with the first “Bric” summit, Russia organizes the awakening of the “global South”

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Fifteen years ago, the first “Bric” summit was held in Russia. Since then, this club has expanded by bringing together the great emerging powers, and aims for the advent of a de-Westernized world.

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Given Vladimir Putin’s attention to symbols, this cannot be a coincidence. It was in Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, that Nicholas II and the Romanovs were assassinated in 1918, the final blow to the tsarist empire. It is there, at the foot of the Urals, that the Kremlin chose to inaugurate a new club of nations intended to overthrow Western imperialism, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that started in New York in 2008: the Brics. Brazil, Russia, India, China: this acronym, too, was born in Manhattan, on the keyboard of a Goldman Sachs analyst, who thus designated the most promising markets for world trade. Nobody thought then that this heterogeneous assemblage (25% of habitable land, 40% of the population and then 15% of global GDP and trade) would come to constitute itself as a rival to the G8 (the six major Western economies, plus Japan and Russia, soon to be excluded from the group).

This June 16, 2009, nine months after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, it is a quartet determined to do battle with the world financial order who have a meeting: Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s stooge, his Brazilian counterpart Lula, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese President Hu Jintao. If China and India overcame the financial crisis without too much difficulty, Brazil is slipping and Russia took it head on, with…