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This article seeks to highlight the fact that globalization began after 1945 and that European integration part of forms part of this process. The current globalization is the result of the new economic international order, also called multilateralism, set up after the Second World War by the government of the United States. Multilateralism is a system which introduces new tools in the liberalism inherited from the XIXth century, by taking account of the two world wars and of the crisis of 1929, and it was first of all tested in Europe. Since the 1950s, the European Community has been experiencing a paradox, because it has always wished to reconcile the requirements of multilateralism to open up to the global market with the European desire to protect its own market.