The Russians Have Come

Over the years that I have been coming to Sharm El Sheikh — a regular stop for the cruise ships I lecture on — I’ve observed the town’s growing Russification. A high percentage of the shops in the Old Market now have their signage in cyrillic, and Russian is the foreign language you hear most often in the street. Local urchins increasingly greet you with the odd Russian phrase. Sharm is not just a magnet for tourists from the former USSR; Russians are buying up property too (as in London). More and more Egyptologists, who work as guides at the heritage sites, speak Russian — and now even Chinese, as tour groups from the People’s Republic swell in number as well.

This is all part of the phenomenon of the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) within the process of globalisation. Though Brazil still hasn’t had quite the global impact economically that the others have, the growing Brazilian presence not just in the Americas but in large parts of Africa and beyond is noticeable. There are said to be over 250,000 Brazilians in England, most of them in London. We no longer live in the bipolar world of the Cold War, nor the unipolar world of US hegemony in the 1990s, but in a genuinely multipolar world, though global institutions — including the UN — still have to take full cognisance of this fact. In the meantime, as the BRICs rise, and the US declines in relative importance, it is all the more essential for Britain to integrate further with the rest of the EU to make a truly competitive, strong Europe on the world stage.