OPINION:ONE OF the instant clichés spawned by 9/11 was that "the world will never be the same again". It was an idea worth resisting, and not just because it seemed such a glib response to so terrible an event. It seemed to imply, somehow, that this massacre of innocents had a higher historical value than other atrocities that happened off-camera, in places less familiar to most of us. And yet, at this distance, it is all too obvious that 9/11 – and more particularly the official response to it – did change the world. Changed it, moreover, entirely for the worse.
Consider, for example, two running news stories of 2011 – the famine in Somalia and the sovereign debt crisis in the developed world. Both can be seen, to a significant extent, as continuing reverberations from the explosions at the Twin Towers.
Somalia is one of the victims of the so-called “war on terror” (the first war on an abstract noun), its fragile government overthrown with US backing because of fears it might be too Islamist. Instead, the country fell under the control of a movement that is, in fact, aligned to al-Qaeda, deepening the political chaos that has been so disastrous for Somalia’s people.
A significant factor in the international debt crisis, meanwhile, is the current budget deficit of the US, projected at $1,580 billion (€1,151 billion) this year. At the time of 9/11, the US was running a current budget surplus. The $2,000 billion cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is by no means the sole cause of this reverse, but it must loom large in any reckoning.
It is hard to remember now, but the world of September 10th, 2001, was a relatively optimistic place. The end of the cold war had opened up new political spaces in which seemingly intractable conflicts (including South Africa and Northern Ireland) had been defused. The great fear that hung over the postwar world – that of nuclear annihilation – had receded. The speeding-up of globalisation, with the integration of eastern Europe and China into the world economy, had created the greatest expansion of trade in history. There was just one superpower, the US, and it seemed a largely benign force in the world.
Much of central and eastern Europe was being integrated, with reasonable success, into a self-confident, expansive European Union whose shiny new currency gave its optimism tangible form. The share of the world’s population defined as living with “low human development” had fallen to 10 per cent – half what it was in 1975.
It was not that barbarism had disappeared – hideous atrocities in Rwanda, the Congo and in the Yugoslav wars had taken the sheen off the bright hopes of a decade earlier. But it was still possible for a reasonable person to hold to some basic assumptions: the concept of universal rights was advancing; war as a means of resolving conflict was an anomaly, a throwback to different times; economic globalisation was making people around the world more similar in their culture and aspirations; large states and international institutions would increasingly work together to resolve global problems.
How could one set of co-ordinated terrorist attacks, however atrocious and darkly ingenious, derail such solid assumptions? The degree to which they were indeed derailed can be gauged simply by listing four things that would have seemed impossible just before 9/11: that a small gang of fanatics directed from remote Afghanistan could change the history of the western world; that democratic governments would resort to systematic kidnapping and torture; that western powers would choose, entirely of their own volition, to launch a major war against a country that did not threaten them; and above all, that the US, the world’s unchallenged superpower, could possibly seem, within a decade, weaker than at any time since the Great Depression.
All of this happened because 9/11 ushered in a new Age of Anxiety, more confusing and unsettling than the last one. A pall of fear hung over the world during the cold war, but the fear was obvious and crushingly simple: the Bomb. Other anxieties arose in the period of relative optimism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, especially those centred on the threat of environmental catastrophe, but they were at least long-term ones. (Global warming wasn’t going to kill you at any given moment.) There’s actually something touchingly naive about the anxieties of the 1990s, like the panic over the Y2K bug that was supposedly going to stop all computers working when the millennium dawned.
In fact, 9/11 created a different kind of fear, neither as wilful as Y2K nor as brutally simple as the Bomb. This new anxiety was summed up in the title of Seamus Heaney's poem in oblique response to 9/11: Anything Can Happen. In the 1990s, such a title would have been redolent of bright possibility – the "anything" would have been assumed to include peace and joy. Now, the anything included big jets appearing from a clear blue sky and flying into tall towers. It included what was described at the inquest into the deaths of 52 people in London on July 7th, 2005, as an "unimaginably dreadful wave of horror", unleashed by ordinary men with ordinary English accents.
Instead of one big fear, this new world contained infinite grounds for terror. Because the 9/11 attacks had seemed to come from nowhere (we now know, of course, that some of the most senior US security officials predicted that something like them would happen), they expanded the sense of threat beyond any rational bounds. If we didn’t know that this was possible, what other apparently impossible horror is about to visit us? If this relatively tiny gang can create such a catastrophe, what other conspiracies may be lurking out there on the edges of western consciousness?
The tragedy was that al-Qaeda wasn’t the only force with an interest in evoking boundless terrors. The fear generated by the atrocity was used by the Bush administration to feed a much larger sense of global dread. Instead of calming anxiety, it ramped it up. This wasn’t a struggle against a criminal gang hyped up on a toxic brand of religious fanaticism. It was a “clash of civilisations”, a war between good people and what George W Bush liked to call “evil-doers”, in which everyone was supposed to pick sides. (A big-selling line of bumper stickers, badges and T-shirts in the US during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq featured the subtle slogan “Evil Doers Suck”.)
And one war wasn’t enough: after the quick, relatively cheap and relatively bloodless overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan – actually a successful response to 9/11 – there had to be the war in Iraq.
It was this response which turned a horrific atrocity into a world-changing catastrophe in which around a million people have been killed or injured, millions more have been displaced and countries beyond either the US or Afghanistan (Somalia and Pakistan) have been destabilised. And the most bitter irony of all is that one of the results of this process has been to expose the hollowness of the belief, virtually a truism in the immediate years after 9/11, that the US rules the world. Al-Qaeda’s grand plan for a new Islamic caliphate was a grotesque failure, and its own bankruptcy has been exposed by the Arab Spring, but it did goad the US into exposing the limits of its own power.
The indirect consequences have been almost as profound. The “war on terror” drew huge financial, political and mental resources away from questions of immense long-term significance, such as global warming and the Millennium Development Goals to tackle poverty and inequality. The rhetoric of the “clash of civilisations” has embedded itself in popular consciousness in Europe, underpinning the steady rise of the anti-immigration and anti-Muslim right. Belief in universal human rights has been set back by many decades as standards that were strong enough to withstand the existential threat of the Nazis have been abandoned by major democratic governments. The fracturing of the so-called “international community” under the pressure of US unilateralism halted progress towards the kind of global institutions that might have been able to respond to the financial crisis. The harm that ensued from that one day has not yet ended.
If there is any good at all to be found in the way 9/11 changed the world, it is the small chink of hope that appeared with Norway’s response to its own, equivalent, national trauma – the murderous spree of Anders Behring Breivik. The prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, announced, right in the midst of the nation’s shock, that the only answer to terrorist violence was more openness and more democracy. He might not have had the courage to say that if he had not seen, after 9/11, the perfect example of how not to respond to murderous fanaticism.