The Children of 9/11

Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed.

I was six years old on September 11, 2001 – old enough to watch adults try to make sense of the images on television, but too young to properly understand what any of it meant. Those of us who were children on that fateful day certainly understand it now.

Mine is the generation shaped by 9/11. Not because it was the only event that did so, but because it was the first in a succession of crises that have defined the world we grew up in.

We were born into the optimistic aftermath of the Cold War. The Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and liberal democracy appeared triumphant. Britain was enjoying the ‘new dawn’ of New Labour. It was supposed to be the “end of history”.

Then came September 11.

The attacks did not simply kill almost 3,000 people, including 67 Britons. They cracked the assumptions of a post-Cold War world. When Tony Blair pledged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States, that strategic alignment sowed the seeds for the invasion of Iraq that became a lasting source of distrust in political leadership and still shapes how Labour talks about military intervention to this day.

The lesson Labour drew from Iraq was not necessarily that military action is always wrong, but that the burden of proof for doing so must be extraordinarily high – a caution that led to fraught debates, for right or for wrong, over Syria.

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Britain today is a very different country from the one I was born into. Since that optimistic dawn, we have lived through the financial crash, Brexit, a pandemic, political instability, a major war in Europe, and an almost perpetually volatile Middle East.

In the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington, and later in Madrid and London, the state acquired greater powers – ostensibly to protect us from terrorism. A quarter of a century on, surveillance and counter-terrorism are an established part of British life. Yet the paradox is that our faith in the institutions exercising that power has never been lower.

The result is a peculiar inheritance for the children of 9/11. We started out in a world that seemed to be becoming safer, more prosperous, more tolerant and more predictable. Instead, each successive crisis has chipped away at that certainty until little remains.

September 11 shattered the idea that the great conflicts of the 20th Century were behind us. The financial crash exposed the fragility of the economic certainties of the age. Brexit upended the assumption that Britain’s political direction was inevitably towards greater European integration and collaboration. Covid proved that even more basic assumptions about everyday life could disappear overnight. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine destroyed the last great assumption of the post-Cold War age – that major war between states in Europe was consigned to the history books.

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Not everything since 2001 has been a story of decline, nor was the world before 9/11 a golden age. But my generation has grown up with a particular relationship with uncertainty. For us, successive crises have become the background noise of adult life.

That inheritance has not just been psychological. My generation entered a job market shaped by the crash that happened before we’d even sat our A-levels, and have spent the years since trying to get onto a housing ladder whose bottom rung keeps rising faster than our wages. We paid more for our degrees than any generation before us. And thanks to Brexit, we lost freedoms the generation before us took for granted – the ability to work, study and travel freely across a continent – gone before most of us had the chance to use them properly.

Twenty-five years ago, I was one of the children watching adults try to make sense of an incomprehensible event. Today, having seen one certainty after another disappear, I am one of the adults trying to make sense of the world it helped create.

The challenge now is not simply to remember the world that ended on September 11, 2001. It is to do better than the generation before us at building what replaces it – to treat the uncertainty and instability of the modern world as something to be defended against, not just endured.

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