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Monday, July 8, 2024

Why BRICS Can't Replace the G7 - Vox Popoli

 The new organizations will not be carbon copies of their Clown World predecessors:

We can state with certainty that groups such as the BRICS and, at the regional level, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cannot replicate the model that has made the Western world so successful. Firstly, the objectives of its members are not to exploit the rest of humanity. Consequently, the level of coordination of national policies also cannot reach such a high degree. Simply because, by participating in BRICS, for instance, countries do not address the most fundamental issues of survival or achieve development objectives. In other words, everything the West creates is aimed against the rest of the world, and there are no exceptions. Those who now oppose the West, whether through confrontation like Russia or through the pursuit of softer alternatives like India and the Arab countries, do not initially orient their policies towards combating all humanity. Therefore, they will find it difficult to create an alternative form of institutional cooperation.

Second, the organizational structure of new alliances of countries from the Global South cannot be based on a ‘single leader’ model. Thus, large countries such as Russia, China, and even India have not joined the Western bloc because, due to their structural differences, they cannot accept the unquestioned authority of another major power to fulfil all of its demands, as Western Europe does with the United States.

Now the Global South is seeking to establish its own institutions but, for objective reasons, it still has a long way to go in understanding how these institutions can function without being replicas of Western models. This applies even to more specific areas of cooperation, which are strictly regulated within the West in accordance with internal power hierarchies.

However, the theoretical aspect of the issue is equally interesting. In this regard, even the very concept of “international order” may prove to be controversial and even unacceptable in some respects in the future.

The fact is that the entire conceptual framework which allows us to discuss international politics in a relatively consistent manner, was developed under specific conditions that were inherent in world events over the past five hundred years. This implies that we cannot currently determine how relevant well-known concepts of international reality will be in the coming decades.

For instance, the “Westphalian order” is a concept that emerged as a result of the legal resolution of an intra-European conflict between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, with little relevance to the rest of the world. However, due to the dominance of Western powers, this order — as a mechanism for interstate relations — has since spread across the globe.

In essence, the current system has been imposed on other countries. A notable example is China, which became “connected” to the Westphalian system through the military aggression of European powers in the early 19th century. This could lead to a situation where the words used by political leaders and scholars become meaningless.

This is another good sign that the most powerful of the sovereign nations, China and Russia, harbor no objective to replace the USA. But we already knew this; if China wanted to replace the USA, it would not have cancelled the planned “jump to China” in 2015 that was intended to accomplish precisely that.

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https://voxday.net/2024/07/07/why-brics-cant-replace-the-g7/