The 1960s were marked by wide-ranging debates about British decline, so much so that historians have identified a culture of ‘declinism’ affecting all asspects of contemporary life, from the prescriptions of economists to the activism of the (short-lived) ‘I’m Backing Britain’ movement in 1968. Though declimism principally affected the political and literary culture of England, this chapter explores how it was also reproduced in strikingly similar ways elsewhere - in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in particular - where a proclivity for diagnosing the deficiencies of nationhood became a recurring feature of the broader political culture. Yet such was the focus on national maladies that these wider commonalities and their shared sources of discontent were almost never remarked upon — even as the practitioners borrowed freely from each other’s rhetorical templates. This chapter, then, takes stock of the wider anxieties about the ‘state of the nation’ that converged around the diminished certainties of Greater Britain.

In her assessment of US democracy, Chebel d’Appollonia emphasizes three main points. First, Americans perceived the meaning of democracy in a multidimensional way. This explains why political leaders’ estimates of the state of democracy have never been just context-dependent; they have also been ideologically contingent, framed by beliefs in US exceptionalism that are often disconnected from reality. Second, US democracy has been and still is more fragile and more resilient than commonly perceived – which suggests we need to put into perspective both an overconfidence in robustness and pessimistic accounts of fragility. Chebel d’Appollonia therefore examines the relationship between “the weakness of robustness” and “the strength of fragility” in order to demonstrate how robustness and fragility are organically related, for better or worse, in terms of perceptions and practices. Third, assessments of US democracy oscillate between overconfidence and declinism, with no stable equilibrium between these two poles. While it is premature to evaluate what the state of US democracy will be in the coming years, Chebel d’Appollonia identifies major threats that can seriously damage US democracy – such as the denial of actual problems by leaders, or conversely, the use of declinist arguments to legitimize undemocratic practices allegedly designed to protect democracy.