10,000 Spoons when all I needed was a Knife

 Ironically enough, it seems that simply searching for a comparison of EU and US policies actually produces good results. In fact, one particular paper does a great comparison of how each model of governance performed during the economic crisis of 2007. The paper in question, "Good governance in crisis or a good crisis for governance? A comparison of the EU and the US" by Waltraud Schelkle has a bias towards the American principle of good governance but still analyzes both systems on the same base in Macroeconomic theory.

Schelkle begins with a history of how the European Central Bank and the American Federal Reserve gained their modern roles of maintaining economic stability and efficiency over political expedience in the 1970s. This change in role for the Fed in that era comes mainly from the realization that there was a bias for deficit and inflation in capitalist societies.

After this breakthrough for the central banks, a surge of privatization and deregulation of utilities companies swept the 1980s in the US. As a consequence of these successful privatization efforts, delegation of policy making power to independent agencies began to rise in Europe.  Once Schelkle finishes discussing the fiscal policy making power differences between the US and the EU, he makes a clear note that state bailouts of firms is less strictly regulated in the US than the EU. This illustrates one clear difference in the way that the US can respond to an economic crisis compared to the EU.

To summarize the differences in good governance overall, Schelkle provides a table recreated here:

From this table we glean the insight that while both systems differ entirely in their systems of governance they score very similar in their strength.

After a comparison that would take to long to summarize in this blog post, it turns out that the odds were stacked against Europe's policy of good governance. Surprisingly enough, good governance actually strengthened the unity between member states. It also helps to demonstrate the importance of throwing away nationalism in Europe. Amongst all this, we also see that the US policies of good governance were weakened by the crisis instead of strengthened like the EU. Despite the flaws of both systems, it seems that the EU may be more well-equipped to handle future crises.