In the place where Europe slides into Asia, the world without the West is gathering to flex its political and economic muscles.

The Bric nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — and the members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) are attending simultaneous summits for the first time. The meetings, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, give a glimpse of the globe tilting east and south in coming decades, away from the traditional dominance of the United States and Europe.

For advocates of the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, this is a depressing prospect. Brazil and India are thriving democracies but the prime characteristic of most of the governments gathered here in the Urals is authoritarian, often of the ugliest variety. Apart from China and Russia, the SCO comprises the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. President Ahmadinejad of Iran, busy crushing protest over his “landslide” re-election, has observer status, along with India, Pakistan and Mongolia. President Karzai of Afghanistan will also be present.

Almost half the world’s population is represented by the two organisations and a growing proportion of global GDP. This is the first summit of heads of state of the Bric countries, whose increasing economic clout has merely been dented by the financial crisis compared with the battering endured by the US and the European Union.

If geography largely unites these countries (with the obvious exception of Brazil), it is much harder to say whether they have common agendas. China and Russia certainly regard the SCO as a means to shut the US out of Central Asia, their shared “back yard”, but both are rivals for access to the region’s vast energy resources.

They view the SCO as a potential counterweight to Nato, in political terms at least, but the mechanisms do not exist for a projection of serious co-ordinated military power across the region — even if they could agree on an objective. Russia, which holds the SCO’s rotating presidency, is pressing a security agenda to counter threats from terrorism, particularly Islamic extremism, and drug trafficking from Afghanistan.

The Bric states are determined to break up the cosy club of the G8 economies. Celso Amorim, Brazil’s Foreign Minister, declared the death of the G8 in Paris last week, saying: “It doesn’t represent anything any more.”

Talk of supplanting the dollar as the global reserve currency with regional alternatives such as the Chinese yuan or the Russian rouble is still far from practical. But it is no longer unthinkable, a measure of how much the global architecture is shifting.

Russia craves the restoration of its international status as the dominant power in the former Soviet region and through its leadership with China in the two organisations. The former Communist rivals have never been on better terms, evidenced by booming trade and a state visit to Moscow by President Hu immediately after the two summits.

Whatever the hurdles to co-ordinated action by the countries gathered in Yekaterinburg, the model of authoritarian prosperity espoused by many members of the two blocs is a challenge to Western notions of progress. The US and the EU can only watch, uninvited, from outside as these powers of the non-Western world debate their visions of the political and economic future.

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