Eastern Europe

Baltimore will play host next month to about 200 economic ministers from the G-7 countries and Central and Eastern Europe.It will be the first meeting of its kind in the city.The three-day conference, to be held at the Stouffer Renaissance Harborplace Hotel Jan. 8-10, is one in an annual series known as the Muenster Process, which encourages businesses to work with governments."[Conference organizers] selected Baltimore because they saw it a good example of a city that had undergone industrial transformation," said Dana Shelley, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is helping to set up the event.

At THE HEIGHT of interest in Eastern Europe, some of us thought that interest in that part of the world was high. That was a mistake. The American people were not that interested. The media was.I wrote a book about the dramatic events in Romania in 1989, which culminated with the execution of the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Shortly after that, I gave a talk to an interested group and someone asked me a question. He began, ''Can you tell us, Mr. Ceausescu . . .?'' People laughed. I laughed.

Europe wants you. It wants to feed you, house you, transport you, entertain you and send you home richer for the experience )) and poorer for the pocketbook.There will be, as ever, much to do, see and buy this year across the Atlantic. Travel planners say that while some destinations, France and Germany among them, will remain expensive, there are some countries that will be relative bargains. The consensus list: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey.Nations formerly in the Soviet bloc, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, are expected to continue attracting growing numbers of tourists.

Travel-bargain specialists have a word of advice for vacation planners worried about the dollar's collapse: Bulgaria.Yes, Bulgaria. Not the undifferentiated, gray land mass conjured up by Cold War stereotypes, but a colorful, bucolic -- even flashy -- gem of a destination, offering attractions from a seacoast with casinos to unspoiled countrysides with skiing.It's a locale where the dollar reigns supreme, unbowed by its swoon on world markets this year."We advised our readership to stay away from Germany and most of Western Europe," says Herbert Teison, editor of the Travel Smart newsletter in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. "On the other hand, Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria, is a good buy."

Keep a young animal in a cage and he'll get restless. Let him out and he'll run. Jon Sakowsky is proof.The tiny plumbing supply company he began in 1988 -- eight years after the 36-year-old Monkton resident got out of Poland on a tourist visa and headed for the United States -- now has $3 million in sales to Poland and bordering nations in Eastern Europe.The U.S. Small Business Administration just named him Maryland's "Exporter of the Year." And Mr. Sakowsky is far from finished."Our focus is on [becoming]

Paris -- This week's meeting in Budapest of the CSCE organization -- incorporating all of the governments concerned with European security -- takes place in the midst of tension over the Bosnia crisis and inter-allied conflict over NATO's expansion and the alliance's future role in Europe.One would think CSCE complementary to NATO rather than rival. Its purpose is to assure a dialogue between Russia and the other former Soviet countries and the nations of the Western alliance. It was created in the course of the Cold War's winding down, an element in the detente that broke out when Mikhail Gorbachev launched his reforms of the Soviet system.

The East-West disputes erupting at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Budapest provide the best justification yet for having the CSCE. If those disputes exist, they cry out for a forum in which to be addressed.CSCE was born in 1975, proposed by the Soviet Union to get the West to ratify the borders of sovereignty and hegemony in Eastern Europe. The West saw it as a way to pry the lid off human rights abuses in Communist countries. That seems so long ago. Now CSCE is a large tent for all the European countries (plus the U.S.)

DRESDEN, Germany -- A year ago investing in Eastern Europe was the craze. A flood of foreign capital moved into these emerging free-market economies and pushed stocks to euphoric levels.Poland's stock market, for example, rose more than 800 percent in 1993. Hungary's market was up 200 percent in February of this year over a year earlier.Then reality set in, with rising interest rates, profit-taking and a flight of capital from these risky, barely regulated markets.Since March, investors have seen values plunge.

New Orleans.--Two seemingly unrelated stories from Eastern Europe point to a new situation over there.Dracula's Bran castle in Transylvania, Romania, needs $300,000 worth of repairs, or it's going to fall down. ''If we have an earthquake or if something is not done, it will just fall down,'' Cornel Talos, the castle's architectural director, said.The other bit of news is that city authorities in Lviv, Ukraine, have been tormenting a group of artists who want to honor Leopold Masoch, the famous masochist, who was born in their city in 1836.

The young seaman snapped a salute as the visitors walked onto the naval vessel in Baltimore's Inner Harbor yesterday, but no admiral was on board. Just capitalists. But in these days of European economic integration and ever-freer trade, they might be the real commanders.The ship was the Danish tall ship Danmark, and the visitors were about a dozen Maryland executives whom Danish Consul-General Leif Donde and other officials were wooing aboard the 253-foot craft to do business in the small Scandinavian nation.