U.S. Diplomat’s Blunt Lesson for W. Europe : Trade: Eagleburger says Western countries must increase aid to struggling Eastern European nations.

WASHINGTON — The wealthy nations of Western Europe “need a fairly stiff lecture” for failing to move fast enough to open markets to the new democracies of Eastern Europe, “and we’ve been trying to give it to them,” the State Department’s second-ranking official said Thursday.

In terms unusually blunt for a diplomat, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger told business leaders that “the European Community, which represents the greatest market for Central and Eastern Europe . . ., has an obligation to provide greater market access.” The United States, he said, had moved to help Eastern Europe improve its private economy and its exports, but “we should not be taking these steps alone.”

Eagleburger’s remarks at the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank came at a time of continuing tension between the United States and Western Europe over other trade issues--tensions that have been building as the major industrial nations prepare for this summer’s annual economic summit meeting in London.

At the same time, Eagleburger expressed a pessimistic view about the political difficulties that have emerged among “nations which habitually were at each other’s throats for the better part of a millennium.”

“Communism accustomed its subjects to the politics of absolutism . . . a belief in magic formulas and all-encompassing blueprints and the tendency to view opponents as enemies and to see all issues in black and white terms,” said Eagleburger, who served earlier in his career as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia.

The combination of long-suppressed ethnic hatreds with disillusionment over the economic difficulties of reform are leading to increased instability across the region, he said.

“The virtues of patience, tolerance and respect for diversity will have to be acquired over time,” but “unfortunately, these virtues are going to be needed not over the long run, but in the present,” he said.

Despite those uncertainties, Eagleburger told the business audience that U.S. and other Western firms should invest money in Eastern Europe.

“At a time when East European trade with the U.S.S.R. and East Germany has collapsed, Western markets are more important than Western aid,” he said. “Unless they can increase their exports, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will lose more from the trade hemorrhage than they could possibly gain from any transfusion of Western aid.”

The Administration, he said, has “shifted its assistance priorities” to emphasize ways to help the new economic managers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria in “the creation, piece-by-piece, of a free-market infrastructure.”

During the first months after the fall of communist governments across the region in late 1989 and early 1990, Western policy-makers concentrated on debt relief and other aid packages, and many East European leaders have talked of even more massive aid programs that they would like to see in the future.

But “the kinds of billions of dollars we used to talk about in the ‘70s are simply no longer available,” Eagleburger said.