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THE BRIC POST-WASHINGTON CONSENSUS

Pepe Escobar

Asia Times, April 17, 2010

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) got together in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, on Thursday with a bang. After meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao, and once again condemning an "asymmetric, dysfunctional globalization", Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was at his ebullient best: "A new global economic geography has been born." Well, not quite. Not yet.

Anyone across the world fed up with Somali pirates in Zegna suits disrupting global trade is interested in what the BRICs are (potentially) up to. The world's largest developing countries, bound to be the engine of the global economy for the next four decades, are essentially up to what then Russian president Vladimir Putin outlined in his famous speech in Munich in 2007; forming a new global consensus. Call it the rise of the periphery (the "Second" and "Third" worlds). Call it the dawn of the post-Washington consensus.

It's nothing short of ironic that major players in the current global financial architecture are being forced to acknowledge that the global "economic and political tectonic plates are shifting". No, that was not Lula, but the George W Bush-appointed head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick. Zoellick even felt compelled to deliver the coup de grace to the patronizing concept of "Third World".

Is the World Bank finally waking up to the real world(s)? The BRICs met in Brazil roughly one week before the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual love fest in Washington. The old order may resent it, but the BRIC voice is and will continue to be ever more insistent. No wonder; they are shelling more funds to the IMF, thus they should have more say on where the money is going. They want an antithesis of Wall Street: transparency. The 2008 financial crisis - which by no means is over - was unleashed by a Wall Street-biased financial casino.

(...) [artículo aquí]