Edward Heath, leader of Great Britain's Conservative opposition, said last night that a healthy Atlantic community will only be achieved when there is a better balance between Europe and North America.

Europe must unite, Heath told a Sanders Theatre audience in his second Godkin Lecture, to strengthen its economy and to close the technology gap that exists between Europe and the U.S.

Heath cited statistics indicating that it will be at least 40 years before Europe catches up economically with the United States, and he suggested that it would probably take a good deal longer even than that. Heath placed much of the blame for this lag on the "economic myopia" of European industrialists who fail to see beyond their own countries' borders.

Among the countries of the European Free Trade Association and the European Economic Community, the internationalization of marketing has been achieved, Heath said, but there has been no comparable progress in production. Because of the refusal of firms in different countries to work together on international undertakings, European technology has remained relatively backward, he said.

The breakthrough in European technology has come in private industry -- in large supranational firms, Heath said. As examples he pointed to Franco-British cooperation on the supersonic jet Concorde, and the joint effort of England and Belgium to develop atomic reactors. These are cases, he said, in which the scale of the undertaking makes it impossible for one nation to handle the entire load by itself.

At his final lecture--at 8 p.m. tonight in Sanders Theatre--Heath will discuss the problem of European defense and the potential role of a united Europe in world affairs.