1. The events of 11th Sept. and subsequent responses have interacted with gloomy economic and commercial news, especially in the USA. If the war proceeds at length and the threat / reality of terrorism persists, by what models can forecasting add value to either the policy-making or planning process?
2. Even if the positive/optimistic analyses of those like Hamish McRae and Robert Barro are right, does the scale of 11th Sept. dramatically darken consumer / citizen perceptions of risk? For the foreseeable?
3. Has 11th Sept. effectively brought the Nineties to an end? With all that this would imply for the Peace & Plenty model?
4. Does the debate about globalisation require new verbal and cultural architecture? How can the benign model of globalisation proceed in conditions of polarised geo-political conflict? Is Fukuyama dead - or just napping?
5. Life has an apparently easy habit of being able to survive around terror. Terrorism has traditionally (in the West) been localised and incidental in its impacts. The West's exposure has generally been light. Some 29 people died in Omagh. Some 85 people died in the Bologna bombing. The entire ETA campaign, which began in the 1960's, has caused a total to date of 1,000 deaths. Compare with the 100,000 people who have died in civil disorder in Algeria since 1992. Or the 800,000 people killed in mass terrorism in Rwanda in 1994. Or with Colombia where, in addition to the frequent murders, 3,000 people are kidnapped every year. Does the scale of 11th Sept. re-alter the West's position in relation to terrorism? Make it less marginal a phenomenon?
6. Has the environmentalist movement lost ground in its responses to 11th Sept? Does the claim that the conflicts now in play have roots in a mixture of ecological despoliation and resource mal-distribution contain credibility? Is eco-pacifism just a flight from political reality? Meanwhile, has the anti-capitalist / - consumerist movement also lost share-value through the ambivalence of its responses? Or do these essentially non-patriotic, we-told-you-so, we-have-sown-the seeds-ourselves arguments capture the essence of the inner dialogue within the thinking citizen-consumer?
7. Is the Bowling Alone (Putnam) analysis - and all the sub-variants (Schor, Frank, Reich…) - now in the process of comprehensive re-writing within US academic life? In other words, is the whole America-in-moral-crisis agenda, and all the politically prescriptive literature that has accompanied it, now dead?
8. Is the model of a benevolent multi-culturalism, as espoused most especially by the Left, in practical trouble? Is a resurgent anti-secular tribalism now inevitable? Have the BNP + OBL changed the picture in the UK forever?
9. By what models should we predict the future (revival?) of those commercial sectors most immediately threatened by 11th Sept? Air travel? Insurance? Tourism? Are we talking short-term upsets only here?
10. Have the electorate's sense of national priorities been re-adjusted - to the Labour Government's advantage? Will it in due course seem unpatriotic to blame HMG for weak public-service delivery when it has been waging a war? Must Labour win again? And again?
