Stephen Sefton, July 13th 2025
Recent statements from the government of the Russian Federation have been very clear that the development of the new multipolar world order is essentially a process of modernization. President Putin commented during the plenary session of the BRICS+ countries summit, July 6th in Brazil, “The model of liberal globalization is becoming obsolete, while the center of business activity gravitates towards developing markets, launching a powerful wave of growth, especially in the BRICS countries."At the same summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented “Multipolarity is not merely an option, but an objective reality replacing the outdated neoliberal model which, in essence, is based on neocolonial practices.”
Although the BRICS+ group is not the only organization promoting cooperation and integration in the majority world, it is the best known and the only one which is genuinely global. Similarly, it is the organization which best demonstrates the limitations and difficulties of coordinating decisive leadership against resistance from the collective West to the modernization of international relations. In this regard, it is worth recalling the origins of the collaboration between the five founding countries of the BRICS group. On the one hand, one has to bear in mind the India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) format initiated with the Brasilia Declaration of 2003 during the first government of Lula da Silva in Brazil.
The goal of IBSA was to create a space for advancing the aspirations of the majority world through South-South cooperation, and also to achieve greater representation of the majority world in existing international institutions. The IBSA countries projected themselves as defenders of democracy in the majority world and have always advocated maintaining balanced relations with the collective West. For India, Brazil and South Africa, their integration into the BRICS group in 2010 reinforced their commitment to the democratization of international relations at a time when the hostility of the collective West against Russia and China was still mainly latent and covert.
For their part, in 2001, China and Russia, with partner countries from Central Asia, had already formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, initially as a mechanism to promote economic stability and regional security between Russia, Central Asia and China. Now, for more than ten years, China and Russia have faced coercive economic measures and increasingly aggressive political-military policies from the collective West. This reality has caused a difference of emphasis between China and Russia and the IBSA countries, although the collective statements of the BRICS+ group insist that it is not a question of replacing but of reforming institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
However, as the collective West has applied more aggressive unilateral coercive measures against Russia and China, it has progressively become more imperative for those countries' governments to promote the development of alternative independent institutions. While this reality has complicated the development of the BRICS group's collective program, it has also boosted and increased its relevance since its inception during the collapse of the Western financial system in 2008 and 2009. BRICS+ has become a central development node of the most important countries in the majority world, capable of surpassing the collective West in economic and technological terms.
The corollary to efforts by the majority world to modernize international relations has been regression at a national level in the collective West to anti-democratic reaction and economic repression against their own populations. The support of the US and European governments for the genocide in Gaza and the recent unprovoked military aggression against Iran indicates that the ruling elites of the collective West have returned to their primitive colonial instincts of conquest and annihilation. There is a strong inverse correlation between the decline of the West's power and influence in the world and the intensification of domestic oppression in their own countries, along with increased military aggression overseas.
After the war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, it was clear that the West had a window of opportunity to reach a new peaceful settlement in its international relations with China and Russia. The Western elites decided to ignore that opportunity. Instead, they have chosen to pursue destructive policies of commercial and financial aggression and military and terrorist confrontation. It is a fight to the death between the outdated old exhausted Western regime and a dynamic, modern world order led by China and Russia. This struggle has been constant in world history over the last couple of centuries. Practically all the anti-colonial struggles for independence and national revolutions have essentially been programs aimed at achieving radical modernization.
Here in Nicaragua, Compañero Moisés Absalón Pastora has reminded us of the significance of the anniversary of the Liberal Revolution of July 11th 1893 noting that, “The Zelaya government sought to modernize and revolutionize the State of Nicaragua through liberal concepts,” based on a republican, democratic and secular state. 34 years later, General Augusto Sandino explained his struggle for national liberation in this way, “I am an urban worker, an artisan as they say in this country, but my ideal is based on a broad horizon of internationalism, on the right to be free and to demand justice... my greatest honor is to come from the bosom of the oppressed, who are the soul and the nerve of the race... Nicaragua, my nation, will receive the tax income that corresponds to it by law and justice, with which we will have enough income to build railways cross our entire territory and to educate our people in a true atmosphere of effective democracy...”
In 1979 the Triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution fulfilled Sandino's dream in the form of a profound project for the modernization of the country, exemplified by the 1980 National Literacy Crusade. Now, Nicaragua’s government, led by Comandante Daniel and Compañera Rosario, is fulfilling, in all its aspects, the historic program of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of 1969. The second stage of the Sandinista Popular Revolution since January 2007 has been a categorical vindication of the vision of a shared national and regional future embodied by General Augusto Sandino in his various manifestos and by the leadership of the FSLN under Commander Carlos Fonseca Amador in their historic program .
In Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, the Sandinista Popular Revolution and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela have demonstrated that only revolutionary processes are capable of achieving the modernization of society in all areas of national life. Other countries with progressive governments in the region have fail to achieve coherent modernization because their local elites use ruthless class war to slow down and roll back national reform programs, for example in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. It is no accident that the principles of solidarity, complementarity and equality promoted by the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance of our America, ALBA, affirm the same vision of cooperation and shared future promoted by the BRICS+ countries.
The BRICS+ summit in Brazil coincides with the increasingly urgent aspirations of the majority world for greater economic and political democratization of international relations, which, in fact, implies their radical modernization. Indeed, with a relatively low profile, the initiatives of the BRICS+ group are advancing steadily based on the central priorities identified by President Vladimir Putin during the summit in Brazil, when he said, “To maximise the emerging prospects, it is important to intensify cooperation within the group, primarily in technology, effective resource development, logistics, insurance, trade and finance.." Now this modernization process includes Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Iran as formal members and, as partner countries, Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
The modality of modernization adopted by these countries contrasts greatly with the varieties of modernization through history. A recent study by the Chinese Institute of International Studies (CIIS) on Modernization and the Global Development Initiative comments, “The early modernization of Western capitalist countries was based on the primitive accumulation by external colonial bloody plunder and internal brutal exploitation. This impetus stemmed from the exploitative and plundering nature of capitalism.”
Later, the CIIS study observes “Historically, modernization has entailed long periods of development, involving industrialization, urbanization, agricultural modernization and informationization. Today, developing countries can transition directly into the digital economy through scientific and technological innovation, circumventing the high costs and resource demands associated with traditional industrialization pathways.” So, it is very clear why the culture of cooperation and the philosophy of modernization promoted by the BRICS+ countries allows them to overcome their internal tensions while also attracting other countries of the majority world to a new path towards modernization.
On July 1st 2021, on the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping explained this reality, when he commented that, with the country’s adherence to socialism with Chinese characteristics, “We have created a new way of Chinese modernization and new modalities for human civilization." President Xi explained that China's modernization is characterized by four factors: the common prosperity of the whole people, a balance between material and spiritual civilization, harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature, and following the path of peaceful development.
A few days later, at his party's Summit with the world's political parties on July 6th 2021, President Xi Jinping said, “The Chinese Communist Party wants dialogue with the political parties of other countries and to learn from their modernization processes in order to enrich the paths leading to modernization together and improve the ways of achieving happiness for the Chinese people and for people around the world.”
The issue of dialogue is central to the modernization of international relations, as Compañera Rosario Murillo remarked in April 2020 recalling Emiliano Zapata, “...with All of Us, here in our Nicaragua, and with everyone, everywhere in this World, we repeat with absolute Faith in God, that we must do Better: A World of Humanity, for Humanity, a World of Coexistence and Complementarity; a World of Peace, a World of Dialogue, a Fraternal and Complementary World, for Everyone, because All of Us live here, for the Good of Everyone!”