[jaguar]

Well yes and no. More stable of late for a variety of reasons, whether it will remain stable is another matter.

The first thing is you're confusing stability and flexability. Look at the relative insanity of the middle ages, wars raging everywhere and all the associated chaos yet somehow, things went on.

Colapse is complicated, without specifying a certain scenario or trigger the extent, bredth and timeframe is pointless to speculate but the amount of damoclean swords that could trigger long term failure are in double figures. A riot is over faily quickly but what about someone unleashing some of those tasty anti-food supply bioagents the soviets kindly developed, then watch the impact of rioting and chaos as dirty bombs spray radioactive isotopes across a few major cities Green Run style (notorious intentional release of about 350,000 curies worth of radioactive isotopes by the US army).

Hell, something as simple as a serious nuclear weapon going off in the middle of Europe could cause at least medium term breakdown. In short, you're not thinking big enough, the kind of sceanrios that get gamed out are well beyond rioting, rioting is a side effect, not a root cause.

Lets play a game. I want to fuck up the UK. Let's get to work. First of all, we're going to bomb two seperate nuclear holding facalities, these tanks hold millions of litres on some seriously nasty stuff. They're well re-inforced by modern anti-bunker shoulder mounted weaponary could do the job. As huge clouds of radioactive material spew forth anthrax is being released in 20-30 location, aerosol style, killing both wildlife and people, not to mention causing a total breakdown in cities as people flea both. The anthrax lives in the soil for up to 20 years rendering most farmland inhabitable, though that's the least of your problems when you consider the radiological contamination, cities lie abandoned, must of europe is a wasteland.