It seems that only now is Brazilian society beginning to realize what BRIC is, the group of countries that Brazil joined without having anything in common with Russia, India and China, and without any serious discussion about its meaning and consequences.
Putin’s use of the XVI BRIC Summit to legitimize his project of recreating the Russian Empire by war, the lack of democratic credentials of practically all its members, and the Chinese monopoly of the group’s economic power make it clear that he will not strengthen multilateralism, much less global development and security. pompous title of the final declaration of the meeting held in Kazan, Russia, between October 22 and 24.
A gathering of countries without any cultural, economic and neighborhood nexus, such as a bric-à-brac, in addition to bad taste, the BRIC is old. It is a new version of the “non-aligned” of the 1950s reimagined by the widows of Bandung, the ideologues nostalgic for the conference convened by the Indonesian dictator, Achmed Sukarno, who had collaborated with the Japanese in World War II.
Driven by hostility to the United States, the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 materialized the Third World concept in vogue in the French left, according to which moral excellence would now be with the former Asian and African colonies, the multiracial and multireligious planetary proletariat that would impose a new international reality through the “moral violence of nations in favor of peace”, according to Sukarno himself, that perhaps he was not aware of how tragic his words would be.
The conference served as a glove for ambitious leaders, but unable to deal with the real problems of their countries, to take the world stage as promoters of a new era of justice and equality. The morality of Bandung was that of anti-imperialists with anti-democratic projects, who had an external discourse very different from the internal practice and who criticized one side while being silent about the other.
Gamal Abdul Nasser, the new Egyptian leader, used the Western conspiracy theory in favor of the Jews to mobilize the Arab world in favor of the creation of an Arab superstate that he would direct. Sukarno advocated nationalism, internationalism, democracy, social prosperity, and belief in God, but suppressed parties, invented a “democracy-oriented,” adopted a depraved sex life, and, extinguishing the Chinese minority with incessant persecution, eventually imploded the domestic distribution system, leading the country’s economy to disaster. And Jawaharlal Nehru, a populist, incompetent, and discretionary ruler who bequeathed enormous problems to India, as the great star of Bandung, denounced imperialism (from the West), the Anglo-French operations in Suez against Egypt, and the Americans in Korea, but declared that civil liberties were not lacking in communist Russia, refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and refused to save Tibet from invasion and colonization by China.
Third World hypocrisy was no match for the crude cynicism of the Cold War. In one way or another, the protagonist countries of Bandung paid dearly for the whims of their leaders. Nehru had to appeal to the US imperialists to restrain China after the harsh defeat she inflicted on the Indian army in a withering border war. Sukarno saw his empire of lies crumble when the Indonesian communist party sparked a bloody uprising that cost the country tens of thousands of lives. And Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, had to expel Soviet advisors to get rid of the legacy of defeats and regain the dignity of the Egyptian army to make peace with Israel.
History does not repeat itself, but it leaves lessons. What changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Asia was not the “moral violence of nations” in the name of some platitude of occasion, but the economic globalization that created commercial and technological powers in East Asia, with repercussions all over the world, the greatest example of which is China.
The BRIC is the result of a misreading of history, both on the part of its centers of real political will, Russia and China, which are making wrong bets, and of some of its unsuspecting members, the main one being Brazil, which is playing the game of others.
It is History, the personality of countries, which cannot be disposed of or altered at the whim of the interests of opportunity, that explains Brazil as the largest democracy in the Southern Hemisphere and the second largest economy in the Western Hemisphere. A reality that cannot be forgotten, both by Brazil and by the main nations of the West, some of which seem to be pleased to lose him as a historical ally.
The twentieth century was an immense bazaar of exotic ideas that engendered the greatest tragedy in history. May his old things remain in that not so distant past that still haunts us.