Al Jazeera.
Goldman Sachs - via economist Jim O'Neill in 2001 - invented the
concept of a rising new bloc: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and,
later, South Africa). Some cynics couldn't help calling it the "Bloody
Ridiculous Investment Concept".
Now that doesn't really apply. Goldman now expects
the BRICS countries to account for almost 40 per cent of global gross
domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and will include four of the world's top
five economies.
Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey,
Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: What would that make?
BRIIICTSS? Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege,
Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled
concept. It stands for the "next 11" emerging economies.
The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of
BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?
Yale's canny historian Paul Kennedy (of "imperial overstretch" fame) is convinced
that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a "historical
watershed", taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of
"the sole superpower". There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for
that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85 per cent of global
reserves, now less than 60 per cent), the "paralysis of the European
project", Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and
the decrepitude of the United Nations.
