PRESS RELEASE

19 September 2002

September 11 one year on:
BASIC Paper analyses how 
the world has changed

A new discussion paper published by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) explores how world politics has changed since 11 September 2001. September 11th 2001 One Year On: A New Era in World Politics?, written by Dr. Andrew Cottey, a member of BASIC’s Board and a lecturer and Jean Monnet Chair in European Political Integration in the Department of Government at University College Cork, argues that international politics have been altered dramatically by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC.

The paper’s main conclusions are:

• Al-Qaida is a truly new type of threat: a global terrorist group, engaged in an all-embracing conflict with the United States and unconstrained in the violence it is willing to use.
  
  

• The war on terrorism and the related struggle against the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have become the central elements of a new US foreign policy – backed-up by a greatly increased willingness to assert US power, unilaterally if necessary.
  
  

• Despite President Bush’s claim that ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’, the majority of other countries are neither uncritical true believers in, nor out-and-out critics of the United States but rather agnostics seeing both benefits and dangers, good and bad, in American power and foreign policy. All states will face dilemmas about whether and how to support, oppose or stand aside from the US-led war on terror.
  
  

• Viewing 11 September 2001 as the first blow in a new global conflict akin to the Cold War, however, risks over-simplifying a complex reality and exaggerating the scale of the threat posed by al-Qaida. In the worst case, rhetoric and policies which view all politicised Islamic and all terrorist groups as part of a larger global campaign against the United States and its allies risk exacerbating tensions between the West and the Islamic world and making Samuel Huntington’s infamous clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy.

BASIC’s director Dr. Ian Davis says "This paper provides an important analysis of the long-term implications of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. We hope that it will contribute to the on-going debate on how America and the international community should respond to the problem of terrorism."

Read: September 11th 2001 One Year On: A New Era in World Politics? 

For further information please contact:

Dr. Ian Davis at +1 202 347 8340 or idavis@basicint.org
Dr. Andrew Cottey at +353 21 490 2087 or +353 86 3828938 (mobile)

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