Mary Dejevsky: We Europeans should claim our bragging rights

Those who challenge the business practices of big corporations in the US find themselves condemned

A more potent image of the crisis that has engulfed the US economy since the Enron scandal would be hard to find than the television footage of President Bush addressing Wall Street financiers as the Dow Jones indicator ticked ever lower in the corner of the screen. Yet what have we Europeans had to say about it all?

Mostly, we have been very – well – European about it. We have said rather kindly that such disasters are not unique to the US, and we British have cited the Robert Maxwell pensions scandal. We have tripped delicately around what we refer to as the far greater rewards and risks of something we call American business "culture". And we have made all sorts of sympathetic noises about the impact on business confidence of 11 September.

When none of these arguments carries the day, we fall back on the oldest of them all: self-interest. So interconnected are national economies in this global age, we say, that when the giant of them all catches a cold, the rest of us are bound to feel the chill, so it is just better not to make the US feel even more ill than it does already.

Oh yes, and we have taken a good self-critical look at our own affairs, from the economic distortions bred by the Common Agricultural Policy to the stuttering growth rates in France and Germany, neatly diverting attention from the fact that the common European currency, the euro, is well on its way to parity with the mighty US dollar. Indeed, the achievement of parity two weeks ago was delayed only by a US-led stratagem to support the dollar under the guise of forcing up a supposedly undervalued yen.

All in all, European leaders have shown remarkable discretion in their public response to the crisis, adamantly refusing to say the one thing that cries out to be said – that this was a crisis waiting to happen for which the US has only itself to blame. It is nothing less than a total crisis of the free market, American style. There are reasons why Enron-Worldcom-Xerox etc happened in America and there are reasons why it need not happen on this side of the Atlantic – unless we panic ourselves into believing that it will.

The disparity in expectations, risks and rewards between the two sides of the Atlantic is a starting point. The inadequacy of the social safety net for anyone deemed capable of working in the US encourages risk-taking, some of it desperate and lamentably ill-informed. The culture of competition, encouraged from nursery school, if not the nursery itself, fosters ideas of success (and failure) that affect people's image of themselves to a far greater extent than in Europe. It should not need to be said, but Europeans clearly need to be reminded periodically that wealth and appearance are far greater measures of success in America than they are in any European country. The vastly greater gap between rich and poor is one result. It is a gap, like the lack of a reliable safety net, that is politically acceptable in the US but would not be in Europe.

Success in the free market elevates someone to the status of national hero – until such time as he or she is exposed as a cheat or a criminal. Europeans, by dint of harsh experience perhaps, treat success more sceptically. While fortunes were made and lost here too, the hi-tech shares "bubble" was never so inflated on this side of the Atlantic. Where Americans are self-selected optimists and gamblers – why else would so many of their forebears have set off to make their fortunes in a distant land? – Europeans tend to be harder-headed. They might have asked tougher questions sooner about where Enron's paper billions came from.

Every country, even the United States, has its own form of censorship. In much of continental Europe it is the links between business and party funding. In France, it is the "private" lives of the élite. In America, it has long been the murkier reaches of big business. For all the lionising of US-style investigative reporting, à la Watergate, consumer journalism hardly exists in the mainstream media.

Those who challenge the business practices of big corporations find themselves condemned to the lower reaches of provincial newspapers and television stations or to "alternative" publications. The ubiquity of genetically modified ingredients in processed food, hormone additives in meat, the business practices of the banana giant Chiquita, an investigation of Disney's employment conditions: these are just some of the subjects that have placed reporters beyond the pale of publishability.

Of course, scandals happen in Europe, too. The recent colourful saga of the Elf corporation, the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, his mistress and the giant slush fund is just one of a crop of characteristically French frauds on the public purse. Since the Maxwell pensions debacle, however, there has been no scandal in Europe comparable with that of Enron, Worldcom etc, in terms of the harm inflicted on "small" investors. Toughened auditing and accounting standards are one of the reasons. Not only is the temptation to inflate profits and cover losses greater in the United States, because of the potential rewards, but the regulations contain fewer safeguards against it.

Like tax regulations, accounting standards are infinitely more detailed in the US than in Europe, but that does not mean they are superior. More fine print means more opportunities for highly paid lawyers and accountants to find loopholes. A simple principle, once laid down, is harder to evade. This is why, having tried to persuade the European Union to accept US accounting standards and so establish the US system as "global", the US is now looking to adopt something closer to the European system.

Accounting standards are by no means the only area of economic reporting where European and American standards diverge. The US calculates labour productivity differently from the way that the EU calculates it. We Europeans tend to believe that US productivity is infinitely superior to ours. In fact, productivity per worker per hour worked is highest in – wait for it – France. No, few Americans will believe that either. Having waited in many a lunchtime queue at sandwich bars in US and French cities, though, and observed people at work in both countries, I can testify to the truth of that finding.

Unemployment definitions could do with some standardising, too: the number of young male Americans in prison is roughly equivalent to the difference between the level of unemployment in Germany or France on the one hand and that of the US (now above 6 per cent). That is even before you ask whether it is really preferable for someone to be "employed" on a "tips only" basis as a valet parking attendant, for instance, than living off state benefits.

Near the start of his second term, when all US economic indicators were turned in an impressively upward direction, President Clinton boasted about how the United States was showing the rest of the world how to manage its affairs. The best that can come of America's crisis of capitalism is that we Europeans will ask whether the US really has all the answers.

The iniquities of deceit and exploitation exposed by Enron and the rest should persuade us to consider the workings of our own, less tidy but often more humane, system in a more positive light. Above all, we need to boast a little more about how our system works – and not be so European about it.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk