What's been the secret of that stability within its borders? Put simply, that in times of crisis, the country's politicians have generally sighed, buried the hatchet and worked out some form of messy compromise to keep the wheels on the wagon and the country motoring.
That's not how it feels in the UK today. With a just few weeks left on the clock before the country crashes out of the European Union without a deal, British politics remains bitterly divided and unable to even meet and talk to try to work things out.
The UK has a Prime Minister who had a record-breaking political defeat on her Brexit deal -- she lost by 230 votes -- but who survived no-confidence votes from both her own party and her own Parliament. Defeated but still in office, she is sticking by the deal she has signed.
Opposite her stands Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, which to date refuse to support a second referendum on May's deal versus canceling Brexit, refuse to support May's deal -- and refuse to meet with her until she "rules out" leaving without a deal, the default scenario and the only remaining possibility.
In business-as-usual UK, we would expect one -- or more likely both -- leaders to compromise, to weaken their own political interest and to work out some form of deal.
Given that Corbyn is far more eurosceptic than his base and has repeatedly said he would like to respect the 2016 vote to leave the EU, logic would suggest a "soft" Brexit, keeping close ties to the EU, might be a possible agreement between the two leaders, even if both would risk paying a price for it at the ballot box.
But that ignores the unique underlying dynamic in British politics at present -- and provides the missing piece of the puzzle to the standoff: Jeremy Corbyn is not seen by the Conservatives as a "normal" Labour leader.
One way to think of the Conservative attitude to Corbyn is to think of him as a left-wing Trump: The party is convinced he would be so radical -- and, in its view, so damaging to the country (or, its critics would suggest, to the establishment) -- that keeping him out of power is an even higher priority than working out a sensible Brexit.
Weakening the Conservative Party, to that logic, would risk creating the conditions for a Corbyn majority government -- and that's not a risk it's willing to take.
On the Labour side of the equation, there is a mirror to that reasoning: While they, of course, don't see their own agenda as damaging, they would not deny they intend to be radical and transformative. Corbyn's shock victory in the Labour leadership contest in 2015 created what many of his inner circle regard as an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime chance for a "real" left-wing government in the UK.
This prospect was enhanced by the 2017 snap election, which Labour was expected to lose by a landslide. Instead, it actually picked up seats and left Theresa May in charge of a weak minority administration. Labour is so close to government -- where its members never imagined they could be -- they can almost taste it and don't want to lose what could be their only shot over Brexit.
When they look at the potential of what they could do in government -- changing the tax system, renationalizing services, expanding public investment and more -- trading that off to bail out a Conservative government on Brexit doesn't look appealing.
It's long been a complaint in the UK that politicians are too similar to each other and the two main political parties agreed with each other too much. That's not the situation any more: There are huge ideological differences between the government and the opposition, and little incentive for either to try to bridge them.
This, then, is the cause for the UK's standoff: While the world is alarmed about Brexit, the two parties are in many ways even more afraid of one another -- and that's not a deadlock anyone seems to know how to break.
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