Although global relationships have impacted the world’s economy at least since the time of the Crusades, in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union triumphal narratives of the expansion of Western ideals of democracy and capitalism began to speak of globalization. Europe’s economy was unified as it had never been before, and the interchange of peoples, products, and ideas seemed to be proceeding on Western terms. In the late 1990s opposition emerged to the cultural and economic domination of the West, among both activists in the West and traditionalists in other parts of the world. The skeptical rationalist world that the Enlightenment had created was not welcoming for everyone, and some discontented groups began to return to and reinterpret their traditional identities in opposition to the West. A new dimension was added to the opposition to economic globalization in 2008 when an economic crisis in the United States triggered a global economic downturn. The resulting economic upheaval in Europe threatened to reverse the decades-long trend toward European unity. ■