Valdai Club

Realising the positive chances from the emerging new period of growth of the association, all countries need to remain diplomatic in promoting their priorities, and seek a delicate balance that will give the BRICS the required stability in the next development cycle, writes Valdai Club expert Dmitry Razumovsky.

Venezuela has gained its right to political sovereignty through much suffering, a right to international political identity. This is a crucial factor enabling it to join the building of a true multipolar world or, to be more precise, a polycentric world order. It is the common orientation to this goal that underlies Russia’s strategic cooperation with both Venezuela and the rest of the Latin American region, writes Valdai Club expert Dmitry Razumovsky.

The European Union and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are formally similar interstate organisations according to the institutional theory of international relations. However, in reality they are antagonists, and their antagonism is conceptual — the EU and BRICS embody the old and the new in international politics and the methods of interstate institutional cooperation. Now that legitimate grounds have arisen to question the future of institutional forms of interstate cooperation in principle, the fates of the EU and BRICS are of equal interest for understanding the foundations on which these states can preserve such major achievements of the 20th century.

The post-election situation will push the parties to embrace radical means of resolving the internal political conflict, and the losers, as always, will be the people of Venezuela, exhausted by the severe economic and humanitarian crisis, writes Dmitry Razumovsky, Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Bolivian society, which has achieved “a cleaner democracy”, is now on the verge of a sharp civil confrontation, which would have been relatively unthinkable during 14 years of relative stability. The confrontation between supporters and opponents of the previous or current interim government has led to the risk of a full-fledged interethnic, interracial conflict, which could have unpredictable destructive consequences.

The victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a pro-US right-wing reactionary politician in Brazil’s late-2018 presidential elections, caused certain concerns among many experts about the country's future participation in the BRICS and the future of the association in general. However, in making such predictions, it would not be entirely correct to rely on existing stereotypes about the left-right dichotomy or the new Bolsonaro administration in particular when considering the role of Brazil in the world and in BRICS.