ONE EVENING last summer, I sat on the porch of the home of a family friend, a Belgian official of the European community (EC), and listened as he made the case that the time had come for a politically unified European superstate. "We have more people than you Americans, and a giant GNP," he said. "Why should we play second fiddle to you in matters of security and foreign policy?"

I confessed that I couldn't think of any good reasons. I muttered something about the US being "bound to lead" and drained my wine glass.

But the more I think about the question, the more hardened is my view that Europe is dashing too fast toward political union. With the Soviet Union's implosion, the EC faces no external threat that can mute the expression of its intense national rivalries and important power asymmetries. In this context, real, lasting unification is impossible.

I had hoped that the countries of Europe would have woken up and smelled the sauerkraut by now. They haven't, and I'm worried.

Next week, a major European summit, one which may seal a federal future for Europe, will take place at Maastricht, in the Netherlands. There, leaders of the 12 EC states will sign away some portion of their sovereignty over monetary, social, foreign, and security policy.

Exactly what is to come out of the meeting is up in the air. Germany and France, and most of the others, want to set a timetable for the establishment of the United States of Europe. "We want a treaty that makes clear that economic union, currency union, and political union are inevitable," German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said last week. Britain stands pretty much alone in wanting to keep final power in national government, by requiring unanimity for any joint European policy and by giving nations "opt-out" clauses in major agreements.

Leaders from the Continent criticize Britain as being out of step with the rest of the EC. But everyone recognizes that at the end of the day Prime Minister John Major will shake his partners' hands, whereas his predecessor was far more likely to beat them about the head. The conciliatory Major will reach some agreement, and probably a fairly wide-sweeping one, with the rest of the EC at Maastricht.

Major may think that signing an agreement peppered with "ifs" and "buts" will stop the momentum for a fully unified Europe. That's wrong. Every new agreement on Europe just adds wind to the federalists' sails.

Of course, this is just as my friend the Eurocrat would have it. Believers in European political unity dream of Europe's regaining a leadership role in world events, something many feared it had lost forever to the giants of the East and West. France has long kept America's attention by playing hard-to-get, but now it wants respect. Germany, after a long period of forced repentance for its sins, wants to get back into the game. Most of the rest of the EC (including the former colonial powers Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Portugal) can't go it alone on the world stage, but wouldn't mind pooling their resources to get a piece of the action.

IN ADDITION to Europe's underlying desire to become a "player" again, Europeans are embarrassed by the Community's inability to respond coherently to the two major post-Cold War crises, the Gulf War and Yugoslavia.

The Euro-federalists hate the fact that, as the Belgian foreign minister Mark Eyskens noted, "The EC is an economic giant but a political dwarf and a military worm." They want to start changing this state of affairs at Maastricht, with as firm a call for political union as they can wheedle out of Britain. A federal Europe, they say, will not be flat-footed when crises arise.

That assumption is over-optimistic. Euro-federalists are being swept away in their own Euro-rhetoric. A call for political integration only makes sense if the nations involved already share compatible ideals and interests. Lofty sentiments notwith-standing, European nations find themselves severely at odds with each other in many, even most, major foreign policy questions.

Yugoslavia is a perfect example of the conflicts within the Community. Ever since the civil war began, Germany has been defending Slovenia and Croatia's "right to self-determination" against Serbia. France, meanwhile, has actively defended maintaining Yugoslavia as a nation.

The rationales for their positions, while unstated in official communiques, are not secret. Germany wants to expand its power to the East by slicing up potential rivals, and France fears an expansion of Germany's influence over Eastern Europe. The cause of the EC's hemming and hawing on the Yugoslavian question, then, is not some failure in coordination, but the natural outgrowth of deep-seated rivalries and insecurities within the Community.

To put it simply (and only a little simplistically), everyone fears Germany. It may or may not be a rational fear. That doesn't matter. The key is that the fear is there.