New world disorder

A scenario in Bruce Sterling’s book Tomorrow Now. He says: Outside the prosperous bounds of the New World Order is a large and miserable New World Disorder. It includes not only the smoking ground of the Balkans but the Caucasus, South Central Asia, and vast, astonishing swaths of Africa. This process of New World Disorder is impressively globalized. It starts with local resentments, but it works through offshore money. It is financed not by the New World Order itself. Civilized states require some criminal services — their populations have a great and abiding need for narcotics, refugee labor, red-light districts, money laundries, and so forth. These are dangerous and socially ruinous activities. So civilized states persecute them and, by fiat, export disorder into the weakest and least policed areas of the globe. In practice, these lucrative crimes have ended up housed in territories that are commercially worthless due to religious and ethnic tensions. So in a globalized world, the nations that break and fail become crooks. The New World Disorder will be a lasting aspect of the new century. It cannot disappear from the Earth through a “war on terror” by states. Bold acts of mass terror can be made more difficult, but the need for the disorder’s goods and services is endemic.