The first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) convened in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on 1 September 1961. Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Josep Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, the week-long summit brought together delegates from 25 countries who strove for a collective foreign policy premised in peaceful coexistence. “Unwilling to remain hostages to nuclear warfare and to nuclear detente, the new states of the 1950s wanted to chart out an independent path — not as proxies for an American-Soviet Cold War,” writes Indian historian and PI Council member Vijay Prashad. In the latter half of the 20th century, this alternative formation, which came to represent two-thirds of the world’s population, sought to drive an agenda against imperialist domination and colonial subjugation. A criteria for invitations to the Belgrade Summit was developed in Cairo in June, 1961. In addition to their “independent foreign policy”, invited nations “offered consistent support to national Independence movements” and were not “members of multilateral military alliances”. The journey to Belgrade, however, began decades earlier. After the October Revolution of 1917, Indian Communist NM Roy predicted the “awakening of the East.” Three years later, the Congress of ‘The Peoples of the East’ brought 1,900 delegates to Baku, Azerbaijan, where they committed to struggle for a life “based on equality, freedom and brotherhood.” As millions won their emancipation from colonialism in the decades that followed, the call from Baku echoed towards Bandung, where the Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples opened in 1955. The Bandung Conference grappled with issues common to the peoples of both continents: sovereignty, racism, nationalism and anti-colonial struggle. President Sukarno, who led Indonesia’s struggle for independence, called on conference delegates to “inject the voice of reason into world affairs and mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa.” His demand found expression in Belgrade six years later with the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. Opening the summit in the Yugoslav capital, Tito said that small and medium-sized countries “were looked upon… as a kind of voting machine in international forums such as the United Nations and others. This gathering of the highest representatives of non-aligned countries illustrates, however, that such outdated practices must be discarded, that non-aligned countries can no longer reconcile themselves with the status of observers and that, in their opinion, they have the right to participate in solving problems, particularly those which endanger the peace and the fate of the world at the present moment. This meeting has been convened to assert that right.” Aiming to build a movement of solidarity strong enough to assert members’ interests on the world stage, the NAM grew in strength. When the Belgrade summit closed, Nehru and Nkrumah travelled to Moscow while Sukarno and Mali’s Modibo Keïta left for Washington. They carried an ‘Appeal For Peace’ to the major powers, asking them to return to the negotiating table from the brink of nuclear war. By the Movement’s 5th Summit in Sri Lanka, 1976, 86 countries were members of the NAM. This upsurge followed the decision to take up the fight for a New International Economic Order during the 1970s. At their Fourth Summit in Algiers, 1973, the NAM declared that, despite the trend in the international situation toward detente, imperialism continues to hamper the “economic and social progress of developing countries but also adopts an aggressive attitude towards those who oppose its plans, trying to impose upon them political, social and economic structures which encourage alien domination, dependence and neo-colonialism.” The NAM rejected the post war world-order and presented an alternative that proposed turning it on its head. The Algiers Summit laid the foundations that would, one year later, come to formulate the UN Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, based “on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all States.” “We face neither East nor West; We face forward,” said Kwame Nkrumah in summarising non-alignment’s struggle to advance the irreversible process of liberation. Today, as the drums of war sound once again, peoples and nations are recapturing the spirit of Belgrade in 1961 as they struggle for a diplomacy based on cooperation and coexistence.

Hegemony is the phenomenon whereby one group leads the whole by projecting its interests as the collective interest. For a long time, the international system has functioned under the leadership of the Global North, particularly the richest and most heavily-armed North American and European states.

This hegemony is so powerful that it is often not noticed. Students at Global North universities studying other parts of the world usually actually study US and EU strategic interests in those other parts of the world, which are passed off as common sense. The media with the biggest global reach frames its reporting of the world through the lens of Global North interests. But our world is changing and that hegemony is being challenged.

The BRICS, whose summit took place in South Africa last week, provides a telling case study. The term BRICs (lowercase S at the time) was first coined in a 2001 report authored by Jim O’Neill, then Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs’ head of economic research. In the paper for the firm, O’Neill pointed out that Brazil, Russia, India and China were the largest “emerging markets” (itself a term of capitalist hegemony, as countries are defined by their value to external investors) and set to grow faster than G7 countries. He argued that international economic policy-making, and in particular the G7, should be “adjusted to incorporate BRICs representatives.”

It is disputed whether O’Neill personally came up with the term BRICs or whether it was his research assistant, a young Indian woman called Roopa Purushothaman. She is now chief economist to India’s Tata group, whose estimated value is now around three times Goldman Sachs’ $106 billion market capitalisation. Another example of hegemony and its unravelling perhaps.

O’Neill’s predictions about economic growth proved accurate, but his prescription for greater inclusion in geo-economic management was not. Nevertheless, what started as a shorthand for Wall Street investment bankers to talk about rapidly growing economies began to take real form.

In 2006, the foreign ministers of the four countries met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. In 2009, the presidents of the four states: Lula, Dimitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh and Hu Jintao held the group’s first formal summit. The following year, South Africa was admitted to the group, helpfully adding an S to the acronym and representation from the African continent.

As a grouping, BRICS is still young but there are signs it is developing quickly, with this week’s summit marking a potential turning point. Mainly excluded from the US and EU-dominated system of global economic governance, BRICS is developing its own through the New Development Bank. Under the leadership of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who took over as chair of the Bank earlier this year, the NDB looks set to expand its role as a rival to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Bank has an authorized capital of $100 billion, which it lends to countries for development projects and infrastructure without the IMF’s austerity conditionalities. Interestingly, at the Summit this week, Rousseff announced her intention to issue around 30% of loans in local currencies, reducing the exchange rate risk for the recipient country.

Now twenty-three other Global South states have applied to join the club, including seven of the thirteen oil-producing OPEC states. As the summit closed, six were admitted, swelling the size and economic clout of the grouping.

Much of the coverage of the summit in Western media has focused on the geopolitics of the war in Ukraine. But its attendees were focused on the major issues of geo-economics: trade, the dollar, sanctions, development and infrastructure finance.

That’s because BRICS is not an anti-imperialist bloc, nor is it a socialist one. Indeed, according to both Xi Jinping of China and Lula of Brazil, it isn’t intended to be a bloc at all. Rather, it is a vehicle through which the global majority’s governments can express and coordinate their geo-economic interests in a world market whose governance systems all bear the impression of Global North hegemony.

The BRICS is not a moral force. But its development is part of a historical process that sees Northern hegemony wane and splinter. That process presents opportunities for progressive forces around the world to engage with critically.

That potential space for action could open not just for Southern progressive forces but those in the North, too. Global North hegemony has not been that of all the peoples of the Global North but that of the Global North’s ruling class. With that shaking, the majority in the Global North could join hands with the majority in the Global South to construct a new world on more equal terms for all.