New Delhi will host the 18th BRICS Summit this weekend. The idea of BRICS is older than the number of annual summits. It was in 2001 that a Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O’Neill, wrote a paper proposing the idea of BRIC – Brazil, Russia, India, China – as an economic block and its inclusion in existing economic fora such as the G-7. O’Neill, a British economist working in one of the biggest banks in the world, was not motivated by ideas of radical cooperation among countries in the Global South in proposing such a group. He believed that the grouping and its inclusion in the global high table of economic policy discussions would make capitalism more stable and better informed to pre-empt disruptions. “Most of the world’s economic disturbances since the late 1990’s and its biggest changes have largely involved countries outside the G7 (with the exception of the technology driven downturn in the US in 2000-2001). The involvement of those with stronger locally informed knowledge and their more informed consideration of the issues may have helped make the resulting fallout less painful or may be even avoided altogether”, the paper said.HT photoAlso Read: Terms of Trade: Political limits of alchemy via exorcismTo be sure, the actual BRICS did not really impress O’Neill much. He described BRICS as “serving no real purpose beyond symbolic gestures and lofty rhetoric” ahead of its 2024 summit and saw groups such as the G20 – it includes both members of the BRICS as well as the advanced economy club of G7 – as a better forum to further global cooperation.O’Neill’s arguments notwithstanding, it is useful to do a critical evaluation of BRICS not just in terms of the purpose it has served but the circumstances in which the idea was proposed and how they have changed in the last 25 years, especially the past decade.When economic history of the current economic order is written, 2001 will perhaps be its most momentous year. It was on December 11, 2001, just more than a week after O’Neill’s paper was published, that China joined the World Trade Organisation to become its 143rd member. The rest, as they say, is history. By the time, BRICS was institutionalized and its first summit was held in Russia in 2009, China was almost the world’s second largest economy. Exports have been an overarching driver of China’s growth.A year before the inaugural BRICS summit, a catastrophic financial crisis, with its origins in the US, inflicted a global economic depression, the largest after the one in 1929. O’Neill, saw the Chinese economic rise coming, but he was completely blindsided by a financial crisis originating in the US metastasizing into a global economic depression. He was Wall Street after all! They created the crisis in the first place.The after shocks of these two events have pretty much shaped the global order since then. China’s rising export prowess has accelerated the atrophying of the industrial workforce in the advanced countries, especially the US. The working class in these countries feel completely betrayed by the existing political consensus. The older political order and its remnants claimed to be celebrating democracy and so-called rules-based-order while practicing plutocracy. In 2016, the had -been and existing global capitalist leaders, Britain and the US, made political choices which shocked the world: the former voting for Brexit in a referendum and the latter electing Donald Trump as its president. The democratic momentum behind these political decisions had the tailwinds of the asymmetry between costs and benefits of globalisation.Today, with Trump back in power in his second term and a lot of major countries in Europe flirting with neo-right political formations which are at the cusp of grabbing power, we do not need a BRICS to challenge the US-led global economic order.This is exactly what people like O’Neill think the platform is being used for. The US itself is decimating that order. Most multilateral institutions, from the World Trade Organisation to the UNFCC, have been rendered useless by the Trump administration. What we have instead is a stitaution where the US is forcing to world to retreat into an era where deals are made on relative strengths of negotiating partners and perhaps even kickbacks to the Trump political-financial complex, rather than some benign, overarching spirit of multilateral cooperation for common good.In the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the high-tech boom it has created, we have a global economy that is threatening to make previous international economic inequalities look extremely benign. The financial bubble it has already created and continues to inflate is perhaps the largest in capitalism’s history.Today, one could actually say that the rules of our economic future will perhaps be written, not by a handful of countries -- which is what people criticized the earlier global orders of -- but a small club of people, who are in control of AI technology in some of the biggest companies in the world today.What should one make of all of these tensions? Is it fair to hold a non-strategic group like the BRICS to account for having failed to bring progressive change in the world, when most of the seismic shocks actually originated from the G-7 and the core of capitalism rather than emerging markets? The point of asking this question is not to answer in it black and white.Also Read: Terms of Trade | Social justice as garrison and vanguardIt is to argue a point that is perhaps useful to let go of conventional distinction such as advanced economies and emerging markets usually deployed by economic analysts. Can we effectively read the tea leaves about the international economic order without being mindful of the contradictions developing inside countries and how democracy or lack of it deals with them? The idea might be extremely unfashionable in an era where economists claim to solve development economics problems with clinical medicine style randomized control trials, but it is definitely worth paying attention to.Multilateralism, if it has to be effective, must get its feet dirty by stepping inside the marsh of political economy. Otherwise, it will continue to be just a symbolic gesture with some immediate transactional deals thrown in and use high moral ground as an alibi.