by Walden Bello
Can the BRICS wrest control of the global economy from the United States and Europe, or will their internal contradictions tear them apart? 
The term “BRICS”—which refers to the bloc of emerging economies in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was coined years ago by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill, who saw the countries as promising markets for finance capital in the 21st century. But even if O’Neill had not invented the name, the BRICS would have emerged as a conscious formation of big, rapidly developing countries with an ambivalent relationship to the traditional center economies of Europe and the United States.