West Europeans Pleased at Prospect of Talks : Summit: U.S. allies generally are glad that Bush will be taking a more decisive role.

LONDON —  Memories of Reykjavik cast a longer, more ominous shadow in Washington than they do in Western Europe, judging from reaction here and on the Continent to news that the United States and the Soviet Union plan a summit meeting next month in the Mediterranean.

It was at a meeting in 1986 in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, that President Ronald Reagan shocked his West European allies by seeming to come within a hair’s breadth of bargaining away their nuclear umbrella.

But while the White House was obviously worried that this week’s surprise announcement of the Dec. 2-3 meeting between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev might bring back nervous memories, Reykjavik was barely mentioned on this side of the Atlantic.

Mostly, the allies seem genuinely pleased at the prospect of what the right-leaning French newspaper Le Figaro has already termed “The Yalta of Freedom.” Yalta was the site of a wartime conference, in 1945, that brought together President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.

Michael Brown, a senior research fellow in U.S. security policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies here, told an interviewer, “There’s been some concern in Western Europe that the United States hasn’t been moving as decisively as it might in improving East-West relations and on giving assistance to Eastern Europe.” Inasmuch as Bush’s change of heart on holding an early summit meeting reflects a change in priorities, he said, there is a positive view of it here.

The French newspaper Le Monde commented: “The American President has appeared more and more like a man on the fringe of events, like an unintelligent spectator dozing during one of the most passionate moments in world history. His reaction, although late, will allow him to get things rolling and open doors in those cases where things are going badly in the Soviet Union.”

A spokesman for Gen. Manfred Woerner, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said that Woerner views the meeting as “a useful opportunity to discuss and improve East-West relations, and . . . clearly of interest not only to the major powers but the entire alliance.”

West Germany, which has taken the most optimistic line among the major West European powers toward changes in the East, has long advocated more frequent contacts between Washington and Moscow at the highest level. West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher predicted that at the December meeting, the two leaders will “support the reforms under way in Eastern Europe and come to agreements in arms control.”

The left-leaning newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau welcomed what is being described as the informal tone of the Mediterranean meeting. It said the meeting should be “the beginning of regular meetings without summit fanfare but with a dialogue of cooperation that will replace the ice-cold summits of the Cold War, with their high hopes that were seldom fulfilled.”

Britain has supported a more cautious line on East Bloc reform, but a Foreign Office official said that Britain, too, thinks the December meeting is “a good idea.” The official added: “There are a lot of changes going on in Eastern Europe. It makes sense for the President and Mr. Gorbachev to get together. We don’t see a problem with that.”

The official noted that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is scheduled to meet Bush in Washington later this month, so she will be able to offer her thoughts on a Bush-Gorbachev agenda.

Another reason for the European reaction is a general view here of President Bush as having a superior grasp of international affairs compared with his predecessor.

Brown, the analyst with the International Institute of Strategic Studies, noted that the White House has said there will be no formal agenda for the meeting, and he acknowledged that “there are certain risks associated with that.” But he said West European leaders “see Bush as more experienced in international relations, and therefore less likely to make mistakes.”

A senior British government official concurred. “Reagan was an entirely different personality,” he said. “Reagan was a man who didn’t get bogged down in detail, which is one way of putting it. George Bush is clearly a much more articulate President. He is the sort of person you can have a discussion with. President Reagan was not an animated debater . . . but George Bush is a different kind of person.”

West Europeans speculated that the December meeting could be very important to Gorbachev, who faces mounting economic and domestic political problems as he tries to carry out his programs of economic and social reform.

Figaro’s Washington correspondent said the meeting will be a Christmas gift from Bush to the Soviet leader. “George Bush put a tiger in the tank of perestroika ,” he said, using the Russian term for Gorbachev’s reform program.

Le Monde said that Gorbachev hopes the meeting will send a strong message to the Soviet people. “In light of the arrival of this new, planetary revolution,” it said, “wouldn’t it be a little petty to threaten the whole process on the pretext that you still lack coffee, sugar and meat, and that a hyper-inflationary spiral looms?”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in London, Rone Tempest in Paris and William Tuohy in Bonn contributed to this article.

SURPRISE UNLIKELY

No decisions planned, A7. East Europeans assured, A6