To the indignation of some and the surprise of others, a little over a week ago Alberto Fernández reappeared after a prolonged absence to proudly announce that Argentina had just joined the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), a group of “emerging” countries that intends to establish itself as an alternative to the G7, which is made up of the most consolidated countries that have already emerged: the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada.
As the two opposition presidential candidates Javier Milei and Patricia Bullrich quickly pointed out, the BRICS is an organization dominated by dictatorships, one of which, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is seeking to gobble up neighboring Ukraine, massacring its inhabitants, while another , China, is governed by characters who do not hesitate to make those who dare to protest against their abuses disappear.
Although it includes two democracies, India and Brazil, that aspire to play decisive roles in a still imaginary new world order, and one that is in deep trouble, South Africa, there is no doubt that the countries that call the shots in the BRICS they are brutal autocracies. It is understandable, then, that the will of the outgoing Kirchner government to join a group led by the Chinese regime that does not hide its intention to put an end to centuries of Western supremacy as soon as possible, has been repudiated by those who are not willing to lend themselves to a geopolitical maneuver that in his opinion is essentially undemocratic.
Milei would like to break completely with China because it is communist and with Brazil because she does not like President Lula, but Bullrich would prefer to limit himself to distancing himself from regimes that he believes are contrary to the values he describes as national. So, presumably, if one succeeds in October or November, he’ll start managing him by sending the invitation to join the Brics into the trash can.
Would it be worth formally linking up with the enlarged Brics, which in addition to the four founders who were inspired by a suggestion by the British economist James O’Neill who bet on the emergence of new development poles, and South Africa may soon include Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and others, including Argentina, to be a reissue of the supposedly non-aligned movement that exerted great influence on the international scene in the final decades of the last century? While it would provide opportunities for some politicians and officials to travel to exotic locations and make vehement speeches about how unfair the world is, the concrete benefits would be slim. Since most of the members are much poorer than Argentina, even Sergio Massa would not find it easy to convince them to lend him more money.
The relative importance of the BRICS, which already generate as much wealth as the members of the G7, is due exclusively to the imposing demographic dimensions of its members. China’s gross product may be on par with America’s, but its population just so happens to be four times the size. Likewise, India, with even more people than China, recently displaced the United Kingdom as the country with the world’s fifth largest economy, but since it has twenty times more people than the old colonial power, such an achievement means very little. It is that the productivity of the countries considered advanced continues to be much more impressive than that of the BRICS; the only thing its members have in common is underdevelopment.
The most interested in transforming the BRICS into something more than a small private club is, when not, the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping who sees them as a diplomatic and commercial instrument that could be very useful to him. His attitude is similar to that of the hierarchs of the Soviet Union towards the “non-aligned” who, without being declared allies of the Kremlin, helped him by putting pressure on the Western powers, reminding them of their historical sins and complaining about their current policies, attributing their backwardness. to the crimes perpetrated by the imperialists of other times. Although the strategy thus supposed rarely produced positive concrete results, it had a significant impact on progressive sectors of Western public opinion by motivating them to take more seriously the complaints of what was called the “third world” and which today is usually described as the “third world”. global south”.
Although the Americans, Europeans and Japanese insist that they are not concerned about the Chinese initiative, they are preparing to face a new rhetorical offensive from countries whose rulers make no secret of their desire to see the world’s architecture restructured to the detriment of the relatively wealthy. The Chinese are very angry that in much of the world the US dollar is the reference currency; they say that different countries should use the local currency, although of course they hope that many will choose to rely on the yuan.
Xi is aware that globalization is losing steam. While it has greatly helped China and other underdeveloped countries by allowing them to take on the manufacturing of vast amounts of consumer goods, it has harmed tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of workers and white-collar workers in the world. “First World” who have not been able to compete with Asians who are capable of fulfilling the same tasks in exchange for wages that are strikingly lower. In addition to causing economic and social problems, such consequences of globalization are undermining democratic institutions in the United States, where they made possible the emergence of Donald Trump, and some European countries.
President-for-life Xi is in a hurry. He knows that time is no longer in his favor. China is in such dire straits that some are convinced that the era of ultra-fast growth is over and that from now on the regime will have to work very hard to retain power that depends on an unwritten pact to guarantee the prosperity of a middle class that is increasingly restless. Those who say that years of stagnation lie ahead for China believe that deflation, recurring banking crises, the collapse of the birth rate, which in many regions appears to have dropped to levels comparable to that of South Korea, and the alarming surplus of men, since it is estimated that there are at least 30 million who will never be able to marry, portend a very dark future.
Meanwhile, in Africa and other parts of the “global south,” the economic relationship with China is under fire by those who mistake it for a variant of the old neocolonialism that is even worse than the West’s because it doesn’t create jobs for its compatriots, that the Chinese tend to privilege their own workforce that is obedient and efficient. To be more specific, opponents of Beijing’s growing influence say that it is deliberately undermining the sovereignty of the countries it “helps” by making them fall into “the debt trap” and then forcing them to insert themselves into an eventual new Chinese order. It is a risk that does not worry Massa.
Before the invasion of Ukraine began, Russia was almost as influential in the league of autocracies that was being formed as China, which is why, at the wrong moment, Alberto urged Putin to take advantage of his desire that Argentina serve as a “gateway” to Latin America. However, the military failures of the alleged “second army in the world” demolished to such an extent the idea that Russia, despite having a smaller economy than Italy’s and not much larger than Spain’s, was still a great power, that today the consensus is that it is nothing more than a vassal of China. Still, the mere presence of Russia has been enough to bring the BRICS into disrepute in the eyes of those who had seen Xi’s attempts to make the group the nucleus of a broad international movement that would back “autocracies” innocuous. not only the cold war that they are waging against the United States and its democratic allies.
Fortunately, it does not seem very likely that Xi will manage to unite the enlarged BRICS. In addition to being a founding member, India vigorously opposes its big neighbor’s expansionism, which is why it has allied itself militarily with Japan, the United States and Australia. For the rest, its leaders believe it is capable of closing the enormous economic gap that separates the two Asian giants. Before Mao’s death, China and India were equally poor, but by abandoning Marxist recipes and embracing a sui generis version of neoliberalism, China quickly became a bona fide power. Many Indians believe that as long as their country abandons the existing extraordinarily bureaucratic system that owed much to the influence of early British Labour, and which for decades condemned it to settle for what some humorists called “the Hindu rate of growth”, walking the time would be able to overtake China. It could be argued, then, that it would be convenient for an Argentina governed by fervent supporters of Western liberalism to remain in the BRICS, since in that case it would be possible to collaborate with India to prevent the group from subservient to the voracious Middle Empire of the dictator Xi.
