Although globular clusters can get shredded by the gravitational tidal field of a nearby galaxy, they are very stable objects which have survived since the beginning of star formation activity in this universe. They are, in some sense, even more stable than galaxies which seem to have evolved at a later time and are so big that they can suffer disastrous collisions with their neighbors.
Dynamically, globular clusters eventually evaporate as 2 and 3-body stellar encounters fling stars in the dense core regions into the cluster haloes where they escape due to gravitational perturbations with nearby galaxies. This process takes 10s of BILLIONS of years, however. There are several examples of nearly dead globular clusters around the Milky Way.
The above image is of Messier 80 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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