Originally published in Catalan in The Conversation on 22 October 2026.
War, energy, housing, schools, public services, protests. Why do so many tensions across Europe seem to be intensifying at once? Recent protests in France, Italy, Portugal and Albania have taken place around the same time, but their causes differ, ranging from the cost of living to education and corruption.
My hypothesis is different: rather than everything deteriorating simultaneously, several crises are overlapping just when people and institutions have fewer material resources and less institutional and political capacity to absorb their impact and work through them together. In my research on cooperation in contexts of crisis and conflict, this is a central question: why does shared pressure generate cooperation in some cases and confrontation in others?
When a crisis crosses borders
Research on transboundary crises shows that many of today’s problems spill across the geographical, administrative and sectoral boundaries around which we organise our responses. A war can become an energy crisis; that crisis can fuel inflation; and inflation can put pressure on households and public budgets. The problem moves faster than the institutions responsible for responding to it.
We can see this now. In a statement to the International Monetary and Financial Committee on 17 October, the European Central Bank warned that the conflict in the Middle East continued to expose energy markets to sharp fluctuations. A decision made far from Europe can ultimately affect electricity bills, transport or the cost of producing food.
Research on polycrisis adds an important distinction: it is not enough for several crises simply to coincide. They become entangled when one feeds into or amplifies another. It is this transmission between systems, rather than merely the accumulation of bad news, that can make the situation as a whole harder to manage.
The room for manoeuvre is also narrowing
A new shock never hits a society starting from zero. It arrives after earlier shocks. In a large-scale Eurofound online survey, based on a non-probability sample and weighted to approximate the EU’s demographic profile, 61% of participants from low-income households said they had difficulty making ends meet in 2025, compared with 9% of those from high-income households.
This helps explain “why now”. Pressure that might have been bearable three years ago becomes unbearable once savings, alternatives and patience have been exhausted. What matters is not only the intensity of a crisis, but also how much room remains to withstand it.
There is also a mismatch of timescales. Markets change quickly; reforms take time; people’s lives cannot always wait. Institutions work through budgets, electoral terms and negotiating processes. People make decisions about leaving home, studying, having children or changing jobs within timeframes that cannot be postponed indefinitely.
The sense that everything is getting worse also has a perceptual dimension. An experimental study conducted in 17 countries found, on average, a stronger psychophysiological response to negative news than to positive news. That does not mean people’s distress is imaginary. Two things can be true at once: we may overestimate the scale of overall decline while also experiencing very real problems. Perception can amplify bad news, but it does not invent the rent people cannot afford, the school without adequate resources or a salary that stretches less far each month.
Needing each other does not mean agreeing
Another common mistake appears here: assuming that a shared problem also means shared interests. Not necessarily. Governments may need to protect purchasing power while keeping deficits in check; an energy transition may bring collective benefits but impose concentrated costs; a reform may be urgent for some and threatening to others.
Cooperation begins precisely here: when different interests must be negotiated without turning every disagreement into a zero-sum game. The cases I have analysed point in this direction: urgency can facilitate joint action, but it cannot replace trust, organisation or a sufficiently shared understanding of the problem. When these conditions are absent, the very pressure that compels us to cooperate can push us to protect ourselves separately.
Protest can also be an act of cooperation
Discontent, however, does not necessarily lead to withdrawal. A meta-analysis examining 182 effects related to collective action identified three recurring factors in mobilisation: a sense of injustice, identification with others affected, and the belief that acting together can make a difference.
That is why a peaceful protest can express distrust of institutions while, at the same time, showing trust among those who organise it. Conflict and cooperation are not always opposites: sometimes cooperation emerges within conflict itself.
Europe has already shown another possibility. During the pandemic, after difficult negotiations, the member states agreed on an extraordinary €750 billion recovery fund financed through European borrowing. National interests did not disappear; a mechanism was created to negotiate them in response to a vulnerability perceived as shared.
Contemporary crises cross borders and sectors with great ease, but institutions, resources and trust do not always move at the same speed. Here lies the paradox behind much of the news we see these days: precisely when interdependence makes greater cooperation necessary, insecurity can make it harder to build.
Understanding today’s tensions therefore requires looking beyond the scale of the protests. What matters is whether disagreements can be channelled through credible procedures, whether costs can be negotiated and whether people retain the ability to influence decisions. The warning sign is not conflict itself. It is the disappearance of credible channels through which conflict can be transformed.
