Why do Westerners hate the idea of BRICS so much ?
If western institutions and way of life are superior ,then capital will naturally gravitate towards them ..
replies(3):
Take away Western purchases of Russian gas for 2 decades and Russia collapses. Take away the encouragement of outsourcing manufacturing from the West to China since the 1980s and the Chinese miracle never happens.
People laugh at BRICS because the BRICS is a joke.
- Brazil is relatively stable but is a largely globally meaningless nation which does little more than export tourism and the Amazon. It’s highly replaceable in the world order.
- Russia is on the verge of collapse. Their strength lay in the appearance of their military strength. But they’ve struggled to defeat a country which didn’t have a military a decade ago and the modern 21st century technology whose sales they’re depending on is failing against Cold War NATO leftovers. They do have natural resources and could have spent the next few decades getting massively rich off selling gas to Germany but they killed that golden goose by starting a land war in Europe.
- India is a country with extremely high potential. Lots of people, enough educated people, etc. However, politics is a disaster, and environmental issues are crushing India. Yet India is poised to take off but their entire growth is based on trading and integrating with the West and yet India keeps ideologically resisting that like it has for half a century and instead aligning with BRICS, whose largest member China is currently fighting a territorial war with India and Indian companies cannot import products and have Chinese websites are banned in India and vice versa.
- China is a one of a kind country. Ridiculously strong manufacturing, extremely capable citizenry, etc. But China is fighting with every neighbor. No one trusts them. Least of all their fellow BRICS member India. And they’re facing a demographic timebomb and despite their economic successes people would much rather emigrate from China than immigrate to it. That’s not a recipe for success a decade+ down the line.
- South Africa is a basket case of an economy. And their politics just got worse. South Africa can enter the conversation when their government becomes capable of delivering widely available drinking water to their population and not have people thirsty because of political corruption.
- we’re on the verge of electing a fascist into the country, primarily because the opposition also sucks. Politically we’re a mess.
- we’ve caused the largest number of modern world fights and deaths. And now we’ve applied our stamp of approval on a genocide where most of the rest of the world is disgusted by us.
- our public infrastructure is collapsing and crumbling. We have no high speed transportation. We have lead in our pipes (flint was just the tip of the iceberg). We have our primary plane manufacturer dying and unable to produce a plane people want to go on. We really don’t have anything to add to the table until we can stop poisoning people due to political corruption.
Anyway it’s easy to selectively pick points and make fun of them.
Western powers have burnt a lot of bridges there over the years. There's been 75 years of coups and interventions, clumsy to downright evil charity efforts, foreign military bases that long outstay their welcome, "development" schemes that lean more towards exploitative than actually bootstrapping, and financial timebombs that result in imposition of austerity and fire-sales of public goods.
China has shown it's possible to massively modernize without completely selling out, so they are an aspirational model for the rest of the developing world. When they come and say "we want mutual progress", it doesn't have the immediate untrustworthy smell it would coming out of an American mouth. What is Washington/London/Brussels doing right now to win back that audience? Even if the West can offer a better deal than Belt-and-Road, itself questionable, will Africa and South America even be willing to listen anymore?