`Social Evils From Failed State Can Spread to Entire World`

British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote in his book “The Breaking of Nations,” “It was not the well-organised Persian Empire that brought about the fall of Rome, but the barbarians.”

The author seemed to suggest that countries join forces to confront chaos and crises across the world.

The weekly magazine Economist said in its latest edition that people across the world face an increase in crises as social evils stemming from failed states have spread since the end of the Cold War.

The zones of war and chaos had been primarily seen as threats to the people living within them or nearby. This is no longer the case as blurred boundaries and the growing number of immigrants have led such places increasingly to be seen as a threat to the entire world.

In the United States or Europe, local and regional conflicts and chaos and crime in weak states are considered bigger threats to their security and national defense.

“Ungoverned, undergoverned, misgoverned and contested areas” offer fertile grounds for terrorists and other nefarious groups, says the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy issued last year.

Experts say such a phenomenon became prevalent since the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001. The crisis and conflicts that had been confined to the Middle East spread beyond the region since the 2001 terrorist attacks posed a threat to the whole world.

The magazine took Somalia as a case in point. American troops went there in 1992 to help the United Nations stave off a humanitarian catastrophe, but still carry out air strikes there against suspected jihadist camps two decades later.

Somalia’s chaos also prompted an invasion of Ethiopia in 2006 and created more chaos as the waters off the Somali coast are a haven for piracy, disrupting shipping through the Suez Canal. The global community has felt the need to settle the problem, with China even sending warships to the Gulf of Aden to protect its commercial shipping.

The massive riots that broke out in 2005 in the ghettoes of Paris filled with many African immigrants are also closely related with the spread of social evils.

Weak states such as Afghanistan and Iraq have become the refuge of international terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda, emerging as a major threat to the security and social order of Western countries.

The Economist also said issues that can simultaneously affect regions like the global financial crisis and bird flu can be included in the same category.

surreal@donga.com