Canada

I was reading an article a while ago about Canada, and how various provinces threaten to secede, and the writer was speculating that Canada might one day just disintegrate. This idea was characterised as 'the boring-dinner-party theory' of the Canadian constitution. The analogy here (if I really must tease it out for you) is quite lovely. You know those dinner parties where once the first person leaves, everyone else decides that it's ok to leave too. So the thing goes fairly abruptly from being a full table to just being the host couple.