What Makes the West Ungovernable
- keebleeleanor
- Sep 15, 2025
- 5 min read
The centre manages. The left critiques. The right scapegoats.
It was a seminal moment to move to Paris. From one of the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone, to one of the richest.
France has universal healthcare, well-maintained infrastructure, high-speed rail, world-class education, and a level of social protection that most of the world envies. Yet the day I arrived in Paris to work on trade and climate change, the French Prime Minister failed to pass a national budget. Parliament fractured. Centrist leadership stalled. Public trust plunged. And riots erupted.
But this wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system.
Affluence, austerity, and the crisis at the centre
The West is quick to portray the Global South as dysfunctional — pointing to debt traps, weak institutions, and political instability. Meanwhile it is unable to manage the growing dysfunction within its own borders.
France, at the epicentre of the "developed world" is revealing deep cracks: in its economic logic, its political institutions, and its social contracts.
This blog was supposed to be about "what (or who) keeps Africa poor." But looking around at Paris, London, Berlin, and Washington, the more urgent question might be: What makes the West, in all its wealth and power, so incapable of governing itself?
Affluence without agency
France may still be wealthy on paper — but inequality has surged, and the material conditions of everyday life have deteriorated for many.
As Thomas Piketty and others have shown, income and wealth concentration in France has increased significantly since the 1980s. While GDP has grown, so has the gap between the top and the masses. The result is a growing disconnect between aggregate national affluence and people’s lived experience of economic security.
Public services exist — but they’re under strain. Jobs exist — but they’re increasingly precarious. Rents rise, while wages stagnate. Trains run, but they’re more expensive. The cost of living climbs while social mobility slows.
In this context, affluence has not delivered agency. Citizens increasingly feel that decisions are made for them, not by them. That policy is managed by transnational elites who may be competent, but seem disconnected — technocrats operating with models and forecasts, while real lives become more fragile.
This disaffection isn’t limited to France. Across much of the West, spatial inequality is increasingly complex — and increasingly visible.
In the UK, deep divides persist between the south and post-industrial northern towns, as well as between rich and poor within affluent cities like London. In France, inequality is marked by the banlieues — under-resourced suburbs at the edge of Paris, often characterised by poor housing and exclusion.
Across Europe, these disparities are written into the housing landscape: visible homelessness in capital cities, migrant encampments on urban margins, and widening gaps in access to decent housing. It’s a geography of inequality that GDP alone cannot explain.
The limits of the centre
Macron’s centrist model promised stability. But faced with a polarised parliament and social unrest, it stalled. Governments today can’t spend more, tax more, or cut more — without sparking revolt.
Technocratic governance no longer works when legitimacy is in question. Budgets balanced on austerity lose public faith. Economic policy divorced from popular needs breeds crisis.
Generational rift and narrative collapse
Younger generations face climate risk, rising costs, and worsening job security — all while funding systems built for older generations. Meanwhile, politicians offer no compelling vision. The centre manages. The left critiques. The right scapegoats.
Populists leap into the vacuum. Because when people feel ignored, someone offering blame will always beat someone offering caution.
Economics shapes governance
This isn’t just political dysfunction — it’s a breakdown in the economic foundations that make democratic governance work.
Rising inequality, stagnating wages, declining social mobility — these economic failures have eroded the public’s sense of fairness and trust. People no longer believe the system works for them, and they’re not wrong. When the economy rewards the few while the majority feel stuck, governance itself becomes contested.
And the relationship cuts both ways. As governments lose legitimacy, they become less able to tax, invest, or regulate effectively — further weakening their ability to manage the economy. The result is a downward spiral: economic exclusion fuels political anger; political paralysis makes inclusive economic reform impossible.
Governance and economics are locked in feedback. When the distribution of wealth is broken, the mechanisms of power follow. Democracy doesn’t just rest on ballots — it rests on economic contracts that feel credible to those they serve.
When those contracts collapse, so does the legitimacy of the state.
What this means for the world
If the West, with all its acquired wealth and acclaimed knowledge, cannot govern itself, how can it lay claim to lead?
What we are witnessing is not just a political crisis, but an economic one with governance at its core. The structures of taxation, spending, debt, and redistribution shape what governments can do — and how legitimate they appear while doing it. When economic models fail to deliver fairness, voice, or protection, democratic institutions lose their foundation.
Democratic governance doesn’t float above economics. It is constrained by it, judged by it, and ultimately undone by it when the system no longer works for the majority. The French budget crisis is a symptom of this deeper collapse — where the old economic playbook no longer secures public trust, yet no new one has replaced it.
This matters not just for France or Europe, but for Africa, Asia, Latin America — the entire global system. The institutions, frameworks, and economic rules designed by the West to enshrine its democratic values are wobbling. Global development can’t rely on a centre that no longer holds.
The lesson is not that democracy is broken, or that technocracy should be abandoned. It’s that vision, legitimacy, and agency matter — in Paris as much as in Nairobi.
The West’s internal dysfunction is a warning. If we don’t reimagine governance — not just manage it — we all risk being dragged down by a system no longer fit for purpose. And the recent display of military hardware in China shows that other systems are waiting in the wings.
How this links back to my blog series
This post continues our journey into two diverging futures:
World 1: isolation, austerity, and political paralysis.
World 2: cooperation, imagination, and shared prosperity.
The crisis in France shows the ways that World 1 is failing — not just in the Global South, but at the heart of the Global North. If we want to build World 2, we’ll need new narratives, new coalitions, and new models that put people back at the centre.
In the next post, I’ll return to my previous question: What keeps Africa poor — and who profits from it?
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