New eras do not announce themselves with billboards or welcoming brochures. They arrive by way of many disparate events. Last week we witnessed one: the gathering in southern China of leaders from the world’s most dynamic emerging economies --the nations we now call the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The summit in Hainan most persuasively is a determination to use the BRICS' global clout to take some of the intellectual initiative away from the advanced industrial nations.
There is a long history behind such ambitions, beginning with the Non–Aligned Movement in the mid–1950s. More recently, after the Asian financial crisis in the late–1990s, the region was alive with ideas intended to make room for an alternative to the neoliberal economic strategy the West was urging: an Asian monetary fund, a regional central bank, bilateral currency swaps, an “Asian Davos.”
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