Many are looking with interest at the BRICS meeting in the Russian city of Kazan. In our country, the Russophile sector most often reinforces the importance of such a meeting. However, she does not have the sacred charge that is attributed to her. The meeting is an attempt, no more, no less, by Russia to try to look like a country that is not in the isolation it clearly is. In other words, Russia is again trying to use propaganda tools to solve an intractable problem.< /p>
The actual situation is what it is, namely – The Russian Federation is in severe international isolation from the free world, and the impasse in Ukraine and sanctions have wiped the country off the world economic map. This is the reality, whatever rose-colored glasses Russophiles put on. By the way, there is one peculiarity – even the BRICS do not accept Moscow's attempts to orchestrate the process by deepening the divide with the free world and seeking to bypass the dollar as the world's reserve currency. These two things – the reluctance of the BRICS to escalate the conflict with the free world and the actual non-introduction of a “single currency” – are the important messages from the cauldron in which Russia is boiling in the city of Kazan.
By the way, the only international factor that allowed itself to legitimize Moscow's hooligan behavior is the tragic image of the Portuguese leftist Guterres, who, by virtue of his own irrelevance, decided to attend the forum. In this way, alas, he also involves the UN, of which he has the dubious good fortune to be the head, in Russophile attempts at soft diplomacy. It is no accident that Israel's sharp reaction to the person of Guterres, who, with the UN-led Palestine Agency, is looking for any mechanism to legitimize the Hamas terrorists. There is already enough reliable data that Hamas cadres have been massively appointed to the leadership of this agency. But Guterres pretends to be distracted on this issue as he goes about legitimizing the Putin regime and the Kremlin's attempts to position itself as a factor. Unfortunately, the presence of the likes of Guterres in the UN only increases the calls for the UN to dissolve itself hastily, but that is another topic.
Beyond the buzz from Kazan and the bankruptcy of the UN chief, there is something important to know. BRICS has never been, is not and never will be an organization that can create a viable alternative to the free world. This is an amorphous and loose attempt by some countries to seek an attempt at better integration among themselves. Its founders – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are important countries with their own presence on the international scene who are interested in cooperating. So far so good. However, the problem for the fetishists of this organization is that these countries have nothing in common with each other, except the desire to have some kind of commercial connection. Moreover, there are large-scale internal divisions and rivalries among them that will never allow for any closer integration.
Brazil is a huge country, one of the largest on the planet, but due to the peculiarities of its geopolitical location, it is always doomed to be on the periphery of major processes. First, because a huge part of the country is occupied by the uninhabited Amazonian jungle, which does not allow any large-scale economic and demographic boom. Second, South America is in the difficult situation of being located in what Russophiles try to brand as the “Global South”, that is, there are logistical difficulties in accessing major trade routes.
I say that the term “global south“ is used by Russia for propaganda, because apart from its formal location in the south, nothing else connects these countries. What do Brazil and South Africa have in common? Australia is also in the “global south”, but the Russians call it the “west”. In general, geography began to be used for political purposes, and this, among other things, simply does not work. Russia seeks to build bridges and unite a community of anti-Western states. But it is alone in its efforts even in BRICS itself. Here, look at a South Africa that is sadly drifting further and further away from the promises of the great Nelson Mandela. Yes, the country is still free, rich and important, but with each passing day, racial tensions and crime seem harder to contain.
India and China are also good examples of why BRICS is an eagle, a crab and a pike. First, India is a democracy. An imperfect and nascent, but democracy. China is an authoritarian communist state that is ruled by the single leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Separately, beyond their historical enmities, these two countries are the biggest competitors for the US and European markets. India recently became the most populous country on the planet, displacing China. China's economy is bigger, but India's is trying hard to catch up, giving good conditions for Western corporations to move their production there. This competition between them will never allow the two to have a long-term future together. Collaboration, yes. Situational support, yes. But long-term and strategic work between them is not and cannot be.
Individually, Putin greatly overestimates the desire of the others in the BRICS to be an alternative to the West. The leading countries in this organization do not want to displace the West, they want to work with it. The rest are fabrications and fantasies of Kremlin support people – conscious or unconscious. It just can't happen – BRICS will not displace the USA and Europe, understand NATO and the EU, that cannot happen. There are many reasons. The first is economic – China and India want to trade with the US and the EU, not go to war with them. Both the Chinese and Indian economies are directly connected to the free world. If China stops selling goods to the US and the EU tomorrow, the Chinese economy will collapse. Therefore, Beijing wants political emancipation from the Western world, but it will never want to lose Western markets.
The second reason is cultural. Europe and the US share a common civilizational code. To it, most schematically speaking, we can add Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and why not Korea and Japan. Yes, Seoul and Tokyo are culturally different from the US and Europe, but the free trade, exchange of ideas and goods between them has reduced these differences to cultural peculiarities within the same civilizational space. In other words – there is a “West”, not because it is geographically located in the west, but because it shares a common civilizational framework. In the most schematic way, it is gathered in the words freedom, democracy, legal order, free economy. This is the common civilizational foundation of this world. And what does the authoritarianism of Moscow and Beijing have in common with the democracy of Brazil and India? What are the shared values between them? Their cultural connections? Are their understandings of the rest of the world universal, do they understand each other, do they support each other?
There is no way BRICS will replace anything. Simply because BRICS is a situational player seeking to compact loose economic spaces. And a hundred more countries adopting it won't change the above. As long as the free world is the economic and cultural hegemon, it alone will shape a space of values for the rest to conform to. Some will deny it, others will strive for it, but this does not change the conclusion.