EUROPE: SUPERSEDING THE PAST

THERE was enough motion on the political chessboard of Europe last week to confound even the most nimble-witted Grand Master. Wherever one turned, there seemed to be delegations hurrying to and fro, trailing position papers, press releases and calculated leaks--Germans and Arabs, Russians and Americans, Israelis and even Chinese.

Much of the activity centered in Moscow and Bonn. It was a case of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolltik and Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev's Realpolitik advancing on the board at the same time. The result was a flurry of negotiations, the likes of which the Continent has not seen in years, if not decades. It would be Utopian to assume that all the movement of the two powers will soon produce a significant relaxation of international tensions. But the fact remains that there is movement, and that small accomplishments may eventually lead to larger ones.

Reasonable Ground. It was Brandt, scarcely 50 days in office as Chancellor, and the leaders of the Warsaw Pact nations who held the spotlight. "We are interested in agreements that supersede the past," Brandt said last week. With Western approval of his policy written into the communique of the annual NATO meeting in Brussels two weeks ago, Brandt is determined to achieve understandings with the East on just about any reasonable ground. Last week alone there were these results:

> In Moscow, German Ambassador Helmut Allardt met with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko for 90 minutes one day and two hours another to discuss negotiations on the mutual renunciation of force. Such a proposal has been pending for three years; it was resuscitated by the Russians early this year. The two governments believe that actual negotiations can begin early next year.

> In Duesseldorf, the Germans announced agreement on a $410 million transaction with the Soviet in which the Germans will sell 1,500 miles of pipeline and buy a 20-year supply of Russian-produced methane gas. The pipeline into West Germany will run through Czechoslovakia and into Bavaria--bypassing East Germany and giving Walter Ulbricht cause to wonder whether Bonn's activist diplomacy is turning him into Europe's odd man out.

> In Warsaw, the official newspaper Zycie Warszawy reflected Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka's newly amiable attitude toward Bonn by suggesting that German-Polish talks on the renunciation of force were "imminent." This week the two nations open new discussions on trade.

> In Prague, following a Brandt suggestion that diplomatic talks might be helpful, Party Leader Gustav Husak responded swiftly, albeit cautiously. "We are waiting for an initiative," said Husak, who proposed as a starter the repudiation "from the beginning" of the 1938 Munich Pact that ceded the Sudetenland to Germany. Bonn already considers the pact void. In any case, the territory was returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II.

The seven East Bloc nations agreed to undertake such bilateral discussions with the West during a Moscow summit two weeks ago. Ulbricht, who fears West German competition in trade as well as politics, was standoffish. He had hoped to gain recognition of his government from Bonn in return for East Bloc talks, but his partners are no longer willing to insist on this. The Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and to a lesser extent the Rumanians, were careful to harmonize their overtures with those of Moscow. After all, one of the reasons former Czechoslovak Party Chief Alexander Dubcek got into trouble last year was that he hinted at closer relations with Bonn. Dubcek's mistake was doing it on his own.

Russia's leaders found themselves every bit as busy as Brandt last week. Moscow's negotiations, however, ranged over a far wider sphere. Items:

> In Helsinki, Soviet and U.S. delegates to the preliminary Strategic Arms Limitation Talks continued discussions. The two sides have progressed far enough that they will probably wind up talks this week and begin formal discussions next year.

> In Moscow, Premier Aleksei Kosygin welcomed a delegation sent by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptians were seeking more weapons--which Moscow is reluctant to give them--and a forthright Russian rebuff of the U.S. peace terms for the Middle East that Secretary of State William Rogers made public last week. They included Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and some form of multinational government for Jerusalem in exchange for Arab peace guarantees by the Israelis. Though the plan seems to offer the Egyptians favorable terms, Cairo rejected it, accusing Washington of trying to divide the Arabs. Moscow, however, is not yet ready to turn down the proposals merely because the Arabs are suspicious.

> In Peking, the Sino-Soviet border talks were at a stalemate (see story on page 35), confronting the Russians with a delicate problem. They wanted First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov to come home to prepare for the SALT negotiations, but they feared that the Chinese would take his recall to mean that the border talks were doomed. The Kremlin solved this by ordering Kuznetsov home for a meeting of the Supreme Soviet. Meanwhile Peking, for its part, got into the diplomatic game last week by authorizing its charge d'affaires in Warsaw to meet secretly with the U.S. ambassador--possibly to revive the Sino-American talks after a two-year hiatus.

Undertone of Alarm. In most of its negotiations, Moscow is placing heavy emphasis on trade and barter. The reason is plain: the whole East Bloc is suffering from a severe shortage of consumer goods as well as hard currency to buy them. West Germany, on the other hand, has become Europe's strongest nation economically. What is not so clear is why the Soviet Union and its satellites are pressing so urgently for negotiations on other issue--most notably an overall European security treaty and other agreements that renounce the use of force. One reason may be that Moscow still fears even a divided Germany, and would like to neutralize it. Another may be the Soviet conviction that even minor accommodations will weaken the ties between Bonn and its NATO allies.

The U.S. and Britain professed no such misgivings last week, though both were skeptical of what would eventually emerge from Bonn's negotiations with the East. The French, however, were openly unhappy. Some diplomats and journalists saw a parallel to Rapallo, the Italian Riviera resort where the Germans and Russians concluded a friendship treaty in 1922. It was the Rapallo pact that opened the way for the German army to train secretly on Russian territory, an operation that continued into the '30s. Rapallo prompted Georges Clemenceau to warn: "The Germans are becoming independent again."

Brandt's anti-Nazi past and his Social Democratic politics acquit him of responsibility for the Germany of that other era. But his goal, too, is an independent Germany--or as he said in October, "a liberated, not a conquered Germany." But he acknowledges that the talk so far has concerned "atmospherics" or small points. Key points, like the recognition of East Germany or the normalization of divided Berlin, may well be years away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.