Yet this assertion seems to crumble a little more each year: estimates of the number of Kosovars slain by the province's Serb minority have shrunk from 100,000 to at most 5,000.
Its social base has shrunk but its core support, particularly members of Syria's religious minorities led by Assad's Alawi sect, has stayed loyal or neutral.
Meanwhile, their competition has shrunk.
The common ground has shrunk".
Its support has shrunk.All the better for the centre-left Social Democrats, whose loud-mouthed leader, Milos Zeman, now runs a minority government, under an opaque deal with the supposedly free-market (and supposedly opposition) Civic Democrats.
The music industry has shrunk.
There have been a few highly visible ethnic minority clergy in recent decades – among them Rose Hudson Wilkins, the Speaker's chaplain, and Michael Nazir-Ali, the former bishop of Rochester, but the proportion had not risen and in recent years has shrunk.
Corporate indebtedness, never very high, has shrunk.
The current-account deficit has shrunk.
