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Куда движется БРИКС: сценарии демографического и ценностного развития
The relevance of "sudden" associations of states, such as the BRICS, is rapidly increasing in the process of transition of the global world order to multipolarity and in the context of geopolitical aggravation accompanying the increase in tension in the former unipolar system. Russia, along with China and India, is among the largest world powers making the most significant contribution to the development of the polycentric world order [Sadovnichy et al. 2014; Grinin 2023; Alekseenko 2017; Popova 2017]. The development of BRICS is considered by a number of major scientists as a shift of the center of civilizational development to the East [Prospects... 2014]. At the same time, the value and ideological basis of cooperation between the BRICS countries and with other developing countries turns out to be much more complicated than the "confrontation with the United States", reducing it to this thesis seems to be an unforgivably crude reductionism. A study of the distance between the countries of the world in the space of value attitudes measured during the World Values Survey showed that some pairs of BRICS member states are the closest "neighbors in values" for each other, that is, they are most likely to support the same values (for example, Russia – China, India – South Africa), however, some pairs of states turn out to be quite far apart from each other (for example, Russia – India, Brazil – India) [Shulgin et al. 2018]. In this context, N. V. Popova's statement about the need to develop an inter-country dialogue, "based on both common values and an understanding of existing value differences, seems completely correct. This condition requires intensive scientific and humanitarian cooperation" [Popova 2021: 4].
One of the significant consequences of establishing such a dialogue, in particular, and the development of a multipolar world order in general, seems to us to be changes in the value picture of the global world (that is, adherence to certain values of the world's population). The authors of the theory of the sequence of human development, R. Inglehart and K. Welzel, based it on the assumption that one of the main processes forming the value attitudes of the population is modernization [Inglehart, Welzel 2005; Inglehart 2015; 2020], which led to the assumption that as developing countries modernize, they will approach developed countries in the prevalence of certain values. However, the study we conducted using some elements of the Inglehart and Welzel methodology on the data of Sh. It revealed the different directions of the movement of the countries of the world along the value axes highlighted by Schwartz. Indeed, both in the Western world (including European countries and former resettlement colonies of the Americas and Oceania) and in the Afrasian macroregion, modernization (approximated through indicators such as GDP per capita and employment shares by economic sector) is accompanied by a decrease in conservation values and an increase in values of openness to change. However, in the Western world, the growth of openness is accompanied by an increase in concern for the environment, and in the Afroasiatic world – an increase in self-affirmation. At the same time, the discovered difference between the Western and Afrasian macroregions "can be explained only very partially through the stadium factor. To a much greater extent, it seems that we are talking about various civilizational patterns of modernization of values" [Zinkina, Slinko et al. 2018: 44; Korotayev et al. 2019]. Accordingly, the further development of the BRICS countries may lead not to convergence, but to a divergence of the values of the population of the West and the East.
This phenomenon will be of particular importance given the scale of the demographic weight of the BRICS, two of the five countries of which are the largest in the world by population. Accordingly, global values are likely to be increasingly determined by the values of the population of these two States. However, this also depends on the demographic trajectories of the BRICS development. In earlier work, we showed that global demographic trends can lead to a slowdown in globalization and a decrease in the level of global integration as the population of developing countries with a relatively lower level of globalization increases [Zinkina, Shulgin et al. 2018]. It was also shown that such an extremely significant global demographic phenomenon as population aging not only in developed countries, but also in many major developing countries, can lead to some important value shifts (in particular, to an increase in adherence to prosocial values, which is observed at older ages) [Korotaev et al. 2021]. The demographic situation in each of the BRICS countries has its own specific features, however, it is possible to note the similarity of a number of important demographic characteristics of these states. Thus, Russia and China have completed the demographic transition and issues of fertility support are more relevant for them now, a similar situation is observed in Brazil. India and South Africa are completing the demographic transition. In this article, in the light of the above, a twofold goal is set: first, to build scenario forecasts of the demographic future of the BRICS countries, and secondly, to predict the most significant consequences of a particular scenario in terms of shifts in value attitudes.