Eastern Europe integration

Five years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe remains economically divided between East and West. The European Union spent most of that period trying to strengthen links among its West European members instead of reaching out to the post- communist countries of the East, unnecessarily complicating the Easterners' transition to democratic capitalism.

Thanks mainly to political shifts in key West European countries, a less parochial outlook is taking hold. Austria, Norway, Sweden and Finland are scheduled to be admitted next years. The most advanced post-communist economies, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, now have a realistic chance of admission within the next decade.

But some Mediterranean countries still fear Eastern Europe as a competitor for financial resources and political influence. The U.S. could help calm these fears and encourage broader European unity. Economic integration is as important to East European stability as NATO membership, and far less provocative to Moscow. Germany is the main champion of bringing in the East. The viability of its eastern neighbors affects its own national security and Germans do not want their eastern border to become the frontier between a "have" and a "have not" Europe. Britain and the Netherlands also favor eastward expansion.

Until recently, a Mediterranean bloc made up of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece resisted opening toward the east. These countries worry about a reallocation in regional subsidies, competition for their farmers and a shift in the European Union's political center from the Mediterranean toward the German- oriented east. They also fear neglect of their own security concerns about Islamic militants in nearby North Africa. But the new conservative governments in France and Italy look more favorably on eastward expansion. These governments are more enthusiastic about free markets and less interested in a bureaucratically unified West than their center-left predecessors.

These changes contributed to the success of a breakthrough meeting recently in Luxembourg between European Union foreign ministers and their counterparts from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania. All of these East European countries now have, or are in the process of ratifying, formal association agreements with the European Union providing for step-by-step access to the single European market.

Luxembourg was a step in the right direction. But the main decisions on the future of the European Union will be taken at the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference to review the Maastricht Treaty. Since the U.S. is not a member of the European Union, it will not directly participate in these decisions. But it can and should speak out for bringing in the East. A stronger U.S. voice would help reassure Mediterranean countries that German influence would be balanced and that their concerns over North Africa would not be slighted.

What the European Union must now decide is whether it is going to be an institution for binding together a long-divided continent or a perpetuator of those old divisions.

-- The New York Times