Introduction

This chapter explores the value of identifying ‘Europeanness’ in understandings of white-collar crime through reference to key European policies relating to unlawful behaviours which are termed ‘market abuse’. Most proximately, ‘market abuse’ is a term of European capital markets law, but the behaviours underpinning it – insider dealing and market manipulation – are commonly identified with the terminology of ‘financial crime’ and ‘white-collar crime’ and are analyzed across key discourses in academic scholarship, practitioner interest and policy making. The analysis considers how such ideas of substantive activity and rhetoric can be joined in different ways, and directed towards evaluating the feasibility of identifying Europeanness in conceptualizations of white-collar crime, and the benefits which might accrue from this. In doing so, utmost significance is attached to how behaviours termed ‘market abuse’ by European discourse demonstrate a European commitment to the use of criminal responses for behaviour which is considered unacceptable. In focusing on the policies of European Union (EU) institutions, particular attention is paid to the reflections of the European Commission (EC) on new market abuse legislation proposed in 2011. Indeed, it was in relation to market abuse specifically that in 2011 the EC presented the perceived superior value of criminal responses for connoting high levels of social disapproval for ‘unacceptable’ behaviours, in comparison with other possible enforcement pathways (European Commission, 2011).

This discussion of Europeanness in understandings of white-collar crime is strongly premised on intellectual and wider understandings of white-collar crime, and how these can be aligned with the closely associated rhetorical construct of ‘financial crime’. ‘Financial crime’ terminology, like that of ‘white-collar crime’ is particularly widely used in the United States and United Kingdom, and the wider common law ‘world’, with both constructs found less in European discourse, mirroring the very premise of challenging Anglo–American dominance that shapes the narrative on white-collar crime. While in European discourse references made to ‘economic crime’ or even the combination ‘financial-economic crime’ are much more common (for example, Ligeti and Franssen, 2017: 1) the ‘financial crime’ construct as it is found in Anglo–American analysis can nevertheless be useful for exploring European conceptualizations of white-collar crime. This is so on account of how a) behaviours which European discourse terms ‘market abuse’ are widely analyzed as ‘financial crime’ across key discourses, and b) how such analyses of ‘financial crime’ speak very persuasively to European understandings of the challenges presented by ‘market abuse’.