Bicycles and Slippery Slopes

What would we do without metaphors? Eugene Volokh has written a law article on "slippery slopes" and now Daniel Drezner mentions something that seems the mirror image: "bicycle theory". Here's Drezner's link

"The 'end of Europe' claim by Prodi is an extreme version of the 'bicycle theory' of international integration, which says that if there is any slowdown in integration, the process starts to wobble like a slow bicycle, eventually toppling under its own weight. This line was also used after the Maastricht accord was signed in the early nineties. I suspect that warnings like Prodi's will, if anything, further turn off people against what elites tell them about the European Union."

A Google search seems to link it to Fred Bergsten. The slippery slope is, in my telling, the idea that a small step forward will result in a long trip to an unwanted destination; the bicycle is the idea that an interruption to progress forward will result in a short trip to the ground.