Leading the way

AS A student of history and politics, today’s article about BRICS and its deliberations, including the upcoming summit in Johannesburg is particularly invigorating. This from the perspective of having entered my formative years into a bipolar world, dominated by two opposing alliances.

A multi-polar world, which is rapidly taking shape, moving apace in a direction away from the aftermath of global geopolitical realities created after the World War II, is welcoming. Simultaneously, it raises many fears in alliances between Washington DC and London, also known as the “special relationship”, and their varied allies. Why a truly welcoming reality which BRICS is shaping? Because it hopefully provides the world with needed stability.

This in a direction away from a world dominated by an American and European alliance which seemingly had forced a global hegemonic reality which came about immediately after 1945. Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned paper on the End of History as the Berlin wall came down, peace broke out across the world and the fall of apartheid as a new millennium was dawning, to some, seemed to predict stagnation in geopolitical historical events.

BRICS and its achievements, as yet another nail in the coffin of Fukuyama’s discourse of historical stagnation, demonstrates to all that the future cannot be easily predicted.

That the present, informed by the past, will create new geopolitical alliances, and healthy ones at that. Alliances which balk at the traditional. And rightly so they should! The US presidency is increasingly unpredictable and tantamount to being unreliable in terms of building alliances which work.

A US president who entered the Oval Office seemingly to be managed as his personal fiefdom, as he had done his business, simply makes this continued BRICS alliance seem even more practical, stable, and progressive in its thinking, in terms new geopolitical realities. Mark Douglas Frier Director: Research Services, Stellenbosch University Libraries Stellenbosch