BRIC's spectacular rise, not so spectacular after all

As the threat of a general global recession grows, the eurozone teeters, the United States slows, and the main developing countries revise their previous confident predictions of bounding to regional or even global leadership like Biblical gazelles leaping from mountain top to mountain top, we can see more clearly which economies will remain healthy.

For years, we heard of the rise of the "BRIC" nations — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — countries anointed as battering rams to the future, inexorably surging forward, into and through the ranks of the tired incumbent economic leadership provided by North America, Western Europe and Japan. BRIC nation even held their own meetings, to compare notes on their vertiginous rise.

Of course, it was utter nonsense; no such rise persists, and these countries have almost nothing in common anyway. In the case of Russia, India and China, the three great national land masses of Eurasia, there are ancient and vivid rivalries between them, both geopolitically and culturally.

BRIC's spectacular rise, not so spectacular after all

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