20 years of BRICS: From Wall Street acronym to global power center

What began as a four-country forum has become an economic heavyweight challenging the old global order The centerpiece of the BRICS program is underway in New Delhi. The group’s Business Forum was held on September 11, and the Indian capital is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13. This year’s gathering is deeply symbolic. Exactly 20 years ago, in September 2006, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China met for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Back then, the group was known as BRIC, and the idea of close cooperation among the four largest non-Western economies struck many observers as more of a political experiment than a project with a promising future.From an acronym to a new center of powerIt is now clear that this was not a fleeting diplomatic episode, but one of the first institutional responses to the transformation already beginning to reshape the world order. The term ‘BRIC’ was not coined in Moscow. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill introduced it in 2001. But it was Russia that proposed turning a clever economic acronym into a permanent political forum. That was Moscow’s moment of foresight: Russia recog...