The decline of trust has become a dominant narrative within both the contemporary academic literature and the media. Onora O’Neill (2002: 8), as part of her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures, observed that sociologists and journalists have reported that ‘mistrust and suspicion have spread across all areas of life’ and therefore ‘loss of trust has become a cliché of our times.’ In a September 2018 address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, diagnosed that the world was suffering from a ‘bad case of Trust Deficit Disorder’ and that people's trust in institutions at both the national and international level was at ‘breaking point’ (UN Secretary General, 2018, cited in Jennings et al, 2019). Evidence for the perceived crisis in trust is frequently provided by national and international surveys: for example, the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer (2020) reported a ‘trust paradox’ where strong economic performance was accompanied by a stagnation of trust in key institutions, such as government and the media. Furthermore, the coronavirus pandemic which swept over the world from early 2020 refocused attention on trust – in terms of both the impact of the presence or absence of trust for governmental policy responses and the impact of the pandemic on existing levels of trust (Devine et al, 2021). Indeed, many policy responses to the pandemic were framed within the context of trust. For example, part of the rationale for the Welsh Government using a locally organised ‘Test and Trace’ service rather than the centralised service set up by the United Kingdom (UK) Government was the assumption that people living in Wales were more likely to follow the advice of someone who sounded as if they were familiar with their community.

Even putting the coronavirus pandemic to one side, in European politics a set of unprecedented events have disrupted existing equilibria. In the UK a long-lasting debate about membership of the European Union (EU) finally resulted in Britain's exit from the EU at the end of January 2020. In France public riots around the yellow vests (‘gilets jaunes’) shattered the calm of Macron's second year in office. In Germany the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been elected in almost every state parliament in the country, enduringly establishing a party to the right of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in the political landscape.