While many in the former East Germany (GDR) look back on a troubled past and face an uncertain present of high unemployment, westerners can review 50 years of econ omic growth and stability.

The Federal Republic of Germany -- West Germany -- was proclaimed on May 23, 1949, nine months after then Soviet leader Josef Stalin called for Berlin to be named capital of East Germany, effectively turning the Russian and western occupation zones into two separate countries.

At the time, post-war West Germany had no military force of its own and was a member of no collective security system.

Fifty years on, it is flying military missions over Yugoslavia as a member of NATO. Almost 10 years after the 1990 reunification, the new Germany celebrates the anniversary as both Presidentof the European Union and of the Group of Seven leading industrial democracies, with world leaders and foreign emissaries regularly meeting in Bonn.

In July 1994, the Constitutional Court ruled that nothing stopped the Germany army from taking part in military operations on behalf of the United Nations or NATO beyond its own frontiers.

The decision was seen by many as a return to normal statehood for Germany, whose western half was for decades after WWII and the defeat of the Nazi regime an economic powerhouse but a military void.

However, many in the east of the country do not share this optimistic view of the state. Overnight, from October 2 to 3, 1990, they found their constitution replaced by that of their western neighbours, a constitution which had only been set up as a temporary institution in 1949 but which had survived intact for 40 years. Many citizens of the east had grown up believing their republic was the better of the two Germanies, founded in October, 1949 with an emphasis onanti-fascism and international solidarity while the West was considered materialist and soft on its past.

The view, however, from the other side of the border was for westerners that of thE GDR as a satellite of the Soviet Union, holding 17 million Germans hostage, a regime which did not hesitate to fire on its own citizens if they tried to escape westwards. After the Berlin Wall, the very symbol of the Cold War, fell in November, 1989, East Germans were in a hurry for freedom and democracy but not necessarily for the disappearance of their state.

However, the realities of the market economy and the cost of reunification disillusioned many Easterners, with unemployment in April at a huge 17.8 per cent.

A recent survey in the daily Berliner Morgenpost showed that while East Germans in the early 1990s thought their former state had trampled their rights, by the end of the decade they nostalgically remembered it as a fairer country where their social needs were protected.

However, it is not just in theEast that doubts have been voiced about the efficiency of the new Germany. Despite the opening of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year, the country faces numerous economic and social challenges. The post-war economic system, based on a free market combined with a protectivesocial security net, is under strain as global competition increases and the popula tion ages. Unemployment is by no means just an eastern problem.

Germany is attempting a slow overhaul of its social and economic systems but politicians are cautious about tampering with a system which one of its Christian Democrat founders, Ludwig Erhard, descrbed as ``free economic activity which is conscio us of its social responsibilities''.