ACCORDING to one American stereotype, Europe is doomed to fail because it has made too many cultural concessions to Islam and too many ideological concessions to anti-business, enterprise-sapping socialism. But an important legal ruling issued this week would suggest a very different transatlantic comparison. A pronouncement by the advocate-general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) came to the firm conclusion that private companies were entitled to bar employees from wearing the Muslim headscarf, as long as it was part of a general and consistently applied policy of banning all conspicuous displays of religious or ideological affiliation. It upheld the right of an employer to impose a dress code, as part of the broader principle that a firm should enjoy some leeway in the pursuit of its commercial aims. This principle could mean requiring workers to appear and behave in a certain way: not only on the obvious grounds of hygiene or safety, but simply as part of company strategy.

The Euro-pronouncement seems almost diametrically opposed to a ruling issued by the American Supreme Court exactly a year ago. In a decision which Judge Antonin Scalia described as “really easy” the Court found that the clothing store Abercrombie and Fitch had been at fault in denying a job to a headscarved woman, even though she had not spelled out the fact that covering her head was part of her Muslim belief. The headscarf was considered out of step with a “look” that the store was projecting at the time, although it has since changed its policy. In the background of that decision was the well-established American legal principle that employers must provide "reasonable accommodation" of their workers' religious needs, provided that this does not cause intolerable hardship to the operation of a firm or organisation.

The European statement wasn’t a judicial verdict but it was a very significant piece of legal guidance, running to more than 30 pages and issued in response to a request from a Belgian court for advice over a woman who was fired from a security firm after insisting on wearing a headscarf to work. The governments of Britain, France and Belgium as well as the European Commission had all sent the ECJ opinions on the case. France, mindful of its own secular principles and its ban on headscarves and other conspicuous symbols in schools, had stressed that EU treaties allow countries to maintain their “national identities” and distinctive approaches to religion.

The advocate-general’s conclusion was a considered reaction to all that advice. “The employer must be allowed a degree of discretion in the pursuit of its business, the basis for which lies ultimately in the fundamental right of freedom to conduct a business,” in the view of Juliane Kokott, the ECJ official who in an earlier life was a distinguished German legal scholar, who as it happens has extensive experience of American academia.

She conceded the relevance of a landmark ruling by another tribunal, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which vindicated an Egyptian-born woman who insisted on wearing a small cross along her British Airways uniform. But in Ms Kokott's opinion, it was significant that British Airways had been inconsistent in its “no-religious-symbols” policy, and also that the symbol in question was a discreet one. In a remarkably blunt piece of language, she also stressed that religion was different from other legally-protected characteristics (race, gender, sexual orientation) because it was a matter of choice.

While an employee cannot “leave” his sex, skin colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or disability “at the door” on entering the employer’s premises, he may be expected to moderate the exercise of his religion in the workplace, be this in relation to religious practices or religiously motivated behaviour such as (in the present case) his clothing.

It is striking, however, that whatever political and legal authorities say, private employers on both sides of the Atlantic tend to react pragmatically rather than ideologically to matters like religion. In politically secular France, bosses have been allowing more time and space for their Muslim employees to pray because factories function better that way. In the United States, meanwhile, the food company Cargill has taken a firm line in a dispute with Somali Muslim employees over prayer breaks at a giant meat factory in Colorado. Nearly 200 employees were fired after walking off the job; they were then allowed to reapply for their positions. The Somalis complained that their prayer time was reduced; the firm insists that it does allow prayer time, but it also cites the legal principle that faith accommodation must not impose intolerable hardship on a business, especially one where safety could be compromised if production were interrupted. As you would expect, Cargill is more interested in getting cattle carcasses efficiently sliced up than in the finer points of Islamic supplication.

On the European side, confusion is created by the fact that there are two at least two transnational courts with some say in this area: the ECHR, an organ of the 47-nation Council of Europe which adjudicates questions of basic human rights, and the ECJ which enforces the laws and regulations of the 28-member European Union.

Marco Ventura, an Italian scholar who runs the Bruno Kessler Foundation, a religious-studies centre in Trento, predicts that this week's ruling, albeit very important, will not be the European judiciary's last word. "European law courts are becoming a trans-national laboratory combining religious precepts, legal mechanisms, private interests and public policies in ever-more innovative ways," he says. And, it might be added, the demands of private interests will probably fluctuate, given that corporations are often more responsive to shifting social reality than judges or law-makers.