The ‘polycrisis’ and social democracy

‘Polycrisis’ has become a term of art in contemporary political analysis. Responsibility for this lies with the former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who influentially used the term back in 2016. Following this, its popularity soared in the 2020s. Pivotal here was the historian Adam Tooze, who borrowed the term from Juncker for, among other work, his pandemic book Shutdown (2021). After this, the term has appeared everywhere, from the reports of consultancy firms to the miscellany of the World Economic Forum, and even in Tom Baldwin’s quasi-authorised biography of Keir Starmer.

What exactly is a ‘polycrisis’ and why is everyone talking about it? What implications does it have for social democrats in the 2020s and beyond? Drawing on a forthcoming chapter for the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, this piece will firstly explain what the term ‘polycrisis’ is trying to capture: a conjunction of political, economic, and social disorders that, through interactivity have become more severe and consequential than other crisis moments in recent history. It then suggests that thinking in terms of the ‘polycrisis’ risks disabling the agency of social democrats trying to respond to the challenges they confront. It will close with some brief comments on some possible routes out of that trap.

What is it?

For most of its users, a polycrisis is a dense matrix of interlocking and mutually reinforcing disorderly processes in world politics. All of us are forced to confront multiple and escalating crises; think of how often we use phrases like the ‘climate crisis’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, or the ‘crisis in the Middle East’. These crises are different, but they overlap and synchronise, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and amplify each other through feedback loops. This has brought us to a threshold point in the 2020s: a time of heightened danger, destabilisation, and radical uncertainty. Back in 2016, Juncker talked about how different crises in Europe – Brexit, the refugee crisis, and security threats – “feed each other”. Tooze, who traces the concept back to 1970s French social theory, believes that radical uncertainty and feedback loops with “escalatory” potential are the most insightful qualities of ‘polycrisis’ talk.

So, when people use the term, they are trying (rather ambitiously) to bring together into one analytical frame a considerable number of distinct challenges. The exact configuration varies, but these challenges usually include:

• The climate emergency and the gigantic, disruptive, and costly state, market and social projects that will be required to address it.
• ‘Culture wars’ or worsening cultural cleavages.
• Actual wars, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the catastrophe in Gaza.
• The fragility of liberal democracy and rise of authoritarianism.
• Technological change, especially machine learning.
• The return of inflation and the unwinding of the near-zero interest rate policymaking paradigm.

The ‘polycrisis’ is not just a list of threats. These challenges are profoundly interrelated – and they tend to make each other worse. In Tooze’s words, the ‘whole is more dangerous than the sum of the parts’. His point can be illustrated with a recent example. Due to Europe’s fossil-fuel energy dependencies, the war in Ukraine led to a destabilising spike in energy costs, which fuelled an inflationary surge, which led to a price shock that disproportionately harmed the poorest in our society, and which pushed up interest rates, which makes borrowing for the climate transition more expensive, which endangers attempts by Europe to transition away from energy dependency on hostile foreign powers…and so on.

For Tooze, this aspect makes our time distinct from other crisis periods such as the 1970s. In that decade, analysts attributed the disorder to a small, related set of causes which allowed them to posit a solution. If the problem was government ‘overload’ and public sector inefficiency, privatisation and market mechanisms were the answer. If it was fiscal and monetary incontinence, depoliticised macroprudential governance was what the doctor ordered. If the cause of disorder, on the other hand, was systematic underinvestment, inequality, and unemployment on a continental scale, something like an ambitious, neo-Keynesian ‘Social Europe’ agenda would make more sense. ‘What makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorientating’, in contrast, is ‘it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix.’

Disabling Agency

When one bundles together these challenges and narrates them in this way, the polycrisis can seem terrifying. It’s revealing that, when Tooze deploys the concept, he liberally uses words like ‘disorientating’, ‘nerve-wracking, and ‘precarious’.

Bearing this in mind, I want to suggest that thinking in terms of a ‘polycrisis’ risks disabling the agency of social democrats to transform the world around them. If any political actor turns to ‘polycrisis’ thinking, they will rely on intellectual maps that are, fundamentally and inevitably, characterized by maze-like circularity and intimidating complexity. That might not be so wise. With such a map, it might be hard to work out where one is supposed to go.

Firstly, the ‘polycrisis’ is a description of a single moment of uncertainty, danger, and disorder (the early 2020s). It’s not a ‘turning point’: there is no obvious way out, no clear ‘end point’, and nor is there an ‘underlying logic’. The point that Tooze and polycrisis advocates try to make is not just that historical change is complex and involves multiple factors operating on different timescales and interacting in a contingent, open-ended way. That is always the case. Instead, they assert that it is not in any way clear, from our vantage point and with our existing intellectual frameworks, what factors are driving our disorder, and which will define the future. At times, Tooze comes close to implying that our moment is unprecedented in all modern history.

There are, of course, strong grounds for rejecting a naïvely linear and stagist views of the ‘progress of history’ and rashly confident predictions of the future: we all rightly scoff at 1990s ‘end of history’ hubris. Nonetheless, polycrisis thinking is the opposite extreme, with disturbing implications for those engaged in actual politics. In short, it gives politicians no idea of where to prioritise their interventions. In the polycrisis, where should social democrats apply pressure and focus efforts? By intellectual design, there is no answer to that question.

As a result, thinking of our moment as a polycrisis may end up encouraging managerial and reactive governance over transformative and strategic governance. It is revealing that the term polycrisis was adopted by Juncker – a veteran elite fixer – and that it is now bandied about at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Managers of the existing political and economic order find the concept of ‘polycrisis’ attractive because they recognise the world-spirit of the 1990s (globalisation and liberal democracy) has stalled. But the polycrisis allows them to describe this breakdown without seriously addressing any of the structural injustices embedded within the ‘unipolar’, market liberal world of the recent past. As others have noted, languages of ‘crisis’ have previously legitimated regressive political projects.

Polycrisis critics such as Inderjeet Parmar – who dubbed it a “liberal buzzword”– have noted this risk. The American writer John Ganz has pinpointed the problem. While recognising its descriptive power, Ganz suggests that the word does not really conceptualise the problem in the way that social theory should: it is too baggy, too imprecise, shy of making analytical choices. As a result, he suggests that the ‘polycrisis’ frame legitimises a politics of technocratic management. It is, he argues, the ‘Keynesianism of Despair’.

This is a rather inopportune time for progressives to despair. In Europe, the Americas, south Asia, and elsewhere, the authoritarian, illiberal right are on the march. They have few compunctions about asserting that some crises are more important, or more real, than others. They have diagnosed a select number of evils: migration, ‘wokeness’, the decline of ‘traditional values’, and the erosion of national sovereignty. In response, they advocate disturbing policy agendas, from the marginalisation of ethnic and religious minorities and the brutalisation of migrants to attacks on the free press, democratic institutions, and rule of law.

We do not need to ignore the gaping contradictions or the morally disgusting implications of their policies to grasp that stories they tell motivate their grassroots and help organise their elite behaviour. Crucially, these stories alight not on the complexity of the ‘polycrisis’ but rather on the simplicity of perfidy. Liberal elites in Brussels/London/Washington, they tell their prospective voters (or rioters), have demeaned, deceived, and betrayed you, and you should fight back. In this light, it is especially dangerous for social democrats to trap themselves in a position where all they can do is talk about how difficult everything is. To respond to the threat of the far right, the liberal left will need to mobilise coalitions of support and enact tangible policy agendas, and that will require clear, directional thinking.

The second reason that ‘polycrisis’ thinking might disable the agency of social democrats is psychological. It is admirably frank of Tooze to be explicit that the appeal of ‘polycrisis’ thinking to him is partly its ‘therapeutic’ aspects, but this is not necessarily a good thing politically. The writer Alastair Benn suggests that the popularity of polycrisis can be explained partly by technology – specifically, social media technology, which constantly bombards those of us who follow current affairs with a disordered feed of chaos, suffering, and danger.

Benn has a solution to this, but it is profoundly individualistic. Drawing on Jungian theory, he suggests that the best response is to seek ‘consolation’ at a time of ‘instability’ by ‘turn[ing] inwards’ and pursuing ‘inner images’. That may well be good advice for mental health – I am not a psychiatrist – but it is not necessarily the most helpful takeaway for a movement founded on collective action. Bluntly, that historic mission requires us to turn outwards, not inwards.

Ways forward

If social democrats want to think about their governing projects as a response to a polycrisis, therefore, they should answer these questions. First, do they think the polycrisis will end any time soon? And second, do they have a positive vision of what an ‘end’ to the polycrisis will look like?

The first question asks, in other words, whether we are in reality living through a historical ‘conjuncture’ – like, say, the 1930s or 1970s? If so, then the ‘polycrisis’ would thus instead be another word for the transitional ‘morbid symptoms’ of a situation in which, as Gramsci famously noted, the ‘old is dying and the new cannot be born’. It is an uncertain period, but it will end in in a (relatively) more stable ‘settlement’.

Alternatively, are we genuinely experiencing something new and more dangerously unstable, with no obvious end in sight? If we are in such a polycrisis, then the answer to the second question might well be a flat no. One can imagine the argument: if there is no obvious end, then there is no obvious end goal either; we are at the mercy of forces far larger than ourselves, we do not understand them, so let us just keep the show on the road as much as possible and try and protect the vulnerable as best we can.

Given the scale and severity of the challenges that confront us, however, I think many readers will find that answer an abdication of responsibility. Can social democrats develop a positive vision of the future in the world of a crisis? Can they build political and governing strategies that build new, resilient coalitions of support, domestically and globally, which will underpin a new, progressive settlement?

I do not think we need to agree on whether this moment really is an unprecedented ‘polycrisis’ to come up with constructive agendas. So, to conclude, I will discuss potential ways forward for social democrats who accept the concept, and those who do not.

Overlap I: Egalitarian risk management

If there is a polycrisis, there may yet be a more positive role for social democrats, beyond technocratic crisis-fighting. This would be to focus on using the state and civil society to actively manage risk in an egalitarian way. One way of defining the polycrisis is as a convergence of escalating and multiplying risks. That is why its adherents often talk about uncertainty. It’s also why the concept appears to have technocratic implications for governance. As ‘risk’ is innately probabilistic, we often don’t speak about eliminating it – that is technically impossible. Instead, we ‘manage’ it. There’s a reason why people in the financial sector who are paid far more than they should be call it ‘risk management’.

But that’s not the only way we can govern risk. You can also derisk problems – or, more accurately, redistribute risk from one group in society to another. If the ‘polycrisis’ is essentially the destabilising convergence and amplification of risk, then one social-democratic response might be to consciously reduce, redistribute and socialise risk in society. This is all a bit abstract, so what do I mean in practice? Well, it is notable that emerging industrial and trade policy agendas in the EU and, particularly, Biden’s America are justified as ‘derisking’ projects. This is both in terms of derisking green investments for the private sector and building trade ‘resilience’ through ‘friendshoring’ and reducing ‘dependence’ on malign foreign actors by rebuilding domestic capacity.

Similarly, in the UK Starmer’s Labour has heavily embraced the theme of ‘security’, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s language of ‘securonomics’. Left-wing critics of Bidenomics have critiqued the implications of derisking private sector investments in green technology and industry. They warn of private sector enrichment and ‘disorderly’ decarbonization. Their warning should be taken seriously: it matters, for example, if ‘Great British Energy’ can take strategic or full ownership of renewable generation and infrastructure. But if the outcome is significant and irreversible capital expenditure on green industry, which has wider Keynesian implications, and if the process is managed by an active state, then a wider ‘derisking’ agenda is defensible on social democratic grounds.

Redistributing risk is not just relevant for industrial and trade policy. In the US, there has also been a revival of electoral appeals to workplace security, and a resurgent trade union movement. In the UK, the Labour Party has relatively ambitious plans for strengthening individual and collective workers’ rights. Moreover, it is possible that the uncertainty and danger of our moment – which the ‘polycrisis’ way of thinking captures so well – reveals a powerful way forward for the left in social policy. It opens a new political case for classic, twentieth-century social-democratic projects and institutions: welfare floors, economic democracy, social rights, labour organisation. After all, as Colin Hay argues, the welfare state was not just about ‘decommodifying’ life, but also about redistributing the costs of known and unknown risks: sickness, unemployment, old age, and natural disasters.

The social democratic response to the polycrisis might, then, consist of the egalitarian management of risk. However, I do not think it depends on accepting the ‘polycrisis’ concept. It may be that we soon move from ‘polycrisis’ thinking into the more familiar intellectual world of a historical ‘conjuncture’ or ‘turning point’, in which an existing ‘settlement’ is destabilised, and a new one emerges. If so, what will it look like? A renewed and revived welfare state for the 21st century would be a fine legacy of that transition.

Overlap II: Prioritising the climate

If this is a more familiar ‘inflection point’, though, then social democrats must choose an era-defining agenda, ideally one already emergent, and follow it through. Otherwise, their opponents will define the future. They will, therefore, need to focus their energies on some crises, or risks, more than others.

There are a few options from which to choose. Given the historical role of social democrats in democratising Europe, and given the threat of the illiberal right, ‘saving democracy’ might become the driving goal. As outlined in the previous section, it could also be transforming and reviving the welfare state. But a strong contender – and perhaps a necessary condition for all other goals – is properly tackling the climate emergency.

This is another point of overlap with polycrisis thinkers. Despite his aversion to a ‘single cause’, Tooze has frequently identified the energy transition as an utterly critical area. If one accepted the argument for the egalitarian management of risk, then urgently tackling the climate emergency would necessarily be central to that agenda.

We should not exaggerate the benefits of a ‘green turn’, nor ignore its problems. The implications of the energy transition for other progressive ends such as job creation are often exaggerated. Moreover, these policies can be electorally toxic. Just ask the Ampelkoalition in Berlin. This is not surprising, given the sums involved implies the effective suppression of consumption to redirect resources to green investment. In practice many green policy agendas have had to be repackaged as something else to make them palatable to particular interest groups. There’s a reason that Biden’s White House bundled their green investments into the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ and the ‘CHIPS and Science Act’. Even then, it is disturbingly unclear if Bidenomics will reap electoral benefits.

Yet, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that addressing the energy transition wholeheartedly is an unavoidable condition, not just for saving the planet, but for other goals too. The dangers of authoritarian populism are hardly going to be alleviated by plausible future scenarios, such as the destruction of human habitats and resultant mass migration to temperate parts of the world. Nor are the risks of military confrontation likely to subside if we enter a world of rapidly depleting natural resources. Hay has also powerfully argued that the welfare state is fundamentally vulnerable to a situation of climate catastrophe. A new era of climate disaster would ratchet up pressure on public debt remorselessly and rapidly, raising the prospect of a serious fiscal crisis.

Therefore, tackling the climate catastrophe should be a policymaking priority whatever intellectual framework one adopts. In the UK, the Labour government’s industrial policies for the green transition remains one of its most ambitious agendas. But its promised capital investment was watered down a few months before the election– a serious problem if their overall aim is for Britain to ‘get its future back’. Social democrats would be wise to protect the agenda as much as possible from the wrecking interventions of other forces and threats: economic, cultural, and political. The future is at stake.

Colm Murphy is a lecturer in politics at Queen Mary, University of London and a contributing editor of Renewal.