If you feel like everything’s falling apart, you’re probably right

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The word “polycrisis” was first popularised in a speech in Athens by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former European Commission president, about 10 years ago.

Juncker was referring to the growing number of challenges facing the EU – from security threats on Europe’s borders and internally, to the then-acute refugee crisis and the still-raw-in-memory eurozone and Greek debt crisis. Each one seemed to reinforce and feed off the other, compounding the sense of gathering chaos. A few days after his speech, the UK seemed to confirm his worst fears by voting for Brexit.

Yet if he thought there was a polycrisis back then, it had nothing on today’s increasingly toxic cocktail of negatives. It stretches way beyond Europe’s borders and is now global in reach.

Almost everywhere there is a deepening sense of things falling apart, most obviously on the streets of Paris and beyond, but also in sovereign debt markets; in rising interest and mortgage rates; in soaring energy costs.

It’s in a seemingly unhinged White House more willing to side with Vladimir Putin’s Russia over Ukraine than with its European allies; in mushrooming trade imbalances and rampant deindustrialisation at the hands of Chinese mercantilism; in stagnant or falling real wages; in an apparently escalating war in the Gulf, now encompassing the Houthis on the Red Sea; in unsustainable welfare spending; and common to almost all countries, a socially sapping cost-of-living crisis ... I could go on and on.

Jean-Claude Juncker’s polycrisis of 2016 has nothing on today’s toxic cocktail of negatives.

With its history of sometimes violent protest, France is in some respects a special case. At more than 50 per cent of GDP – according to the International Monetary Fund’s last Fiscal Monitor – the........

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