With President Clinton's attack on Europe's financial support for its aircraft builders still echoing here, the European Airbus consortium has introduced the A321, which it touted as a new airplane made without subsidies.

But, as has always been the case in the long-simmering dispute between the U.S. and Europe over whether European government subsidies are costing jobs and profits in American aerospace, much turned on definitions. The 186-seat A321 is not, by most definitions, a new aircraft. It also can be argued that it is subsidized nearly as much as Airbus' five other models.

Statements by Clinton last month at the Boeing Co. reignited a debate over whether government aid to Airbus Industrie amounts to unfair subsidies that eliminate American jobs, as the president said, or is Europe's only way of competing with an American aerospace industry that has benefited from decades of government spending on military and space programs.