At a TIME conference in Berlin, eight experts reflect on the future of European unity while the Continent's eastern parts are breaking off and breaking down

By Bruce W. Nelan--Reported by Frederick Painton/Paris, with other bureaus

Maastricht? Even Europeans would probably hesitate if they were asked to point it out on a map. Most of them are even hazier about the precise political significance it carries. Yet the press and politicians in the 12 countries of the European Community are talking incessantly about preparations for Maastricht and speculating about its outcome.

The reason is that the middle-size city in southeastern Holland is the setting for next week's E.C. summit, and that its name has become a shorthand way of referring to the key decisions that the heads of the Community's governments will have to make. There they will be asked to approve two treaties amending the E.C.'s fundamental Treaty of Rome as the next step on Europe's road to economic and political union.

In the heady days when enthusiasts at the European Commission, the Community's executive branch, believed the treaty amendments would steer the Twelve directly to a single currency and a federal government, they portrayed Maastricht as a make-or-break moment. Either major progress would be guaranteed or the Community would find itself in danger of backsliding into nationalist rivalries. Now that hedging and compromise seem more likely than clear-cut decisions, Maastricht is being re-evaluated as just one more milestone on a long road to unity.

For the past six years, the drive toward a united Europe has focused on Dec. 31, 1992, the deadline for completing the plan to make the E.C. a truly common market in goods and services. Project 1992 would abolish internal trade barriers and in the process spin off up to 5 million new jobs and produce $250 billion in savings for West European businesses and consumers. Americans--and many Europeans--envisioned 1992 as the birth date of the United States of Europe.

Now, with little more than 12 months to finish the job, a sense of urgency is taking hold. Two-thirds of the 282 measures that make up the project are in force, including E.C.-wide rules on consumer protection, telecommunications and technical standards. But the measures yet to be put into action are the most sensitive and hotly political--like social and health policy, taxation, the environment, state subsidies. Without agreement on these, the common market cannot become a reality.

Bureaucrats in Brussels seem to be regulating the Continent's every nook; hardly a day passes without a perceived offense by one interest group or another. For Holland's midwives, European integration means allowing foreign competitors with less training to deliver Dutch babies. French cheesemakers may have to bid adieu to raw-milk Camemberts that do not meet the Community's health standards. Spanish bullfighters might lose their picadors to satisfy British animal-protection lobbies, but Spanish fishermen can troll in British waters.

Still, like patients bracing for an uncomfortable but ultimately beneficial treatment, West Europeans mostly welcome the plans for monetary and political union. Annual surveys by the E.C. show a steady rise in popular support for unification, with a solid majority favoring a common foreign and defense policy, a single currency and creation of a European central bank. "Even uneducated workers understand," says Louvain University public-opinion expert Jan Kerkhofs, "that if Europe is not strengthened, Japan and the U.S. will conquer more markets. People want a united Europe out of fear more than out of love."

Even though Project 1992 is still incomplete, the E.C. now confronts more existential questions about its future. Will there be a European currency and one central bank by 1997? Will the Twelve pledge themselves to achieve something like a United States of Europe in the not-too-distant future? As newly united Germany eagerly pushes forward and island Britain hangs back, the short-to-midterm outlook is for an artfully designed halfway house.

Not since the end of World War II has Europe faced a turning point so clearly fraught with perils and yet so tantalizingly rich in promise. It is the fragility of the equilibrium between the gradually integrating states of the West and the ominous fragmentation in the East that helps fuel the rush toward union at Maastricht. The logic is simple: if unity in the West is delayed, progress may be frozen by the cold winds of disunity from the East. The political will to construct a federal E.C. could be threatened by demands to broaden the Community first. While none of the Community's members are prepared to halt the march to union, Britain in particular sees dangers in rushing toward it.

To discuss the course of a Continent torn between unification and nationalism, TIME invited a panel of eight experts--from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia and the U.S.--to take part in a conference at a retreat on the outskirts of Berlin. Surprisingly the group, including historians, former diplomats and political advisers, disagreed fundamentally about the direction Europe is taking.

In the past, such conclaves have generally arrived at a consensus about basic political goals. Conventional scenarios have pictured an integrated Community gradually becoming the nucleus of wider economic organizations embracing Central and Eastern Europe--a rational, tidy, progressive and reassuring destiny for the Continent. But what if the western part of Europe could not avoid being drawn into the turmoil looming in the East? Some panelists said the E.C. would be betraying its ideals if it failed to reach out now--and urgently--to the struggling democracies in the East, threatened by economic hardship, ethnic strife, and populist disillusionment with barely budding democracy. The penalty for delay, they maintained, could be chaos on the Community's borders and irresistible waves of economic refugees. Other participants feared that the E.C.'s resources and energies might be squandered in a rescue attempt that was doomed to fail. They contended that the Twelve had first to deepen their tenuous integration; aspiring members in Eastern Europe would have to wait until they were economically more advanced and sufficiently democratic before being allowed to join what by then would be a European federation.

Much of the concern about Maastricht's outcome originated in Bonn and Paris once the full implications of German unification had begun to sink in. As panelist Horst Teltschik, director of the Bertelsmann Foundation and Chancellor Helmut Kohl's former foreign policy adviser, explained, "Why is Germany so interested in political union? Because when we started with unification, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand were very worried. We said, If you're afraid of a unified Germany, let us integrate the Community; and we asked the French to take the initiative." Of all the members of the E.C., the Germans, now 80 million strong with a dominating currency and industry, are the most eager to shed parts of their sovereignty and thus ease the burden of their history. As Kohl has said, "Fears are understandable. So I tell our neighbors we all need Europe and Germany needs Europe more than anyone else."

The French seem to see greater integration as the solution to their apprehensions as well. Said panelist Dominique Moisi, associate director of the French Institute of International Relations: "If the price to pay for the unity of Europe and the return of Europe as a real actor on the international scene is a strong Germany, I'm ready to pay it. Either we'll get a strong Germany within a divided Europe or a strong Europe and within it a powerful Germany."

For a nation that takes such evident pride in its world standing, France, unlike Britain, is ready to accept the prospect of diminished sovereignty in an integrated Europe. "What do we lose in creating a common currency?" asks Jean Francois-Poncet, a former French Foreign Minister and now an independent Senator. "Not much. We are already in the mark zone." The same reasoning applies to foreign policy, he says. "We are not capable of doing anything alone--even preventing the Serbs and Croats from going to war."

Most of TIME's Berlin panelists agreed there was little chance--no matter what the decisions next week in Maastricht--that the E.C. would be able to respond as a single supranational entity to the threats of hunger and violence in Eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. Perhaps the strongest voice of pessimism came from Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and now a columnist for Turin's daily La Stampa. "Many problems we will face in Europe," he said, "are simply not soluble, and we have got to accept them as such." At best, he said, the West could encourage the remnants of the Soviet Union and its former satellites to restore broken trading relations among themselves.

Romano was supported in much of his basically pessimistic assessment by David Anderson, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin and a onetime U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, who pointed to what he considered the tough realities of Western democracy. "We are telling people that if they will just become more democratic, more market oriented, we will be morally bound to give them our attention. I don't believe that. Western leaders are facing a series of important elections and at the same time dealing with major economic problems at home." Under those circumstances, he wondered, "is any Western politician going to leap into the void because he feels morally bound? We have never faced anything like the problems posed by the decomposition of the Soviet Union. There is not enough money in the industrialized world to save it."

Reacting to the gloom, Teltschik said the West had no alternative to trying to help the East. "There are things we can do. We can prevent starvation in the central areas [of Russia] this winter, for example. We have proposed ways to modernize those industries that can quickly earn foreign currency." With the E.C. offering associate status to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, he said, "we are moving in the right direction."

That suited Sir Charles Powell, Thatcher's former foreign policy adviser and now executive director of Jardine Mathieson, who charged that the crisis in the East had caught the E.C. "flat-footed" and absorbed in its own institutional problems. "We must accept that a tight union is a luxury we cannot afford," he said. "We cannot deal with the problems of the new Europe and hang on to old institutions as if nothing had happened."

The discussion stirred warnings from the panelists from the East. Moscow foreign affairs analyst Igor Malashenko, formerly a press adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, told the conference that the "crucial moment" had to be seized. "If we want the Russian system eventually to be compatible with Western systems, then we should have direct Western participation in Soviet reforms," he said. Though fragmentation will continue for a while, Malashenko predicted, some kind of new "Eurasian community" will emerge from the debris.

For Polish panelist Piotr Ploszajski, former director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in Warsaw, success at Maastricht next week would not necessarily be good news for Eastern Europe. "I think its results will make it even more difficult for East European countries to attain membership in the Community," he said. He was also disappointed by the thin flow of Western economic aid, which he called "mystery funds" because they are wrapped in confusing conditions. "We are told we will get help, but where is it?"

Only a year ago, Europeans looked forward to an era in which the dynamism of the E.C. would reach out to embrace the Eastern millions whom Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel has called "the kidnapped Europeans." Now they have arrived on the West's doorstep, still somewhat confused and reverting too often to the bellicose habits of 50 years ago. Once again an old order is dying in Europe while a new one has not yet been born. The challenges, unprecedented since 1945, are largely unknown and therefore troubling. As the Berlin conference demonstrated, it is a time for both political courage and humility; without them the Continent could be setting a course for confusion rather than unity.

COFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

POLITICAL STABILITY. The E.C. is likely to remain an island of relative prosperity amid social unrest in the East.

THE U.S. The American commitment to Europe is ebbing, even though Europeans want a continued presence.

THE SOVIET UNION. It is in Western Europe's interest to promote democracy; there should be no attempt to humiliate or isolate the losers of the cold war.

NATO. The alliance defines transatlantic relations and remains the only working security treaty on the Continent, a necessary insurance policy.

EUROPE. The argument for union grows more compelling; no single country can deal with the challenges facing the Continent. The U.S.S.R. and its former allies cannot solve their problems without Western support.