Beijing-led revolutionary declaration: open war with the US-led world

BRICS (China, India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil) represent 45% of the world's population, inhabit about 34% of the planet's land area, and produce 37% of the world's economy. They also produce about 45% of the world's wheat.

The recent Kazan Summit, the 16th BRICS summit since its founding, may have put us on the cusp of a new world order. Not only by emphasizing in the Kazan Declaration the need to recast the US-dominated world order as unipolar, unfair, and ignoring new global realities.

Beyond that, BRICS-Plus presents itself as an open, non-ideological, global construct, with no barriers. Three of the five founding countries are democratic, a fact that says a lot about the nature of this bloc based on common interests.

The final statement of the recent BRICS-Plus summit was called the “Kazan Declaration.” It is a comprehensive text containing 134 articles, taking into account all global issues, from culture to politics.

The declaration referred to the Security Council as an undemocratic and unrepresentative structure that excluded nations and continents and represented a dominant minority. The declaration repeatedly said that the current international order was no longer fit for today's world and was no longer global.

Under the slogan “BRICS and the Global South: Building a Better World Together,” dozens of countries and institutions were invited to attend, and with the approval of more than thirty countries, the Kazan Declaration was issued. The declaration mentioned the word “fair” 15 times, which is the lure that BRICS offers.

What is happening in the world, under the management of institutions established after World War II, is not fair. The unfair world order works for the benefit of a small international system, the reference here is to the G-7 countries, which represent less than 15% of the planet’s population.

BRICS promises to rebuild a multipolar world order based on diversity and sharing, and believes in open paths between the North and the South. A new form of globalization is presented by BRICS, on the ruins of American globalization that wants one-way international trade, for ideas, goods and even people to flow from the North to the South, not the other way around. As soon as people and goods were seen approaching borders, the Western right rose up and democracy cried out for the closure of borders.

The Kazan Declaration devoted a long paragraph to Palestine in its statement, Article 30. The text affirmed its support for full membership of Palestine in the United Nations, as part of its “unrestricted support for the two-state solution,” according to the text of the declaration. The declaration condemned the Israeli war on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and supported an international status in which East Jerusalem would be their capital.

It has become clear that BRICS-Plus represents the world majority, and the Kazan summit was attended by representatives from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, international organizations, and the UN. Even Cuba and Serbia, which are viewed especially by the Western world, were invited and their representatives attended. The world is gradually moving from the Washington Consensus, that is, the rules of American economics and politics that have prevailed since the end of World War II, to the Beijing Consensus.

The sudden collapse of the “neoliberal” market in 2008-09 opened the way for what has since become known as the Beijing Consensus, or the Chinese model of economics and politics. It was in those critical hours of 2008 that Fukuyama wrote about what he called cowboy liberalism, two decades after his famous study of it as the happy ending of human toil and the pursuit of perfection.

The Chinese model, argues Chinese thinker Victor Gao, is based on driving all four wheels of a car in the same direction through a strong and efficient system. In doing so, Gao argues, it offers a more worthy model than a democracy that produces eight governments in eight years. Beijing’s alternative to democracy is “political meritocracy,” a system of governance based on competence and professionalism, as Daniel Bell notes in his important paper on the “China Model.”

Asians, not just China, speak of Asian values, those that put society rather than the individual at the centre, as Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, argued. If Western democracy, with its human rights code at its centre, is suited to a life centred on the individual, what will suit nations that put society before the individual will be different.

The Chinese model bets on challenging liberal democracy, claiming that an effective totalitarian system will be able to accomplish the basic task of raising the level of well-being and protecting social peace. China has worked tirelessly to promote the idea, and Western liberalism has come to realize that the Chinese model has provided an economic achievement unprecedented in human history, moving more than half a billion people from poverty to well-being in a quarter of a century.

Along with China, Asians have provided “the most sustainable development miracle of the 20th century,” according to a United Nations report. The Chinese cloud is casting a shadow over the Western world from Berlin to Washington, and in Germany the talk is about what the world will look like when an authoritarian state writes its rules and draws its borders.

America and Europe, in this context, are required to rewrite the rules of the game, not only through customs protection or protectionist policies, but by promoting innovation and developing an infrastructure capable of meeting the coming challenges.

At the same time, BRICS-Plus is expanding its influence by creating new alliances and seeking to achieve a new balance in the global system. This balance is based on the idea of multilateralism and shared international decision-making, far from the Western hegemony that has prevailed for decades.

Ultimately, the world seems to be moving toward a multipolar system, where no single country or group of small countries can dominate international decisions.

This transformation will not be easy, and will require political, economic, and perhaps military confrontations. But what is certain is that the global order we have known since World War II is now on the verge of radical change, with China and BRICS-Plus at its heart.

*Quoted from Al Jazeera Net