The alliance of Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa seems one of the symbols of the fundamental changes that have taken place.
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“At first they don’t notice you, then they laugh at you, then they fight with you. And then you win”. This great saying of Mahatma Gandhi comes to mind for the first time when looking at the path that the BRICS organization has traveled in the last two decades. In the early 2000s, when, in the context of enthusiasm for the ideas of the “unipolar moment” and the “end of history”, which had not yet sunk into oblivion, some experts began to talk about the unlimited potential of developing powers , predictions about an imminent change in the global coordinate system were perceived with a smile.But today, the reformatting of the world order seems an accomplished fact, and the alliance of Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa seems one of the symbols of the fundamental changes that have taken place.
Of course, like many young organizations, BRICS is experiencing some difficulties and problems. Our positions and views are far from identical in everything. Moscow and Beijing have learned firsthand how pernicious illusions about the prospects for an overly confidential dialogue with the collective West can be. New Delhi, Pretoria and Brasilia may still have to go through a similar recovery. Some of the elites of the respective countries are still closely connected with Western business circles and leave no hope, even in the face of the sanctions war unleashed against Russia, of integrating into global markets.
At the same time, taking advantage of the vulnerability of open democratic systems, the West uses all its favorite tools to weaken the position of independent politicians. However, the vector of movement is determined and, in the long term, the liberation of the old dependency will definitely take place. After all, no amount of persuasion can make Indians forget centuries of colonial oppression, Brazilians forget the crimes of the military junta covered up by Washington, South Africans the US-sponsored crimes of the apartheid era.
But in the end, with the extremely important symbolic significance of the upcoming BRICS summit, this platform is far from the only alternative to the formats promoted by the West. The same Shanghai Cooperation Organization has long become a key association for solving fundamental problems in the field of security in the Eurasian region, and the queue to join it continues to grow. In Southeast Asia, ASEAN, along with major international players, is actively working to promote an alternative to the US-centric agenda. OPEC+ has become the most important world forum in the field of energy policy, with which Washington’s “arbiters of the world’s fate” are forced to curry favor. The African Union is actively transforming the status of the countries of the continent in international politics. And this list can go on for a long time.
In fact, the world has finally become truly multipolar. And the only ones who refuse to recognize the fait accompli are American and European politicians, intoxicated by the illusions of previous years, who still see in the Ukraine crisis an opportunity to recover positions lost by their own arrogance. They do not understand that the extinction of prior dominance is the inevitable follow-up to objective historical trends. It would be naive to expect some fateful decisions from the next BRICS summit that will predetermine the development of humanity; such pathos is rather characteristic of essentially empty G-7 events. The leaders of the largest developing countries are well aware that ahead lies a path of decades that will lead us to the desired goal only during the lifetimes of the next generations. But the first steps in that direction have already been taken, and the restoration of neocolonial unipolarity is only possible in the imagination of yesterday’s thought rulers, who helplessly watch as the hegemonic reality that suits them is being destroyed.
