BRICS and a new model of hegemonic stability

Abstract

BRICS as a forum of the largest developing economies is at the center of the global contemporary political process. There are ongoing debates for more than a decade on the reasons for the establishment and the ways of assessing the efficiency of BRICS. Two major theoretical perspectives in the international political economy (IPE), namely economic nationalism and liberalism, have opposing views on many aspects of these debates. They emphasize the search for common interests, which places the five BRICS states into a single forum, and find a lack of shared values/interests, which inevitably leads to a collapse of the forum in the near future. This article puts forward the following hypothesis: the original willingness of BRICS members to transform the architecture of international finances to the profit of developing nations has been replaced recently by a desire to preserve some of the attractive features of todays’ global economy (low trade barriers, monetary stability, and free movement of investment) in the context of the decline of US hegemony. Today, BRICS member states share China’s intention to ensure the liberal nature of the international trading system while strengthening state control of public life according to the “embedded liberalism” model. To substantiate the hypothesis, the authors apply ideas from the neo-Marxist school of IPE, which is currently experiencing its renaissance.