Transatlantic model wars

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: half liked them). In Spain, Sweden, Britain and the ex-communist block, enthusiasm for foreign investors left America trailing. Nor are pinko Europeans cheering at the spectacle of America nationalising banks. Europe is a capitalist place. True, there has been some Schadenfreude about the humbling of the “Anglo-Saxon” or “ultra-liberal” model. But there is also much unease about the taxpayer paying billions to take control of wayward businesses. In the words of Joaquín Almunia, the European economics commissioner, action must be taken to prevent systemic risks, but “Socialists like me are against financial socialism.”

A question of attitudes

Yet when it comes to instincts, three big differences suggest themselves: attitudes to risk, attitudes to the state, and attitudes to profit as a motive. The French paper says that the European social model is “characterised by a high level of protection of people against the vagaries of life”. That is not a policy goal with much resonance in America, where winning and losing are part of life and society is tolerant of those who have done both—like successful entrepreneurs with a bankruptcy behind them. The paper reflects a western European view, too. Unemployment benefits are higher in western Europe than in America, and can last (much) longer. But in eastern Europe, welfare is often stingy.

Trust in the state is also greater in western Europe than in either America or the ex-communist block, where public services nearly collapsed in the early 1990s. Dutch government research found that eastern Europeans like the idea of private pensions. Western Europeans, in contrast, trusted the state to provide for their old age.

Language can be revealing. The European press has written much about America using the “state” to save AIG and other outfits. Americans talk instead of a “government” bail-out. There is a difference. In places like France, the state is the State, run by a bureaucratic elite with a special claim to disinterested wisdom. America’s government does not claim a monopoly on wisdom when it comes to bailing out markets; it is just that, in hard times, it is the only bit of the system with money.