BRICS can offer a peaceful alternative to Western-dominated global governance only if its members move beyond geography and develop shared political values, according to an analysis of the bloc's prospects. The argument, rooted in a recent column by Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, holds that the collective West is in relative political decline and that leading non-Western states must cooperate more closely to respond to the challenges of the modern international order.
The central question, the analysis suggests, is what can bind together states with very different cultures and interests. Historically, two factors transform common interests into sustained cooperation: geography and shared values. Geography shapes political culture and helps states develop common ideas about what constitutes a just international order. The Western community itself is the most obvious example, with its common political norms developed within a relatively confined geographical and historical space.
Asian powers, by contrast, were historically separated by enormous distances, making formal alliances less practical. Russia developed a strategic culture based primarily on surviving by its own resources, regarding alliances as a choice carrying serious moral obligations rather than an unavoidable necessity. Europe, through centuries of interaction within a common space, produced a coherent political civilization whose states became connected not simply by interests but by ideas.
Geography matters principally because it can help create this civilizational commonality. Once that commonality exists, geographical proximity becomes much less important. The Five Eyes intelligence partnership, for example, is effective not because Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the US occupy a convenient geographical space, but because they share a language, political culture and historical experience. The same is true of the G7, whose influence has little to do with its members being scattered across North America, Europe and Asia.
This brings the analysis to BRICS. It is tempting to explain the bloc's growing importance by pointing to its geographical reach, as its members now stretch across continents and encompass an enormous share of humanity. But geography is not the real source of its significance. BRICS matters, first, because it has become the first serious non-Western alternative in the debate over who sets the rules of international affairs and how those rules should operate.
Virtually every major institution of modern global governance, beginning with the United Nations, emerged from a political and intellectual order overwhelmingly shaped by Western powers. BRICS is different. Its only significant intellectual debt to the West is its acronym, coined by a Western economist in 2001. What subsequently emerged from that label was something quite different: for the first time in centuries, a major international political project has developed largely outside the West's intellectual and institutional leadership.
The analysis acknowledges that the counter-offensive by the United States and Europe against the erosion of their international position may often appear chaotic, yet behind it lies something more durable than formal bloc discipline: a shared worldview and common political values. Those seeking a more just international order must therefore understand both the strengths and weaknesses of the institutions they have created, and recognize that power in international affairs depends not only on the ability to formulate rules, but on persuading a sufficiently large group of states to implement them.