The governments of the five large countries of the Global South, the BRICS states, met in New Delhi this week for their fourth summit. These five countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are home to forty per cent of the world’s peoples, and their share of the world’s Gross Domestic Product is now just over twenty-five per cent.
Most of what was said at the summit, and in its Delhi Declaration, was hot air, as one has come to expect of such meetings. However there are at least two significant developments that set this summit apart. First, the BRICS states not only repeated their critique of the world economic order and North Atlantic financial hegemony, but they offered new policy guidelines and institutions as a counterpoint. Second, the BRICS states have taken some more steps toward the rejection of the North Atlantic’s political leadership over the planet. It is not clear on this second point where the BRICS states propose to plant their own flag, but what is clear is the frustration with the NATO agenda in North Africa and West Asia and with the North Atlantic agenda in the trade debates that will take place in Doha, Qatar next month.
Little of this summit came into the papers of the North Atlantic. Part of this is to be expected, as newspapers generally abjure stories about seemingly dull trade negotiations and routine political meetings. No wonder that the news of the Arab League in Baghdad this week is simply about the fact that it is happening there for the first time since 1990 than about what the Arab states shall discuss in the way of trade deals and Syria. The character of the debates and the measures taken are not going to be reported at all. All that we shall hear is that the Arab League will not take a position on Syria consonant with what the West would like. That is the measure of the North Atlantic presses’ interest in that summit. On the BRICS summit, even the financial papers have been silent. The only report in a major paper was banal (from Jim Yardley in The New York Times, March 29). It repeated the old saw that the BRICS is more a photo-op than a genuine political bloc. As Ananth Krishnan of The Hindu said of Yardley’s report, it “puts up a straw man,” hoping that the BRICS is a bloc “which it isn’t, and then shoots it down in 800 words.”
Typically, the BRICS states have been wary of a frontal assault on neo-liberalism or on the policy arrangements favored by the North READ MORE
