IN NOVEMBER 2001, an economist at a London investment bank was going over lists of international GDP indicators, comparing the developed countries of the G7 with what he called ‘some of the largest emerging market economies’. He concluded that Brazil, Russia, China and India would be the world's leading economies by 2050, surpassing the six most prosperous countries of the West. Although the statement was bold, it came within a brief seven-page working paper brightly titled ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’ (O'Neill 2001). The very suggestion of a ‘better world’ right around Christmas time was a welcome relief after a fiscal year marked by the impact of the September 11 attacks.

Time has passed and Jim O'Neill's argument has gained resonance. Since 2001, his futurological forecast has attracted its share of fans. International media brought together market economists and government technocrats for live debates, skyrocketing online sales of self-help literature on global developmentalism. At the heart of the argument, an old question persisted: can peripheral countries play leading roles on the world's political and economic agenda for promoting development and progress?

In further articles and interviews O'Neill, senior analyst at Goldman Sachs Bank, insisted that the BRICs would be the new global locomotive, moving down the target date of the forthcoming future, from 2050 to 2039 and then to 2032 – sustained by the projection of the huge annual growth rates of those countries between 2001 and 2012, and aspects like the Brazilian discovery of offshore oil reserves, in 2006. BRICs eventually became the topos of discussions that associated emerging countries with a new developmental wave. The BRICs idea turned O'Neill into a celebrity of neo-developmentalism and a bestselling author (O'Neill 2011, 2013). Beyond the author's persona, this concept has also helped reorganise the political agenda of all the peripheries of international capitalism, not just the BRIC countries. Of course, not everyone agreed with O'Neill's exercise in predicting such a future. It has received much criticism and has even been disregarded as fortune telling.

Framing the question

FROM A GLOBAL perspective, democracy seems to be nowadays the political regime that in discursive terms is implicitly considered the sole legitimate political order. Now, in contrast to the past, whenever democracy is not acknowledged as the only suitable regime to institute an order, either explicit ad hoc justifications have to be provided to show why temporarily democracy should not rule, or resistance to democracy is associated locally with resistance to domination. Paradoxically, at the moment in history when the reputation of democracy is at its best globally, a series of elements seem to suggest that its workings are in trouble (Rosich and Wagner 2016). Or, in other words, the constitution of a new global order that connects all human beings, arising as a response to the crisis of the previous order and possessing a commonly understood need to be democratic in its outlook, appears as tension-ridden. It is the first time in history that a socio-political ordering of the totality of human beings has to be normatively justifiable on democratic premises. Thus, it is an urgent task to collectively reconstruct socio-political thinking in the light of this present challenge.

Nevertheless, in both intellectual and historical terms the challenge itself is not new. Cosmopolitanism is the intellectual tradition that focuses on this problematique, though until very recently it did so only from a normative point of view and addressed it as a politicophilosophical project. However, Immanuel Kant, who remains the most representative thinker of this cosmopolitan project, did not believe that it was reconcilable with democracy (Kant [1784] 1989). From a historical point of view, the two ‘world’ wars of the twentieth century gave birth to two consecutive global political institutions, first the League of Nations and afterwards the United Nations. The failure of the Wilsonian utopia of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ after the First World War led the founders of the United Nations to envisage a much less ambitious political programme, putting human rights at the centre of their normative project and leaving to the principle of state sovereignty the political regime of member states.