Regional Outlook : Germany, France Shape a Model for Diplomacy : * Their post-World War II partnership became the motor for the peaceful integration of a democratic Europe. Now they are once again drafting the future.

If miracles occur in the world of diplomacy, the post-World War II reconciliation between France and Germany would certainly be a candidate.

Blessed by the vision and statesmanship of early postwar leaders from both countries and some nudging by the United States, France and Germany managed to transform their troubled, violent history into a partnership that quickly became a model for other nations to follow.

The two continental adversaries, who lost 9 million of their citizens in two world wars this century, built a partnership that became a motor for the peaceful integration of democratic Europe.

They gave birth to the idea of a European Community in the 1950s, then 20 years later came up with the European monetary system that today binds together nine continental currencies.

In the 1980s, they launched the crusade to forge the 12 EC nations into a single, borderless, West European market of 330 million consumers scheduled to be achieved by the end of next year.

Last week, in the wake of a prolonged crisis triggered by the events surrounding German unification, France and Germany were once again drafting Europe’s future as Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Francois Mitterrand met here to discuss the boldest ever joint Franco-German initiative: treaties that would commit the 12 European Community countries to eventual political union, a common central bank and a common currency.

It is an initiative some say would bring nothing less than a United States of Europe.

The treaties will dominate the Dec. 9-10 EC summit scheduled to be held in the Dutch city of Maastricht. Substantial progress would be the clearest signal yet that the crisis is over and Western Europe’s most crucial relationship is back in full bloom--as influential and powerful as ever.

For some nations, such as Britain, such steps seem too radical and the outcome at Maastricht is anything but certain.

“Unfortunately, Europe is not a game of two countries, but of 12,” commented a French diplomatic source in Paris. “Everyone focuses on the U.K., the universal scapegoat for problems in Europe. But most of the other members--the Spanish, the Dutch and the Italians included--also have their own special problems with political union. We can’t expect miracle solutions coming out of Maastricht.”

No matter what the results, however, one message from Maastricht will remain clear: Germany and France, Western Europe’s two largest, most influential countries, remain together, pushing their partners harder than ever toward a greater unity they see as essential for their own interests and for long-term political stability in Europe.

Last week, French presidential spokesman Jean Musitelli called the Franco-German dynamic “the principal factor in the construction of Europe.”

It is a description hard to dispute.

“The Franco-German relationship has become both the concrete mechanism and the symbol that has made war in Western Europe unthinkable,” said Hanns Maull, deputy director of the German Foreign Policy Assn. here. “The two countries have embraced each other so tightly that they have gone beyond the traditional ways of dealings between nations.

“This is the core of the (West) European experiment, the (West) European experience,” he added.

The fact that the relationship remains so strong despite serious strains imposed by the transformation of Europe’s political map over the last two years is, in some ways, almost as remarkable as the initial reconciliation.

For the better part of four decades, until 1989, the relationship existed on a natural symbiosis. France benefited from West Germany’s enormous economic power, while West Germany, in working with France, enjoyed a degree of political legitimacy that helped mitigate the legacy of the Third Reich, its limited sovereignty and its divided status.

“Germany had the deutschemark, France had the atom bomb,” summed up Maurice Faure, a close friend and former Cabinet minister of Mitterrand, in an interview last year with the German weekly Der Spiegel.

The contradiction between the official French position in support of German unity and the obvious benefits to France of Germany’s division were best captured in the sardonic comment of French writer Francois Mauriac, who once professed that his love for Germany was so great he was just happy there were two of them.

But when the Berlin Wall collapsed in November, 1989, a French policy predicated on Germany’s division crumbled with it.

A united, confident, fully sovereign Germany, nearly twice France’s size in terms of population and 2 1/2 times as large in economic terms, suddenly loomed as anything but an equal partner.

At the same time, the fall of the Iron Curtain had shoved France from the center of Western Europe to the margins of a far larger Continent suddenly free, open and eager to join the integration process.

The force de frappe was suddenly obsolete, while the deutschemark could only grow stronger.

Germany’s dream was France’s nightmare. Tension was immediate.

While opinion polls in France indicated widespread public support for German unity, the ruling elite saw it otherwise.

Mitterrand traveled to Kiev to enlist Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s help to slow the rush toward German unity, and was the lone Western head of state to visit East Berlin on a trip viewed in West Germany as an attempt to prop up the disintegrating East German government.

When Kohl balked at an immediate reaffirmation of Germany’s post-World War II border with Poland, Mitterrand quickly invited then-Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski to Paris in a move more symbolic of the 1930s anti-German alliance than a reflection of post-Cold War realities.

“The French political class, in a way, took German unification as the worst defeat since 1940 and that we didn’t like,” commented Michael Stuermer, director of the German government-backed think tank, the Ebenhausen Institute. “We ignored it generally, but we didn’t like it,” added Stuermer, who wears a small red rosette in his lapel in recognition of work in promoting understanding between the two countries.

Kohl’s initial actions after the fall of the wall only helped stoke French worry.

He broke a longstanding precedent by delivering his 10-point plan for German unity to the West German Bundestag without first informing Mitterrand.

The French, accustomed to being consulted on even the most minor issues that affect the two countries, were enraged. Officials at the Elysee, the office and residence of the French president, spoke openly of Kohl being “untrustworthy” and “overly emotional” about German unification.

In the months that followed, Mitterrand eventually accepted the inevitable, yet France seemed almost relieved at Germany’s paralysis during the Gulf War.

The two countries clashed again last summer over the Yugoslavia crisis, when German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, bending to political pressure at home from Yugoslav immigrants, appeared ready to recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.

For a few tense weeks, complicated by the annual August holidays that virtually halt the French government’s ability to react to such crises, it appeared as if Europe might experience a nightmarish flashback in which the two continental powers would once again line up with old allies in the Balkans powder keg--France with Serbia and Germany with Croatia and Slovenia.

According to French Foreign Ministry officials, Genscher stepped back from formal recognition of the two after his French counterpart, Roland Dumas, told him bluntly: “If you do that, you will set Europe back 20 years.”

Because of its disillusionment with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, France was able to easily break its historic pro-Serbian position to join with Germany in backing a common EC policy to end the crisis through a cease-fire and negotiation.

Today, officials in both Paris and Bonn claim that the troubles in Franco-German ties, and the strain in relations between Mitterrand and Kohl, have passed.

“They belong to yesterday,” said a senior Kohl aide. “In the major questions of European policy and security policy, we’re in complete agreement.”

Those who have studied the bond between France and Germany claim that its strength lies in three simple imperatives: history, national interests and the reality that each has no better European partner with which to pursue those interests.

“We shared the fighting,” said Maull, referring to the two world wars this century that claimed more than 2 million French and about 7 million German lives. “There is a strong feeling that we must build from this common experience.”

Maull and others, for example, trace Britain’s hesitancy toward European unity, in part, to what he called “a less intense” exposure to these conflicts.

For the postwar leaders of both France and Germany, the experience was also personal.

French President Charles de Gaulle was a German prisoner of war in World War I, Mitterrand was a World War II POW and Kohl, although only 15 at the war’s end, was reared and still maintains a home only a few miles of the French frontier.

Still, it was American urging that derailed a return to the cycle of past enmity by deflecting De Gaulle from his desire to take the left bank of the Rhine and part of the German Ruhr as war reparations.

Instead, the United States urged France to embrace West Germany into an alliance of mutual interests.

The former French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman fathered the initial reconciliation, with his 1950 plan to integrate West German and French coal and steel production in a “community” that benefited both. The European Coal and Steel Community quickly drew the Benelux countries and Italy, and became the forerunner of today’s European Community.

The natural interests that brought France and Germany together then remain essentially valid today.

For France, despite its nuclear deterrent and its U.N. Security Council seat, its role as a great power is over. Today, more than ever, the EC serves as the best amplifier for a French voice on the world stage.

The community also integrates Germany into an economic and political system that reduces any chance of it becoming a threat by breaking off on its own course. France also benefits from the stability of the deutschemark.

In Paris, closer European unity means greater political and economic security.

For Germany, EC membership has brought undreamed-of market access for its industry and a degree of political acceptance it could never have achieved on its own.

In an era where German foreign policy leans heavily on multilateral forums, the EC, along with the Western military alliance, serve as its foundations.

“After German unity, our greatest political goal is to achieve European economic and political unity, and this is only possible in close cooperation with France,” a Kohl aide said. “We need a partner who can help push integration further.”

Today, France and Germany are each other’s largest trading partners, sharing trade that during the first eight months of this year totaled $68 billion.

Except for former West German business, French industry has bought more former East German state-owned enterprises than has that of any other country.

The two countries are bound together in countless people-to-people exchanges running from school groups and town mayors to central ministry bureaucrats.

France and Germany also boast Europe’s only internationally integrated military unit, a 5,000-strong brigade deployed along the Rhine, and last month announced plans for a Franco-German corps of about 50,000 that Mitterrand and Kohl presented as the possible nucleus of a European army.

With the headquarters of such a corps planned for the French city of Strasbourg, the move would break new emotional ground in the relationship by requiring uniformed German officers to serve on French soil for the first time since Hitler’s Wehrmacht was driven back across the Rhine in 1945.

That the relationship has survived the dramatic changes in Europe, including German unification, so well has demonstrated that both France and Germany value their common ties enough to protect them from further strains, political observers here believe.

“Across party lines, we’re trying to do everything to accommodate France to the new situation,” said German Social Democrats’ parliamentary foreign affairs spokesman Karsten Voigt. “When the French make a proposal, our initial reaction is always positive.”

Kohl aides also say the chancellor has specifically tried to avoid any actions that would give an impression of trying to push Mitterrand aside as a leading spokesman for Western Europe.

A senior official in the German chancellery recently noted that Kohl inherited a maxim from his party’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, that Germany must reconcile three vital relationships--those with France, with Israel and with Poland.

“Together with the Atlantic Alliance, Kohl has acknowledged the importance of all three,” the official said, “but the relationship with France has always had a priority with him.”

Times staff writer Rone Tempest in Paris contributed to this report.