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MOSCOW, May 22. /TASS/. NATO, EU and other international structures in future will try to make out of BRICS a threat to the existing world order and to drive wedges among its members, head of the international committee at the upper house of the Russian parliament Konstantin Kosachev told the BRICS Academic Forum on Friday.
"We shall have to face that stage - it has not begun yet, where BRICS will experience attempts of breaking it into national parts," he said. "This is a rather realistic challenge for BRICS."
Tendencies of the kind will be growing "as BRICS is gaining power," he said.
"Geopolitical opponents at a certain stage will try to make out of BRICS an alternative, which brings new threats to the world, which is already united in other structures," he said. "Clearly, those would be NATO, EU and some others."
However, he is confident the BRICS member countries will pass that stage, as the union "develops not as an attempt to replace anything or to compete with anything."
"We are speaking about taking the world on absolutely different approaches - not mono-, but polycentric world, which has equality, and where countries respect each other’s interests," he said adding that approach to construction of international relations "is a response to the social order not only in the BRICS countries, but outside them as well."
"BRICS ideology has clear and very good future," he said in conclusion.
BRICS is a union of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (till South Africa joined the organisation in 2011, it was called BRIC). The union was established in June, 2006. Since then, summits are organised every year - the member countries are hosting them in turn.
The BRICS countries collectively represent about 26% of the world’s geographic area and are home to 42% of the world’s population. In 2013, the share of the BRICS countries reached 16.1% in global trade, 10.8% in military spending and 40/2% in production of non-renewable energy resources. The BRICS consumer market is the largest in the world and is growing by $500 billion a year.