After ten years of porteño life in Buenos Aires, my friend Emiliano Guanella, a courageous Italian freelance journalist, has moved to Rio de Janeiro because, he says, “Brazil is where things happen”. In musical terms, it’s like switching from the swoon of the tango to the energy of the samba. But this summer, even the Brazilian samba turned into an angry capoeira: protests in 100 cities, dissent against the ‘futebol god’ and derisive slogans calling for “More bread, less games!”
What’s happening in Rio and Sao Paulo? Brazil is a mighty nation. It’s the ‘B’ in BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the club of emerging powers that for ten years now have been called upon to set the course for the future of the planet. At more or less the same time, in Turkey – modern, fast-paced, Western Turkey – young people who had gathered to defend a small wood and a historic square became a veritable army. They were beaten and insulted, but their actions helped to shed light on the
mechanisms behind ‘happy growth’.
What’s happening in Ankara and Istanbul? Turkey and its economic miracle have earned it the ‘T’ in MIST – Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey – the ‘newcomers’ club which according to some experts will hold the keys to the new world. These ‘newcomers’ are rich but also extremely poor, tough yet fragile. They have no qualms about destroying the delicate balance of their
ecosystems, and are a cauldron of social and political contradictions.
And thus we have the new order: wellbeing drives protests more than poverty. As philosopher Moisés Naím warns, “Prosperity doesn’t buy stability”. Can a country like Russia show us the way, sitting atop a mountain of gas and oil while practising state-sanctioned homophobia? What about Mexico, which has vast economic resources but has been fighting a 30-year war against the drug trafficking monster?
This fad for lumping countries together under acronyms such as BRICS, MIST, PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) and FISH (France, Italy, Spain and Holland) is a very clever simplification. Yet more than describing real socioeconomic trends, it actually reveals a need to pigeon-hole and a vain search for meaning in the tumultuous ebb and flow of history.
To quote a wan Hamlet contemplating the world from the towers of Elsinore Castle: “The time is out of joint”.
More modestly, we must surrender to the evidence: there is no longer a leader of the pack in the planet’s disorderly caravan (ah, for the bliss of the Cold War!). Everyone is jockeying for position, elbowing and biting, and it’s not a pleasant sight. Welcome to the club of unhappy giants.
After ten years of porteño life in Buenos Aires, my friend Emiliano Guanella, a courageous Italian freelance journalist, has moved to Rio de Janeiro because, he says, “Brazil is where things happen”. In musical terms, it’s like switching from the swoon of the tango to the energy of the samba. But this summer, even the Brazilian samba turned into an angry capoeira: protests in 100 cities, dissent against the ‘futebol god’ and derisive slogans calling for “More bread, less games!”
