Destabilisation is a word that has international connotations. It is currently being used about the situation in Eastern Ukraine, Iraq or the general situation in the UK after the EU election results. But it had a long journey into the English language, from saints to ships to politics.
To go back to its roots, let us start with the idea of being stable or strong. The term is used in two of the earliest works of literature ever to appear in English. Firstly, as early as the 1200s in the South English Legendary, there are biographies of saintly persons. One of them St. Oswald ruled before Christianity was really stable in the country. There is also a use of the term in Cursor Mundi, one of the first great poems in English, written around 1300, a huge work of some 30,000 lines describing the history of the world from a Christian and English perspective. It describes a castle that stands stable.
Even though the word was used many times in medieval English, it took almost 600 years to appear as a verb in English. It took until 1861 with the English engineer and naval expert William Froude, a specialist in the stability of ships, who improved hull design and worked out a formula relating to the speed-length ratio called the Froude number. So he really knows what he is talking about when he describes a ship that could be “stabilised by breadth of beam or by deeply stowed ballast”.
And it took even longer for the word ‘destabilise’ to appear. When it did so, it was in an appropriate form, in a book called These Eventful Years put together by Encyclopaedia Britannica. An article by W. M. Hughes (the Australian politician who had just finished as Prime Minister) described how the creation of a new political party has a “destabilising influence” on politics across the British Commonwealth.
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