While chaos and change roiled the Muslim world, economic crisis sapped growth and political unity in Europe and North America. In 2008, the United States entered a deep recession caused by the burst of the housing boom, bank failures, and an overheated financial securities market. The U.S. government spent massive sums in attempts to recharge the economy and prop up failing companies and by 2014, the economy showed modest improvement. Yet as the housing market slowly recovered and unemployment slowly declined, the vast income inequality between a very wealthy and tiny elite and a far larger group of wage-earning Americans continued to trouble observers.

The recession quickly swept across Europe, where a housing bubble, high national deficits, and a weak bond market made the crisis particularly acute. In 2010, Spain, Portugal, and especially Greece were close to bankruptcy. Greek political leaders struggled to implement a painful neoliberal austerity plan — which meant raising taxes, privatizing state-owned businesses, reforming labor markets, and drastically reducing government spending on pensions and other popular social benefits. All these measures were required before Greece could receive financial aid from the IMF, the European Common Bank, and the European Union. In the summer of 2012, Greece was still flailing, prompting speculation that it might leave the Eurozone, followed, perhaps, by Portugal or even Spain and Italy.

This sudden “euro crisis” put the very existence of the Eurozone in question. Germany and France, the zone’s two strongest economies, felt pressure to provide financial support to ensure the stability of far weaker countries, including Greece and Portugal, though they did so with strings attached. As with Greece, recipients were required to reduce deficits through austerity measures. Even so, the transfer of monies within the Eurozone angered the citizens of wealthier countries, who felt they were being asked to subsidize countries in financial difficulties of their own making.

If bailouts upset wealthy Europeans, deep cuts to benefits coupled with ongoing hardship from the recession infuriated the citizens of poorer countries. In Greece, unemployment hit a record 25 percent in 2012, and more than half of young adults lacked jobs.8 As governments cut popular social programs, demonstrators took to the streets to protest declining living standards and the lack of work; in Athens, protests large and small were almost a daily occurrence in autumn 2012.

The euro crisis shook general faith in European unity, especially among conservatives. In Britain in January 2013, Conservative Party leader and prime minister David Cameron (r. 2010–) pledged to hold an “in/out” popular vote on Britain’s membership in the EU within five years. On the far right, the crisis generated even stronger anti-EU sentiment and anti-immigrant extremism. By early 2014, Europe’s mainstream leaders’ commitment to the euro and the EU had stabilized the situation. Though weak economic growth and high unemployment remained troublesome, particularly in Greece and Spain, it appeared that the EU had overcome the worst of its economic woes and avoided political disintegration.