ABSTRACT
As this book makes clear, in the last few years the idea of how emerging economies or “powers” can be accommodated into the global system has become central to debates about global governance, particularly in the post-financial crisis period. A narrative surrounding emerging economies, mostly emblematically captured in the acronym BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), has emerged. The BRICS term itself has become a normative neologism symbolizing a changing world order, as we have seen, but this is wrong. What the BRICS term actually denotes is the active incorporation of various centers of accumulation into the ongoing neoliberal global order, which strengthens this set of international structures. In essence, “emerging powers” is really “a euphemism to designate places where capitalism anticipates big returns.”1 The BRICS, in short, is the epitome of the defeat of the global South project as exemplified by notions around the NIEO. As mentioned earlier, the acronym was coined from the asset man-
agement world and was formulated by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs as a means of maintaining the global neoliberal world order, of reinscribing the current models of accumulation through promoting them as destinations for finance capital and encouraging the extension of global managerial responsibilities to the internal bourgeoisie of select emerging economies. Indeed, O’Neill argued that the BRIC states had “encouraged and inspired other emerging nations to join the global economy, how they are helping post-2008 crisis West recover its
economic health, and … will be crucial to a better economic future for us all.”2 As William I. Robinson notes, “[t]hat it was perhaps the most predatory financial institution on the planet that coined the term BRIC, and did so in order to suggest that transnational investors would find new opportunities in these countries, should already have told us something about the relationship between the BRICS and the [transnational capitalist class].”3
