Abstract
The chapter observes various prognoses about the Great Divergence of the East and West, as well as the concept of the BRICS countries. It refers to historical reminiscences concerning the past superiority of China to Western countries. That superiority hid the principal differences between the East and West in productive forces. The author presupposes that the apparent dynamism of some emerging countries, primarily China, hides the difference between the advanced Western countries and the so-called emerging powers, in the character of their productive forces again: the post-industrial, knowledge-based economies in the West and the industrial productive forces in emerging countries. Meanwhile, this difference is the main obstacle to the attempts of China and other emerging countries to become the new economic centre of the world.
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Notes
- 1.
About the concept of modernity as the specific, Euro-centred great tradition, see Eisenstadt (1973: 203–211).
- 2.
One of such forms was the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ conception of ‘non-capitalist way of development’ from feudalism to socialism. Its absurdity and voluntarist character consisted not only in a naïve belief to jump over the whole stage of development – in contrast to the ‘properly’ Marxist classification of development stages – but also in presupposition that there was the feudalism, this exclusively European phenomenon, in non-European societies based rather on the Asiatic mode of production with all its modifications and varieties.
- 3.
‘The process of the spread of modernity beyond Europe is characterized by widely varying features’ (Eisenstadt 1973: 259). ‘One of the most important implications of the term “multiple modernities” is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities’, wrote Eisenstadt.—… ‘the trends of globalization show nothing so clearly as … the construction of multiple modernities; attempts by various groups and movements to reappropriate and redefine the discourse of modernity in their own new terms’ (Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3, 24).
- 4.
According to the International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook (data have been renovated two times per year, in April and October). Viewed on 05.04.2019 – http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-capita-ranking.php; http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp-capita.php
- 5.
‘…China, with continuing economic growth (albeit at a reduced rate), is destined to become one of the two major global powers and ultimately the major global power’ (Jacques 2009: 363).
- 6.
Even in 2013, on the eve of ‘the turning point’ in the BRICS short history, when the first signs of serious structural and institutional diseases in Brazilian, Russian and South African economies began becoming evident, the Indian think tank, representing India in the BRICS academic community, continued to argue: ‘The formerly dominant Western powers are steadily losing the ability and perhaps the will to play the hegemon’s role, while the formerly marginalised “third world” finds itself newly empowered’. (Saran et al. 2013: 8).
- 7.
This commission was organised on the initiative of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy who was not satisfied by the recent, widely accepted system of economic indicators.
- 8.
‘Consider the problems posed by the suburbanization process underway in many countries. As a result of increases in commuting, GDP increases because of greater spending on transportation. If the country fails to provide adequate public transportation, there will be greater use of private means of transport, and an increase in traffic jams and thus higher oil consumption, all contributing to increased GDP. But the well-being of society is clearly lower. People literally lose time (commuting time is not leisure, nor, like work, does it yield a direct return) and pollution increases’ (Stiglitz et al. 2009b: 15–16).
- 9.
Bairoch based his estimations upon the data on GNP (gross national product) but not GDP, as Maddison did. However, because of low level of development and small importance of the external trade for traditional, agrarian societies (except few cities like Florence, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp or Bremen) the difference between GDP and GNP could hardly be significant at that time.
- 10.
Being in disagreement with Pomeranz’s explanations of the West Europe’s, primarily Britain’s, breakthroughs and take off in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Great Divergence of the levels of socioeconomic and technological development between West and East had become obvious, I do not comment his explanations here.
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Krasilshchikov, V. (2022). The ‘Multi-Polar World’, BRICS and the Coming Chinese Hegemony: Prognoses and Daydreams. In: Brazil - Emerging Forever? . Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50208-9_2
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