The BRICS in the New Global Economic Geography

The architecture of global governance is made up of intergovernmental global and regional organizations as the inner core of formal multilateral machinery; informal but functionally specific and single-problem oriented institutions such as the Proliferation Security Initiative; and a “soft” layer of informal, general-purpose institutions such as the myriad of “G” groups which “serve as consensus incubators and direction-setters, not direct action decision-makers.”1 They can range from G zero-a world in which no country exercises hegemonic power or influence-to G1, a unipolar world. In recent times there has been much talk of a possible G2, meaning the United States and China, and some talk of a possible G3 (with either the European Union, EU, or India being the third member).