Our Brave New World (Part Two) : The Anti-Western Coalition
The second rising sub-world that challenges the West is usually referred to as the New Emerging Powers (NEPs). Indeed, both its core—the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)—and its more tenuous members (Turkey, Iran) have, or seem to have, undergone stunning economic growth. According to the IMF, China achieved three hundred and thirty percent GDP growth from 1990 to 2006. India's GDP growth was one hundred and fifty percent, while Brazil's and South Africa's were each fifty percent. Russia actually experienced a negative growth throughout the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet regime, but then engaged in a solid four to eight percent yearly growth rate from 2000 to 2013, except for 2008–09, when it was badly hurt by the American and European recession. Turkey's GDP underwent a fourfold increase, from $200 billion to $800 billion at official exchange rates; Iran's was threefold, from $150 billion to $580 billion.
Such growth took place against a background of decline by former growth leaders like Japan (barely twenty percent) or most European Union nations (an average thirty percent). Moreover, it meant for every country in that sub-world—with a combined population of about three billion, or forty percent of the world population—a definite transition from endemic poverty and backwardness to at least the prospect of affluence and economic maturity.
However, the New Emerging Powers are very different from the older emerging countries such as Asia's "Little Dragons" (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) in the 1970s in that their main challenge is not economic but political and geopolitical.
First, NEPs are not democratic powers. While democratization or the consolidation of democracy was either a stated concern or a corollary of growth for the older emerging countries, most of the NEPs are neither democratic nor moving toward democracy. China, nominally still a communist country, is a one-party authoritarian regime. Russia is a post-communist country that has relapsed into authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin after a brief and chaotic experimentation with democracy under Boris Yeltsin. Post-apartheid South Africa is effectively ruled by the hegemonic ANC party. Iran is a theocratic dictatorship. Turkey moved from a secular, military-dominated semi-democracy to a neo-Islamic and increasingly authoritarian regime. Only Brazil and India can pass today for bona fide democracies.
Second, NEPs are hypernationalist regimes. Without exception, the NEPs are pursuing explicitly nationalist agendas, very much at odds with the Western globalist and post-nationalist agendas. It may be an ethnicity-centered nationalism, as in China, a race-centered nationalism, as in South Africa, a religion-based nationalism, as in Iran, a civilization-based nationalism, as in India, or a combination of several types of nationalism, as in Turkey, where the "neo-Ottomanism" blends ethnicity and religion, or in Putin's Russia, where ethnicity combines with a revived Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, but in all these cases there is a link between the absence of democracy and nationalism.
Third, NEPs are decidedly anti-American and anti-Western. A determining factor of this anti-Americanism appears to be the nature of the self-interest of the local elites. In the older emerging countries, these elites created or remodeled under the aegis of America (as in the case of occupied Japan), benefited from the openness and inclusiveness of Western civilization, and soon realized that adopting democracy would not jeopardize their position, but rather stabilize it. In most of the New Emerging Powers, on the other hand, the ruling elites were created or took over in defiance of the West and regard Western influence as a threat (even though their current economic surge is largely an outcome of a Western-induced globalization), and tend to believe that they will not survive a Western-style democratization.
Finally, NEPs are building strategic anti-Western alliances. While their respective national interests do not always coincide, and in fact collide in many respects, the NEPs see anti-Western and anti-American cooperation between them as an overriding priority for the time being. They tend to take a unified stand and to support each other in diplomatic affairs and at international fora: Russia and China in particular, as UN Security Council members, have taken similar lines on the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Palestinians, and Ukraine. They have set up strategic, military, and economic cooperation. They lead mutually reinforcing media and influence campaigns.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has been so far the main vehicle for strategic inter-NEP cooperation. It was started in 1996 as the Shanghai Five, ostensibly a common strategic forum for Eurasian powers: its founding members were Russia, China, and the three Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In 2001, it took up its present name upon the inclusion of a fourth Central
Asian country, Uzbekistan.
Two other factors have been even more relevant than the SCO itself, however: the signature, in 2001, of a bilateral "friendship" treaty between its two most prominent members, Russia and China, and the steady accumulation of "observers" (India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia), "dialogue partners" (Belarus, Sri Lanka, Turkey), and "guest attendees" (the Commonwealth of Independent States, ASEAN, Turkmenistan) that have turned the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a loose but very large group, representative—to quote Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev—of "half of humanity." Significantly, the US was denied SCO observer or partner status when it applied in 2006.
The SCO has been dismissed for years as a mere showcase with no real substance. In fact, the organization and its array of partners have gradually developed formal and informal strategic cooperation in many fields, from counterterrorism to intelligence sharing, and from conventional defense matters to cyber warfare. The Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure, an SCO agency headquartered in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, explicitly coordinates action against "terrorism, separatism, and extremism" in the member states. Bilateral or multilateral military exercises have been conducted since 2003, and SCO members have engaged in bilateral armament trade.
The SCO has also fostered economic cooperation in terms of transportation, energy, and trade. Time and again, the SCO has floated concepts like an alternative world banking system or even an alternative global currency, establishing it as a rival to the IMF, the World Bank, and the dollar. However, such projects stand a better chance to materialize—if they stand any chance at all—within a broader BRICS framework.
Many countries that remain formally outside the circle of SCO membership or partnership can be construed as virtual members, since they tend to coordinate their diplomatic or strategic policies with SCO countries. This is the case of paleo-communist states like North Korea and Cuba, of Brazil and the "progressive" Latin American countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Nicaragua, and others), and of South Africa.
(See Parts One and Three)
© Michel Gurfinkiel & World Affairs, 2014
Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in Paris, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.