LONDON — The world is clearly passing through a crisis of political legitimacy. People in growing numbers do not trust their governments or their governing classes. In many cases they despise them.

Survey after survey shows that in many societies throughout the advanced world there is now a widespread lack of belief or confidence among ordinary people in the right of political leaders and the governing class to make decisions on their behalf.

For example, in the European Union the semi-official Eurobarometer survey shows that more than 80 percent of the voters do not trust political parties and more than two-thirds distrust their national governments. A recent wider survey of 18 advanced countries found that 63 percent of those questioned believed their government consisted of politicians and officials who looked after their own interests. Even more questioned whether their politicians acted for the benefit of the people.

As transparency has increased and the Web has opened wide the workings of government and politicians to the public gaze, the old belief and faith that governments somehow possessed superior wisdom and represented the true will of the people has evaporated.

The United Kingdom is currently showing signs of these symptoms in an especially virulent form, with the British public now convinced that members of Parliament are abusing their expenses and misusing taxpayers' money to feather their own nests. This belief, fanned by the media, now threatens to spread from outrage against individual named incumbents into a general pattern of outright contempt that could have major consequences not just for political parties but for the entire Westminster system.

Although the problem may be very acute in the U.K., and focused on the expenses issue, it is in fact part of a much broader trend. Distrust is international and aimed at both rulers and political institutions almost everywhere, whether national, international or supra-national.

In country after country, including Japan, studies confirm that the public see their political rulers not as heroes but as a source of unworkable laws and regulations, jargon-laden verbiage, coverups, incompetence and worse. This sentiment does not necessarily translate into a mass withdrawal by voters and the public from the political system or into despairing apathy and disengagement.

Although it is true that voter participation in the recent EU parliamentary elections was abysmally low, generally political interest and involvement is higher than ever, with evidence of the motive being to punish and strike out against the established political classes, their alleged remoteness and their cozy structural habitats.

A surge of new networks, ideas, activities and organizations is filling the public space, largely empowered and enabled by the global information network that now instantly and continuously links hundreds of millions across the world. Networks like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and many others, now create links between interests, lobbies and protest movements that are replacing traditional hierarchies of governance.

This gives a valuable clue as to what is really going on. Power, influence and the protection and promotion of national interest and concerns are no longer the sole preserve of conventional diplomatic channels and traditional government- to-government interfaces. Those methods are no longer trusted, or even needed in the Internet age.

Yet what this globalized and transnational networking system also does is create its opposite — a powerful and almost furious longing for clearer national identity and better protected cultural diversity. It seems that people young and old yearn more than ever to belong, to have a clear definition from inspirational leaders of the role, purposes and priorities of the local communities and societies they inhabit. They want to know where they stand, what the focus of their loyalties should be, and how their particular community or nation fits into and connects with the wider world system.

Opinion pollsters and election strategists tell us that domestic issues come much higher up in the agenda than broader questions of overseas relations and international strategies. But this is misleading. The experts are posing the wrong question. A country's positioning in the world and its international connections give its citizens' lives meaning. They tell people what to be proud of, what common causes bind them together, why it is worthwhile to be a nation and what contribution that nation can make to the new global order.

These are not abstruse "foreign" matters or the preserve of the chattering classes or commentators. Domestic and foreign issues have fused. They are central to daily and family life and the hopes and feelings that sustain existence and give it meaning.

As the British watch their precious, ancient and once respected parliamentary system of government sink into discredit, their search becomes one for something better, more open and more respected — a clearer sense of national direction and a clearer definition of what it means to be British in this complex and dangerous age.

That "better something" can only be a new kind of leadership that boldly articulates national priorities, recognizes the severe new limits on what national governments can achieve at home and overseas, is absolutely free of any taint of corruption, and is honest with the people as to what benefits the modern state can deliver.

Somehow the Westminster Parliament and the British political leadership must renew themselves along these lines. It is going to be a long hard struggle.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords (www.lordhowell.com).