> But Comrade Redmond, this blows up your BRIC thesis for good.
Oh, I've always been mildly skeptical of the BRIC thesis, which I always thought of as a canny Goldman Sachs marketing ploy - they were reinventing themselves as the privileged brokers for SWFs needing "expertise" on the capital markets (a.k.a. the ability to wrap Z-grade trash in AAA ratings, for suitably lush fees). Russia and China are genuine developmental states, Brazil may yet become one, and India isn't there yet. Trouble is, Goldman leaves out Malaysia, Vietnam, Venezuela, Eastern Europe, etc.
But I do think there's reason to be hopeful, simply because today's semi-periphery and the new metropoles have common economic interests. That makes this hegemonic shift very different from the collapse of the British or liberal-era world-system in the 1930s. Back then, the semi-peripheries (Germany, Italy, Japan) launched genocidal wars on the USSR and China, still very much peripheries. Thankfully, no such fratricide is in the offing today.
-- DRR