problem: the fate of between 2.5 and 3 million ethnic Germans who now reside in the Soviet Union, Poland and Romania.

Failure of any economic revival in Eastern Europe or increased political instability would likely spur the flow of those wanting to exercise emigration rights guaranteed by the German constitution, a development that would only place additional tensions on German society.

For many, tensions are high enough.

The combination of an open, but tightly controlled frontier leads to traffic jams that frequently tail back through communities on both sides of the border, polluting the air and angering local residents.

Ugly incidents have also occurred where German neo-Nazi youths have attacked Polish tourists. Last April, on the day visa-free travel was instituted across the German-Polish border, for example, about 200 young Germans shouting “Germany for the Germans!” tried to block the Oder River bridge and smashed windows of a bus carrying a Polish orchestra returning home after a trip to the Netherlands.

As the eastern-most European Community country, sharing a long border with “poorer Europe,” Germans have definite self-interest in providing generous aid to eastern countries.

The $33 billion either pledged or disbursed to the Soviet Union since 1989, for example, is tops among donor nations, as is the $10 billion in credits and grants provided to Poland since the mid-1970s. These figures, however, are dwarfed when compared to estimates of the money needed to erase the disparities between the two Europes.

One study conducted by the German Economic Institute in Cologne projected that it could require as much as $420 billion of capital investment annually for the next decade to bring industrial productivity in the former Soviet satellite countries up to average West European levels.

On a more modest level, the Polish and German governments are studying a plan for joint development of the border region with the help of an investment bank and a technical assistance program, taking advantage of cheap Polish property and labor costs to produce for the large EC market.

Planners admit, however, than much depends on the terms of the treaty of association still to be negotiated between Poland and the EC.

“The terms would need to be generous to make such a plan feasible,” said Johannes Pornschlaeger, who helped develop the plan for GOPA, a private German consultancy based in Bad Homburg.

An Economics Ministry spokesman in Bonn said talks on the plan are scheduled with EC authorities later this month.

Despite the extent of the divide separating the two Europes, some analysts still find grounds for optimism.

Vogel, for example, in making his comparison with the U.S.-Mexican border, noted that the potential for development in Eastern Europe remains superior to that in Latin America.

“In training, education, literacy and language, East and West Europeans share much in common,” he said. “And that is a decisive difference for the medium- and longer-term outlook.”