Leading Article: The ties that bind Blair and Jospin together

Salut les vainqueurs... if Tony Blair's greeting tomorrow to France's new prime minister Lionel Jospin is anything short of heartfelt and enthusiastic, he will be missing an historic opportunity. The reason for warmth has nothing to do with their rendezvous, a meeting of the Socialist International: that's a largely superfluous talking shop. Ideologically, there is no point in pretending the two are copains. In a Britain where the only Keynesians acceptable in official circles are neo-neo, Mr Jospin's "Keynesianism seasoned by Marxism" has a decidedly ancient and foreign air. A quick, smug London consensus has formed, swirling through Labour too, dismissing Jospin as a dinosaur whose election is a mildly irritating irrelevance for go-ahead British modernisers.

That would be a terrible mistake. Jospin and his party should not be underestimated. Nor should Blair greet him cynically hoping that Jospin and his feather-bedded, reactionary supporters will pull Labour's chestnuts out of the fire over European Monetary Union by destroying it. That is the politics of crossed fingers and forked tongues - the sort of politics Paris has always suspected London practises.

In fact, there are good, honest reasons why the two men should embrace in victory. One is women. With Mr Jospin, French national political life begins a gender transformation akin to that accomplished by Labour on 1 May. Both leaders preside over young, modernising supporters. They share a passionate commitment to getting back into productive employment legions of fellow citizens who have been marginalised in recent years. Their prescriptions may differ but the ambition is the same; their respective efforts to cut youth joblessness will make a fascinating contest.

There is another reason for amity, though in these early days the two men may only dimly realise the scale and significance of their opportunity. Mr Jospin is an "Enarque", a fully paid-up member of the French governing elite. His refined analysis of France in Europe is rooted in his generation's conviction that, when global storms blow, France needs the lodging that European Union alone can provide. People like Mr Jospin are formed by the French state tradition. But for them, above all, European participation is about serving national ends.

How foreign? Not at all. That is the position which New Labour has arrived at. It is a logical, rather pragmatic position with little sympathy for the masochistic (and Hegelian) German view, that Europe is Fate, that European participation is a way of saving Germans from themselves - that if they are not tied down to the deck in Brussels the Lorelei (aggressive nationalism) will lure them to doom.

But the French and British leaders are fated and tied in a simpler way. They are fated to be colleagues, tied together by electoral time-scales. Together they are likely to outlast Chancellor Kohl who, even if he were to win the federal elections next year, is surely unlikely to see out another full term. That is not to imply that some new Franco-British axis against Germany is in the offing - the alliance across the Rhine has permanently entered the French political soul. It is to say that the potential for entente is rich and inviting.

But surely that friendship could not survive the abstention of Britain from EMU? We think it can and will. There are ways in which the non-participation of Britain in the euro could create circumstances in which a Europe-friendly British government could act as broker, arbiter and picker-up of pieces.

Here are two scenarios. In one, things unravel. The German government could fall - the Free Democrats could withdraw or the Christian Democrats split. The French government could find that expectations for policy change built up in this election explode - though the surveys show a good deal of realism on the French public's part. Even after fudging, the Maastricht criteria are met only by the Dutch. The euro does not go ahead, at least not before the turn of the century. The Blair government gets through its first term without having to think about joining; it approaches the task of re-thinking financial co-operation within the confines of the EU with clean hands, and a spring in its step.

In the other scenario Mr Jospin manages to stick with his principal electoral promises, such as abandoning the nationalisation of France Telecom, improving civil service salaries, filling the hole in the social security budget while still producing a 1998 budget that is Maastricht-compatible. Perhaps he will also manage to tack on to Maastricht a political mechanism for corralling the European Central bank. That is a heroic list of achievements. If the new French PM is able to accomplish even half of what is in his party manifesto he will have redefined the intellectual, let alone political, basis of the single currency project. He wants to "socialise" it, in theory giving the European Central Bank a jobs target for its control of the money supply. (If that sounds contradictory, it is.) We may be sceptical. But a French socialist administration that did all that, ensuring the euro went ahead on strange new terms, could hardly be sneered at or ignored.

Either way, Jospin should not be underestimated; nor should the capacity of the French political elite to adapt to what seems necessary. For better or worse, his fate now becomes entangled with the fate of European integration, and therefore of Tony Blair too. He is not an offshore political bachelor. This may be an arranged marriage, lacking the whiff of political eroticism in the air whenever Blairites and Clintonites mingle. But it is a kind of marriage nevertheless; and Blair should embrace it.