[andrew_eit]

Actually, I would say that their history is an argument against the case that they are unstable.

The fact that Germany had such a massive political and existential crisis that led them to war and genocide is still very much present in their memory. National pride is still something that is quite frowned upon (it would make people very uncomfortable say, if you walk around the street with a German flag and it's not clearly due to a football game).

On the other hand, I would say countries that have not yet had any cultural or existential crisis in the last few hundred years as a nation are more at risk of collapse. Unless the country and culture is constantly changing and evolving and its population are similarly keen to routinely update the status quo, at some point it will fall out of sync with, people will get upset and wonder why things aren't like the good old days, find arbitrary reasons for this (identification of perpetrators and allocation of blame) and the upheaval will begin.

[danjac]

I'm not arguing that German society or politics are unstable, rather that there is a justifiable deep-rooted fear of instability at an individual level - which doesn't have to be rational.

[andrew_eit]

Ok that I agree with - German conservative culture does value 'keeping everything as it is and not changing anything except when absolutely necessary'.