Even the approach of the anniversary inspires dread. On Wall Street this week both the markets and the dollar fell: jittery traders apparently fear that the arrival of September 11 2002 will be marked by a repeat performance of September 11 2001.
That’s understandable. Those traders live in New York, where a glance skyward still brings back lurid memories. But what about everyone else, all those who don’t live a cab ride from Ground Zero? Last September 12 we read, and told ourselves, that the world had changed forever, that nothing would ever be the same again. Were we right?
Americans may well think so. Their country certainly seems different — starting with the man at the top. George W Bush looked vulnerable a year ago, his poll numbers pale. After 9/11 he was transformed, venerated as the embodiment of America during the greatest surge of patriotism since World War II. His party may lose seats in Congress in November, but few would bet against Bush for 2004.
For the best part of a year it has been considered virtual heresy to criticise him or his handling of the ”war on terror”. Now the president compares himself to Winston Churchill, a wartime leader courageous enough to stand up to tyranny while all around him are falling to their knees.
And that mood has spread throughout the United States. The isolationism that could be heard among some Republicans before 9/11 has been replaced by a militant unilateralism, not confined to the governing elite. Where once there was a desire to withdraw from the world — to have no part in global governance nonsense like the Kyoto treaty or the International Criminal Court — now there is an acceptance that the US has a responsibility for the world. Not to share in namby-pamby, multilateral arrangements, mind, but to grab the world by the scruff of the neck and take charge.
The logical line to 9/11 is clear: there are bad guys out there, bent on wreaking havoc, and only the US can defeat them. It used to be foreign leftists who spoke of US imperialism; now an increasing number of US commentators, from Right to Left, proudly describe the US as a latter-day empire — with a duty to protect, and, if necessary, rule the world.
Along with that has come a new disdain for those who might stand in the way. Where once Europe was faulted for its anti-Americanism, a new anti-Europeanism is alive in post-9/11 America — regarding the continent’s nations as craven in the face of dictatorship, congenitally anti-Semitic and with a limp-wristed readiness to surrender their own sovereignty either to the European Union or the United Nations. Only the US can be relied on to save our sorry European asses. As Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer put it recently: ”We are in a war of self-defense. It is also a war for Western civilisation. If the Europeans refuse to see themselves as part of this struggle, fine. If they wish to abdicate, fine. We will let them hold our coats, but not tie our hands.”
If US politics has shifted to a go-it-alone, gung-ho self-confidence, its economics has moved in the opposite direction. A year ago the US seemed set to bounce back from a mini-recession: the president had cut taxes and passed a stimulus package to kick the US back to life. But 9/11 inflicted what economies like least: a grievous shock.
Some industries felt the blow directly, insurance and aviation chief among them. But there was a knock-on effect. Plunging economic confidence prompted a serious, forensic look at the US’s corporations: investors wanted to know which were healthy enough to weather the coming famine and which were not. Companies that had flourished when no one examined them too closely were suddenly exposed as shams. Enron and WorldCom may have survived before 9/11. After it, they were doomed.
Outside the US the felling of the twin towers has left its mark, too.
The issues have changed: last year the future of global capitalism felt like the most important question of our time. Now it has been displaced by panic at the prospect of a ”clash of civilisations”.
Anti-capitalists will insist that we’re all making a terrible mistake, that the only clash of civilisations that matters is the one between rich and poor. They may be right, but the public imagination tends to have room for only one bogeyman at a time. After 9/11 it’s the prospect of murderous violence that terrifies us rather more than the omnipresence of Nike and Starbucks.
A similar reordering of fear has happened within British society. Race relations used to be about tension between black and white. No longer.
After 9/11 it’s Islam that gets the prejudice juices flowing. Whether the row is about faith schools, citizenship classes or British values, the imagined threat today is of a Muslim enemy within. Note how the British National Party aims its most visible bile not at black Britons but at Muslim ones. That pattern was already emerging before 9/11. But it has added bite now: the party can scare voters with the whisper that they might have a hijacker for a neighbour.
The racists’ change of target is but one symptom of a deeper change brought on by September 11: the reassertion of religion. The thought that an act of such horror could be fuelled by religious anger sent people rushing back to texts they had once ignored. The Qur’an became a US bestseller, as people learned anew that religion was not just a private matter for individuals but one with grave public implications.
In Britain, the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury became a question of great, national moment. The probable blockbuster movie of the season is Signs, a thriller with an unashamedly spiritual edge. The Booker-nominated novel Life of Pi centres on faith. Religion is back.
So some of the large, tectonic plates of our world have certainly shifted — but not in the way we expected. On September 12, when the conventional wisdom declared that life would never be the same again, most people were, I suspect, talking not about global politics, but their own day-to-day lives. They imagined a new dark age was coming, in which they would never dare fly again, would stay away from tall buildings and where violent death seemed an ever-present possibility. Where life had seemed relatively safe before 9/11, from now on it would be marked by menace.
It has not turned out that way — for one simple reason. The anticipated wave of spectacular, follow-up horrors did not come: no anthrax on the tube, no dirty bomb in Los Angeles, no nuke in Rome. The result is that we do not live in the permanent shadow we feared, constantly waiting for al-Qaida’s next strike.
Instead we live in a world changed in a different way. Not the transformation we expected, it’s true, but still a world divided, gripped by rumours of war — and full of danger. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002