BRICS nations just want what is theirs, and that spells doom for the Western hegemony
Noted columnist Pankaj Mishra calls BRIC a “casual acronym” coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to draw attention to investment opportunities in Brazil, Russia, India and China. But it became much more significant when Russia initiated the formation of the eponymously titled global body in 2009.
A year later South Africa joined them, making it BRICS. The whole exercise was conceived as a counterweight-in-the-making to the West-obsessed United Nations, the World Bank, IMF and other multilateral organizations that follow – in the terms of top-notch thinkers and economists – a neo-colonial policy with the US dollar as the reserve currency.
The BRICS nations, which had either rung out old monarchies or liberated themselves from colonial oppression, had long craved decolonization, but the US and its allies used every pretext to delay this overdue process. In the meantime, there were efforts such as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that demonstrated the passion of multiple countries to break out of the clutches of American-centric global institutions, especially financial institutions, which had become instruments zealously used by the US and certain former colonial powers to control the resources of other countries.
Any bid to question the hegemony of these global power structures was considered blasphemy, and the Western mainstream media promptly denounced any alternatives to the economic order of the day as non-starters or damp squib. At the same time, they kept silent on the aspirations of the countries that had fought colonial and expansionist powers tooth and nail in the first half of the century to rewrite world history.