Jospin says socialism has ceased to exist. Now he's out to defeat Blairism

THE OBVIOUS question was "where's the beef?" But the British and French prime ministers had grander things to speak about than the beef war when both addressed the conference of the Socialist International in Paris yesterday.

Their speeches, especially Lionel Jospin's, had been billed as an important new stage in the mostly amicable battle between the two men for intellectual and modernising leadership of the left in European, or even the world. It was to be Mr Jospin's answer to Tony Blair's Third Way: Jospinism versus Blairism.

In the event, both men gave thoughtful speeches but there was little new to chew on in the performances of either. Their thoughts on the future of socialism, or social democracy, in the 21st century were received politely, rather than ecstatically, by delegates from more than 100 countries.

Mr Jospin, the alleged traditionalist, admitted that socialism, as a rival economic system to capitalism, had ceased to exist. But he defended the classic welfare state and rejected the, implicitly Blairist, view that faster job creation depended on diminishing job security.

Mr Blair, the moderniser, said that the differences between Mr Jospin and himself had been exaggerated. New Labour's belief in "enterprise and fairness" was the same as Mr Jospin's acceptance of a market economy but not a "market society", he said.

But he went on to warn that left-of-centre movements the world over must be on the side of reform if they were not to be buried by the sheer pace of technological, economic and social change in the new century.

From the French point of view, the fact that Mr Blair came to the meeting at all was a small victory. Early in his term of office, he made clear he regarded the Socialist Inter-national as a lumber-room of old-fashioned leftist thinking. He floated the idea of a rival world social democratic group, to include the US Democrats.

In June, Mr Blair infuriated the French socialists by persuading the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, to sign a joint declaration attacking universal welfare and "rigidities" (ie legal protections and workers' rights) in labour markets. As recently as September, relations with Mr Jospin were so cool that Mr Blair asked for assurances that he would not be booed at the Paris meeting.

Mr Jospin's people let it be known that he would use his speech to attack the "Third Way". He would do so, they said, from a position of strength, since the French economy has recently outperformed Britain. In other words, Mr Jospin intended to boast that he was both more socialist and more successful than Mr Blair.

Mr Jospin's domestic difficulties made that approach inappropriate (his finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, resigned last week after being implicated in a financial scandal). In any event, it was agreed before the conference that speeches could be robust and opinionated but would not rubbish each other's views.

The conference was expected to agree a Paris Declaration last night that would seek to encompass both Jospinism and Blairism - and several other isms - in one statement. The text speaks of "opening the doors" of the left to a spirit of reform but also calls for market economies to be placed in a "regulatory framework".