By Alina Vey 

The question of whether the West is in crisis has become increasingly difficult to separate from a more fundamental question: what holds a political and social order together when confidence in its institutions begins to weaken?

The issue is not simply whether individual governments are popular or unpopular. Nor is it confined to elections, political parties or particular ideological disputes.

At a deeper level, it concerns trust.

Can citizens still trust institutions to represent them? Can institutions maintain legitimacy while societies become more fragmented? And can democratic states adapt to technological, economic and geopolitical change without losing the sense of cohesion on which their political systems depend?

These questions are becoming increasingly visible.

The 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, which opened in September 2026, has placed “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation” at the centre of its work. The President of the General Assembly has argued that rebuilding trust requires institutions to confront their shortcomings and demonstrate that they can deliver meaningful results. 

The OECD’s 2026 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions provides another indication of the problem. Across the 33 OECD countries and five accession candidate countries covered by the survey, 40% of respondents reported high or moderately high trust in their national government, while 43% reported low or no trust. The OECD also found that perceptions of whether people have a meaningful voice in political decision-making are an important driver of trust. 

These figures should not be interpreted as evidence that democratic systems are simply collapsing. Indeed, the OECD notes that trust has stabilised on average after an earlier decline and has improved in roughly half of the countries where it had previously fallen. 

That distinction matters.

The challenge may therefore be less about a straightforward collapse of Western democracy than about whether existing institutions can adapt to a rapidly changing environment while retaining legitimacy and public confidence.

A more fragmented information environment

Technology has complicated this question considerably.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has identified increasing fragmentation of the public sphere, declining trust, polarisation and the effects of artificial intelligence and digital information environments among the challenges facing European democracies. 

The problem is not simply that people disagree.

Disagreement is inherent to political life.

The deeper problem emerges when societies begin to lose a sufficiently shared understanding of facts, institutions and the rules through which disagreement can be managed.

A society can survive profound political disagreement.

It becomes considerably harder to maintain cohesion when citizens no longer believe that the institutions responsible for arbitrating those disagreements are legitimate.

This is why trust matters so much.

Security is changing too

The external environment has also changed.

NATO’s current strategy reflects a substantial increase in defence investment. Following the 2025 Hague commitment to reach 5% of GDP on defence and security-related spending by 2035, NATO reports that European Allies and Canada increased their combined core defence expenditure by nearly 20% in real terms in 2025 compared with 2024. 

At the same time, warfare itself is becoming increasingly connected to cyber capabilities, information, technology, industrial capacity and economic resilience.

Security can therefore no longer be understood purely in terms of military strength.

It increasingly involves the resilience of societies themselves.

That raises another question:

Can a society remain strategically resilient if it is internally losing confidence in the institutions that are expected to protect and represent it?

The technological transformation

The challenge extends beyond conventional geopolitics.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to raise questions about governance that previous technological revolutions did not pose in quite the same form.

The UN’s current work on AI governance reflects this. Its 81st General Assembly has made AI governance a major part of its agenda, with discussions focusing on how international institutions can respond to a technology whose development is increasingly concentrated among a relatively small number of states and companies. 

The question is therefore becoming larger than simply how the West responds to geopolitical competitors.

It is also about whether Western institutions can adapt to a world in which technological power, economic power and geopolitical power are becoming increasingly interconnected.

So, is the West actually in crisis?

Perhaps the more useful question is not whether the answer is simply yes or no.

The evidence points to something more complicated.

Western societies retain powerful institutions, substantial economic resources, advanced technological capabilities and extensive international alliances. At the same time, they face measurable challenges involving trust, political participation, information fragmentation, technological disruption and strategic uncertainty. 

A crisis does not necessarily mean collapse.

It can also mean a period in which an existing system is forced to confront whether the assumptions that sustained it remain adequate for the conditions it now faces.

That may be the more important question for the West.

Not:

“Is the West finished?”

But:

“Can the institutions, values and social relationships that underpin the Western order adapt to the world that is emerging?”

The answer will not be determined by a single election, government or geopolitical confrontation.

It will depend on whether institutions can retain legitimacy, whether societies can preserve enough common ground to function despite disagreement, and whether democratic systems can adapt to technological and geopolitical transformation without losing public trust.

The future of the West may therefore depend less on its ability to preserve the past than on its ability to renew the foundations on which its political and social order rests.