Whether old or new, democracies are fragile. There are no guarantees that they will last. Why? Part of the answer is that democracy is an inherently unfinished project. There is always more political work to do. The institutions that define democratic life, such as a robust civil society, political parties that structure public opinion and voting behavior, and free, fair, and competitive elections, moreover, are just as available to authoritarians, as to democrats. Finally, democracies operate in an international system that supports the spread of dictatorship, as well as democracy.

The final chapter explores the reception of songs lost and then recovered in papyri finds within their own fraught material context, focusing on Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and Timotheus’ Persae. How does the experience and narrative of loss, discovery, and recovery inform our sense of the bodies in these poems, so concerned themselves with the loss of limb and grasping touch?

A financial system channels funds from net savers to net spenders. But it does more than that, for the pie need not be fixed in size. Through its power of credit creation, the financial system can fuel economic expansion. The process is prone to fragility, however, and overshoot can end in crisis. A financial system encompasses financial intermediaries, which issue claims against themselves in order to provide funds to users (e.g., banks creating deposit accounts to make loans), and financial markets, which facilitate the direct exchange of claims between suppliers and users of funds (e.g., stocks and bonds). A diversity of channels for financing undertakings allows for the management and dispersion of risk. Interest rates and asset prices are determined in financial markets, with movement in the opposite direction of one another. Variation among the economies of Emerging East Asia is nowhere more stark than in the realm of finance. Hong Kong is home to the highest ratio of financial assets to GDP in the world while in the least developed economies of the region banking systems are rudimentary and capital markets little more than an idea.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany serve to this day as a “warning from history.” The precise lessons to be drawn from this episode remain controversial. Did the first German republic collapse from a lack of popular support or from institutional weakness? These questions were far from the minds of Republican elites. Arnold Brecht and Hans Staudinger regarded problems of stability as primarily administrative. Territorial reform and the creation of public–private partnerships were their creative attempts creating some much-needed breathing space for the young Republic. These initiatives tell us much about the reasons why elites overestimated the robustness of their own institutions. At the same time this ill-founded confidence was necessary for such administrative experiments. Paradoxically, assuming stability can be important in encouraging elites in new democracies to engage in necessary reforms. The administrative rationale also had a dark side, however. It led to a myopic focus on technical detail while ignoring the larger political context and in particular, underestimating the systemic threat from political extremism.

This chapter defines robustness and fragility, argues that they can only be determined confidently in retrospect, but that assessments made by political actors, whilst subjective, have important political implications. We suggest some of the consideration that may shape these assessment. They include ideology, historical lessons, and the Zeitgeist. We go on to describe the following chapters, providing an outline of the book.

Yearnings for political change – dormant for decades, suppressed by coercion and perceptions of unattainability – can suddenly appear realizable with the emergence of new stimuli and facilitating conditions. For a Fourth Wave of Democratization, which ended Communist rule in Europe, the Gorbachev-led fundamental change of the Soviet political system and of Soviet foreign policy was the crucial facilitator. There was a circular flow of influence, which began but did not end in Moscow, in which a liberalization that evolved into democratization in the Soviet Union acted as a stimulus to pressure from below in East-Central Europe. But the attainment of decommunization and national independence in those countries emboldened the most disaffected nations within the Soviet multinational state. The transformation of the Soviet political system was consciously sought by Gorbachev, but the fragility of the state in conditions of political pluralism became evident. The USSR was not in crisis in 1985 but fundamental reform led to crisis by 1990–91. Gorbachev’s embrace of political pluralism plus Yeltsin’s paradoxical demand for Russian independence from the Union led to the Soviet breakup. Even apparently consolidated political orders, America’s included, are potentially fragile, as Trump’s attempted subversion of US democracy, with Republican Congressional backing, has underlined.

I make two related claims: (1) assessments of stability made by political actors and analysts are largely hit or miss; and (2) that leader responses to fear of fragility or confidence in robustness are unpredictable in their consequences. Leader assessments are often made with respect to historical lessons derived from dramatic past events that appear relevant to the present. These lessons may or may not be based on good history and may or may not be relevant to the case at hand. Leaders and elites who believe their orders to be robust can help make their beliefs self-fulfilling. However, overconfidence can help make these orders fragile. I argue that leader and elite assessments of robustness and fragility are influenced by cognitive biases and also often highly motivated. Leaders and their advisors use information selectively and can confirm tautologically the lessons they apply.

This chapter focuses on the origins of the institutions that would evolve into the European Union. Norman argues that a focus on perceptions of fragility provides a fruitful but underexplored perspective on the creation of the early institutions of European postwar political cooperation. The design of these institutions were informed by perceptions of fragility associated with democratic governance. The conventional functionalist story of the EU, where cooperative institutions were set up to prevent new conflicts between the formerly warring countries, while not inaccurate, obscures how the reconstruction of the European political order was also an answer to the breakdown of European democracy before the war. Notions of democracy’s fragility informed the functionalist perspective on politics as well as the perceived for a ‘militant’ protection of democratic institutions. Apart from shaping the origins of the European political order, the chapter argues that perceptions of fragility have continued to inform the institutional development of the EU and even ongoing efforts to strengthen its democratic aspects.

We review our theoretical claims in light of the empirical chapters and their evidence that leader assessments matter, are highly subjective, and very much influenced by ideology and role models. They are also influenced by leader estimates of what needs to be done and their political freedom to act. This is in turn shows variation across leaders. The most common response to fragility is denial, although some leaders convince themselves – usually unrealistically – they can enact far-reaching reforms to address it.

One of the root causes of the poor economic performance and fragility in Africa is the marginalization of the majority of the people, due to the absence of efficient and effective language policy and planning. Language policy and planning in Africa will need to focus on the management of multilingualism as a fundamental tool to achieve sustainable and long-term endogenous development. This chapter explores the nexus between language and the economy, and presents an economic situation that is directly impacted by the current language policies on the continent.

The labels ‘state fragility’ and ‘civil war’ suggest that security in several African countries has broken down. While people do experience insecurity in some parts of conflict-affected countries, in other areas they live in relative security. Between 2014 and 2018, the author travelled to South Sudan and the Central African Republic during their ongoing civil wars and into Somalia’s breakaway state of Somaliland to gain insights from the people whose security is at stake. He develops the concept of a ‘security arena’, wherein he investigate security as the outcome of actors’ local political-ordering struggles on a fluidity–stability spectrum. He finds that neither stable nor fluid ordering per se creates security or insecurity. Security improves when actors seek to cohabit all parts of arenas by using varying ordering forms in a complementary fashion.

Chapter 1 provides the research framing of this book. First, it discusses relevant academic works on arenas and combines them with the author’s own empirical insights. It defines ‘security’ and describes the two key dimensions of actors and their interactions. Second, descriptive commonalities and differences in ordering practices in the local security arena lead to analytical insights that call for more in-depth investigation – namely, the respective roles and interactions of state, non-state, and international actors; the dividing lines between inner and outer circles in the local arena; and different relations between peripheral local cases and their respective centres. In the methodological section, the chapter explains the selection of these three countries and the local arenas within them, how data was gathered through an explorative mix of methods, and its analysis through process tracing and the Comparative Area Studies approach.