A striking feature of global interdependence beginning in the early 1950s was the rapid emergence of multinational corporations, or multinationals, which are business firms that operate in a number of different countries and tend to adopt a global rather than a national perspective. Their rise was partly due to the revival of capitalism after the Second World War, increasingly free international economic relations, and the worldwide drive for rapid industrialization. Multinationals treated the world as one big market, coordinating complex activities across political boundaries and escaping political controls and national policies.

The impact of multinational corporations, especially on less industrialized countries, has been mixed. The presence of multinationals helped spread the products and values of consumer society to elites in the developing world. Critics considered this part of the process of neocolonialism, whereby local elites abandoned their nation’s interests and contributed to continued foreign domination.

Multinational corporations are among the main beneficiaries of economic liberalism: growing openness of national markets and growing economic integration allow corporations to move goods, capital, and technology more fluidly and more intensely. But the growing interconnectedness of world markets comes with costs. In particular, it has meant increased economic volatility such as the banking crisis that swept the United States and Europe in 2008 and plunged countries into deep and long recessions.

The recession created particular hardship in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Monetary policy for the euro was set for the currency zone as a whole and was strongly influenced by its most powerful economies, Germany and France, which resisted expanding the monetary supply to relieve the most afflicted economies in the Eurozone. The tension between the economic policymaking of Germany and France and the deep economic crisis in southern Europe threatened European economic unity.