Many commentators in recent days have allowed themselves to predict the advent of a new protagonist of world governance: the Super-BRICs.
Some observers, adding up the GDPs of a number of large emerging or developing economies, argue that the West has already been outclassed. In my view, it is about hasty conclusions that do not stand the test of a few informed considerations. It seems to me that the following three points are sufficient to suggest a little caution.
Primo, if it is clear which countries are traditionally part of the BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India and China, plus South Africa added later, it is not equally clear which other countries would be added to form the Super-BRICs. We are talking about Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Iran and various other countries. It is worth remembering that, in the face of self-determination by a new bloc alternative to the Western one (North America and Western Europe, plus, if you will, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea) the acronym BRICs came minted in 2001 by Goldman Sachs to better channel financial investments towards the main emerging economies. BRICs is therefore, by construction, a Western etymological creation, functional to the needs of financial capitalism and which is ill-suited to denominate an opposition to the West itself.
For, it makes no sense to add realities that are so different and lacking a common denominator of a historical, political, institutional order. It's true, sometimes the heterogeneity of ends manifests itself and, even if born in the shadow of the most famous American investment bank, an effective synthesis could blossom from that diversified mass. However, the definition of the Super-BRICs, if one goes beyond the only glue (“super” yes but only as “super-ficial”) of the opposition to the West, reveals a giant with feet of clay. A single example of the two heavyweights will suffice. Talking about a structured alliance between China and India is currently a mere verbal exercise, if one recalls the historic conflicts between the two Asian giants or the persistent border tensions. Furthermore, India is a founding member of QUAD, the institutional container of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which since 2007 has aggregated it to the United States, Japan and Australia precisely in order to contain Chinese expansionism. In this sense, it should be remembered that since 2020 the QUAD has been gemstoned into QUAD Plus, also including New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam and since 2021 it has also opened up to the participation of Brazil and Israel as observers.
Third, even leaving aside the problems of Russia's systematic violation of international law, which smear the negotiating table, the idea of the Super-BRICs emerges in the wrong historical phase, the one in which some crucial issues of the forty-year hyper-development are coming to a head Chinese. The ongoing bursting of the domestic housing bubble sounds jarring for China's expanding global role right now, which, in hindsight, is the biggest of the giants at the Super-BRICs picnic. Here too a memory exercise is needed. In the late XNUMXs, the main challenger to the United States was the economy of Japannot that of China. Well, about thirty years ago the precedent of the explosion of the Japanese real estate bubble occurred, from which the economy of the Rising Sun has never recovered. Obviously, it would be incorrect to draw a parallel sic et simpliciter. Nonetheless, given that there has also been talk of the hypothesis of a common currency for the Super-BRICs, it is legitimate to ask whether, in the current scenario of the collapse of Chinese real estate values, the citizens of the world who can choose would prefer to invest their savings in a currency (even if digital) printed in Beijing or another printed in Washington or Frankfurt.
In short, that of the Super-BRICs, rather than a solid reality, at the moment seems like one curious story to tell to the children to put them to sleep, or maybe one fake novels to be spread on social networks, but another topic would open up here…