Europe

The Belgians, the Italians and especially the British won't like it. But rescuing Europe from its current malaise probably depends on France and Germany once more getting their act together and presenting their EC partners with a fait accompli.The European Community faces savagery on its Balkan porch, potential chaos from Algiers to Moscow, and a more civil but still ominous disarray in its own ranks. Europe needs a smaller core of decisive and truly unified nations to put out whatever fires are extinguishable and to contain those that aren't.

DESCRIBING THE limited objective of President Bush's first official visit to Europe, Chief of Staff Andrew Card said it was to explode the myth that Mr. Bush is a go-it-alone cowboy not quite up to the job. The president achieved that objective and more. The president stood his ground on "global warming" (he is properly skeptical and wants it studied more). He skewered the Europeans on their own pro-Kyoto Treaty position. Mr. Bush referred a reporter's question on the subject to European Union Commission President Romano Prodi.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Jacques Chirac should easily defeat extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen in today's presidential elections in France. But neither Mr. Le Pen nor the public mood of insecurity that helped propel him into the second round is likely to soon fade. Moreover, his success could embolden nationalistic and xenophobic parties elsewhere in Europe. The outcome of today's election is not in doubt. Eager to restore the nation's dignity, voters on the left as well as the center will heed the admonition of political leaders to reject the extreme right.

Berlin. -- President Clinton, at the Brandenburg Gate tomorrow, will pronounce a benediction over the ghost of the vanished Cold War. American, Russian, French, British troops, after a half-century's presence, are departing this once and future capital city.Mr. Clinton has already revealed one appeal he'll make to Germany: that Berlin, once the dividing line of the Soviet and Western worlds, may now ''help to bring East and West together for all time.''Indeed, one can ask what better place could be found for an American president to urge Germany to take on still greater European and global responsibilities than in this most free-spirited of German cities -- the metropolis that least easily succumbed to Hitler, the city that withstood the Soviet blockade of 1948 and a generation of snarling communist threats.

Spring and summer vacations to Europe were expected to be among the casualties of the war in the gulf, but now that the fighting has ended, industry officials anticipate many Americans may head across the Atlantic after all."We already have seen since the beginning of [last] week a major increase in telephone calls, visitors to our information centers and -- travel operators tell us -- bookings," said Michel Bourquier, chairman of the European Travel Commission, which represents 24 countries.

Washington. -- The surprise survival of Britain's Tories last week stemmed but hardly reversed a tide of voter protest that has swept across Europe, posing a widespread threat to powerful parties and long-serving politicians.John Major's victory may have confounded the pollsters and pundits, who universally predicted neither main party would gain a parliamentary majority, but its narrowness did show a lack of any real enthusiasm among voters for either the Conservatives or Labor.The Tories lost most of the 102-seat parliamentary majority they garnered in 1987.

NEW YORK - Europe, the mother of the industrial revolution, is greeting the changes brought about by globalization and the e-revolution not only with Old World cynicism but often with trepidation. Newness and change, frequently represented by America, are becoming the unwanted strangers knocking on the door. There is concern about the loss of political power and cultural relevance as the United States becomes even more dominant. That concern is accompanied by a natural uneasiness with change that is rooted within many segments of European society.

WASHINGTON - As President Bush heads off today to visit Europe for the third time this year, it's worth asking whether the trans-Atlantic relationship has any chance of improving. Perhaps. The Bush administration is adopting a new attitude regarding Europe. But can Europe get over its obsession with Mr. Bush? There has been a notable change in the second Bush administration's posture toward trans-Atlantic relations. The talk of "Old Europe" has been banished from the administration's rhetoric, and officials now speak passionately about how much the United States and Europe need each other.

Don't expect a United States of Europe any time soon. Th European Community's march toward an open market by the end of 1992 has stumbled badly, the result of centuries-old differences and the special interests of massive industrial cartels.The fact that a number of European nations are already in recession, with others likely to follow, has further slowed general economic progress. The euphoria is also gone from European stock mutual funds, the darlings of Wall Street a year ago.The European companies whose stocks these funds hold have struggled and a stronger-than-expected U.S. dollar further depressed returns of such funds based in the United States.

Paris -- In the Netherlands next month the European heads of government are supposed to consider political union. A draft treaty will be before them. It will serve to demonstrate how remote European political unification really is. Political unification, that is, as the leaders of the European Community have chosen to define unity.They say they mean a true federal government with a common foreign and defense policy. They seem obsessed by the American precedent: that they are doing the same thing the delegates of the American colonies were doing at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787.