The West's Perfect Storm

Council of Europe head Alain Berset tells Newsweek that stability and the rule of law are in peril

- TOM O'CONNOR

THE HEAD OF EUROPE'S OLDEST intergovernmental organization has warned that the West is caught in the throes of a series of crises that bears the real risk of undermining democracy, stability and rule of law, telling Newsweek that urgent measures were needed to rebuild trust in institutions designed to uphold these values.

In an interview on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Council of Europe Secretary-General Alain Berset outlined a "sequence of crises" dating to at least the 2008 financial crash that has sowed the seeds of discord, contributing to an uptick in unrest, conflict and various forces seeking to upend the current order across the continent and beyond.

"Financial crisis, debt crisis, the first stage of the war in Ukraine, just to take this example, that means war again on the European continent," Berset, president of Switzerland in 2018 and 2023, told Newsweek. "Then we had the rise of populism, the crisis of multilateralism. We have had pandemics, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and, during all the time, the climate crisis."

"It's not one crisis, it's the perfect storm," Berset said. "It's creating instability, and it means that it's destroyed perspective, and this has also destroyed trust in institutions." The situation, he said, calls for huge investment in "comprehensive security," and not just the kind of "hard security" to which the European Union pledged 800 billion euros ($940 billion) on defense this year.

UNREST Police contain a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, England, in September, amid a rise in nationalist