  We investigate the exclusive production of the pseudoscalar mesons pi0, eta,
eta', K+ and of the vector mesons omega, phi in a microscopic gluon-exchange or
instanton model. We describe the baryons as covariant quark - scalar diquark
systems with harmonic confinement, thus taking into account center-of-mass
corrections and Lorentz contraction in different frames. The excitation of
intermediate baryon resonances is accounted by colorless 2-gluon (soft Pomeron)
exchange. We find that our model accounts for the systematics of the high
precision data on exclusive meson production from various modern proton
factories.
