Another International Summit With More Bark Than Bite

An inaugural summit of the world's biggest emerging economies to discuss ways of moving away from the dollar and establishing "a new world order" sounds pretty daunting. But as it turned out, the first meeting of the BRIC did little but serve as a platform for tepid rhetoric.

The four nations--Brazil, Russia, India, China--which currently account for 15 percent of the world's total output, are expected to surpass today's biggest economies by 2050. This is based on their impressively large growth rates over the past decade.

Concerned by the devaluation of the dollar, the BRIC countries are hoping to buy up IMF-issued bonds and increase their power with international financial institutions.

But the BRIC nations are, at the moment, far too disjointed, economically and politically, to emerge as a unified power. Trade tariffs have recently increased tensions between China and India. Russia, Brazil and China are heavy exporters, while India is focused on domestic demand and less concerned with the dollar's international clout.

Russia's economy alone has contracted 10 percent this year and could be harmed further by the economic problems of deteriorating Eastern European nations.

"Unlike the diligence of the Chinese, the resourcefulness of the Brazilians or the innovation of the Indians, the country is seen as heavily trapped in its own history. A country that cannot quite decide whether it will play well with its neighbors or simply go out to bomb them, in other words," Chan Akya of Asia Times wrote, calling the BRIC summit a farce.

So there was little for the BRIC to do besides issue an almost pointless communiqué stating its desire to have a larger role in international economic decision-making. "This is not an economic bloc at all, this is a brand name," said Professor Michael Bernstam, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. It appears that a new world order will have to take a rain check until 2010, when the BRIC will meet again in Brazil.

The summit was upstaged by the nearby meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which was bizarrely attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as his country descended into post-election chaos.