The bigger Brics cement new world

Ironically, given what happened yesterday in Sandton – where a significant salvo was fired in the battle for control of the global economy – the acronym Brics was originally coined by an American economist working for financial giant Goldman Sachs.

In his report, Building Better Global Economic BRICs in 2001, Jim O’Neill identified Brazil, Russia, India and China as showing significant growth and analysing what impact this might have on the global economy.

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The Bric countries only began meeting informally in 2006, started formal summits in 2009 and admitted South Africa as a full member the following year. Since then, the group has been growing in financial power – thanks mainly to the explosive growth of China – as well as global diplomatic clout.

However, with the admission of another six countries – Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – Brics took a major step yesterday towards redefining the global landscape.

As a grouping, it has long been focused on building an alternative to what it calls the “unipolar world”, dominated by the West and the United States in particular.

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That domination has been not only geopolitical, it has also been financial because global monetary systems are knitted together around the dollar. Brics is determined to launch its own payments system and currency in opposition to dollar domination.

And the fact that three major oil producers – Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE – are now on board raises some intriguing possibilities… that oil sales may start to get denominated in other than “petrodollars”, or that there may be cheaper oil for the other Brics countries.

Is this the beginning of the end for Western hegemony? It is probably still to early to say that but after what happened yesterday in Sandton, the world will never be the same.

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