“Disintegration” bounces back and forth between the boardroom, where negotiators discussed the future of the Far Eastern Championship Games, and the fields, where athletes fought for victory under the sweltering Manila summer sun. The boardroom bouts and athletic competitions both produced controversies, but the former ended up outweighing all the animosity, camaraderie, and complexity of the latter. Boardroom negotiators from the Philippines and Japan, including several who had studied at Springfield College, ended up dissolving the Far Eastern Athletic Association, which had up until that time governed the Games, replacing it with a new organizational entity that included the puppet state of Manchukuo. Chinese negotiators, who were unable to attend the final meeting, vented their frustration upon arriving back in China. The conflict on the field, which centered on a series of basketball competitions, as well as the drama of the boardroom negotiations, set the stage for the actual conflict that would take place when Japan invaded China and the Philippines in World War II. This chapter concludes the story of the monograph by tracing how things began to fall apart as the world sped toward conflict.

Frontline crisis teams are typically very cohesive, characterized by strong bonds between members. Cohesion ensures that team members look out for each other in dangerous work environments, operate resiliently in crisis contexts, and can rapidly coordinate in stressful situations. This explains why many crisis organizations are total institutions. Yet, cohesion may also produce dysfunctional group dynamics, as open debate about the crisis and the required response is avoided. Contestation in crisis teams is often deplored and might escalate into conflict, but it does ensure a thorough analysis of the situation from diverse viewpoints and thus facilitates the adoption of a well-considered, mindful response. The simultaneous need for cohesion and contestation creates a dilemma. To deal with this dilemma, it is important to note that team tensions are varied. Crisis organizations, particularly those with complex tasks, can pursue task-related contestation, while upholding relationship-related cohesion. This requires an investment in mutual trust and respect, so that team develops a safe space for open interactions without risking hostility or disintegration.

A psychodynamic approach to anxiety is not disorder specific; anxiety can and usually is present to varying degrees in all patients that are seen for psychodynamic psychotherapy. This chapter aims to shed some light on some psychodynamic approaches to thinking about anxieties. Using theory and clinical examples we think about how difficulties in containing processes between caregiver and infant early in the infant’s life may predispose to the persistence of archaic anxieties. We go on to explore the nature of separation and loss in relation to anxiety and finally, we reflect on how internal conflict and the role of a critical internal object can bring about anxiety. The clinical examples illustrate how wider variation in anxieties may present in therapy and the last section focuses on how the therapist may experience and respond to these different anxieties.

In this final chapter, we revisit some of the central tensions that run through the whole book and ask ourselves the question: what is the future of the EU? And what is the role of law and politics in its governance? We will start by examining the main routes by which reform of the EU order occurs, beginning with formal Treaty change before discussing 'integration through stealth' and 'dis-integration'. In the remainder of the chapter, will discuss four key choices facing the EU in the near future: substantive choices (over which policies to prioritise), political choices (over how to respond to populism and contestation), constitutional choices (about how autonomous the legal order should be) and global choices (regarding how Europe should define itself in the wider world). The concluding chapter is meant to guide an advanced discussion on what the EU can and should like in the medium-term future.

In the previous chapter, we saw how colonial administrations attempted to eliminate African roadblock polities and obtain exclusive control over mobility, relying on road building to enhance their grip. To understand contemporary roadblock politics, we need to turn to another set of connections: the negative dialectics between the disintegration of colonial transport networks and new forms of power and survival in its ruins. Chapter 4 shows how the story of Central Africa since independence is largely one of the demise of centralized control over logistical space, and with it, the return of the friction of terrain, to adopt James Scott’s vocabulary. In 1960, Congo entered upon independence as one of Africa’s most industrialized countries. In the wake of the Belgian colonial drive for logistical control, it boasted one of the continent’s most sophisticated transport networks. Yet half a century later, most of this road network was gone. Meanwhile the road network of the Central African Republic shrank by half. Concomitantly, the conditions necessary to manufacture power out of the friction of terrain once again fell into place, and within fifty years of independence, control over roads again became a central pivot in the region’s political economy of war.

Since the 1940s pro-European elites have embedded concrete steps towards European integration within a narrative that the member states were on the road to an ever closer union. The unification process was posited to be unidirectional and irreversible, resting on the twin motors of ever progressing deepening and enlargement. Nevertheless, Algeria managed to leave in 1962, as did Greenland in 1985. Long before Brexit, the narrative of the ‘ever closer union’ has also been called into question by other events and processes. For example, the Luxembourg compromise of 1966 ditched an integration step laid out in the treaty. A plethora of small and tiny changes also accumulated to disintegrate existing achievements or make them dysfunctional. The European Coal and Steel Community, for example, was largely non-functioning only a few years after its establishment. Overall, this chapter argues that disintegration and dysfunctionality are part of the political normality of the integration process. They are produced by the treatment of complex problems and knock-on effects of the integration process itself. The trend has strengthened further since Maastricht, and since the 1990s it has been shaping the debate over the European Union more strongly than ever before.