Perhaps that is what is required to maintain the precarious independence from the larger empires on three sides.

However, by playing one petty ruler against another, under the leadership of their first mayor, Salvor Hardin, they maintained a precarious independence.

These states have enjoyed periods of precarious independence, but never independence with security.

Presently it maintained a precarious political independence based on bribery, determination, suppleness in business practice, and a stiffness in internal loyalty bordering on patriotism.

THE Metropolitan Opera faces its precarious independence with such resourcefulness that one winces a little at all the criticism it's been getting this year.

High in the central mountains the Tzotzil Maya maintained a precarious independence by working seasonally as peons on the coffee plantations.

In 1971, putting Bengali nationalism ahead of religion, Bangladeshis opted for a precarious independence instead, and slid rapidly into hopeless underdevelopment.

For a century Osroene would retain a precarious independence as a buffer state, sandwiched between the two empires.

And now, with the Iraqi Kurds savoring their newfound but still precarious independence, it seems that Kurdish past might once again prove to be Kurdish prologue.

Tensions there had been throughout the century but there is some evidence of a conscious 'respectable' assault on this precarious independence by the end of the nineteenth century.