World Bank vote shows lack of mortar to hold BRICs together While this tradition accounts for much of this week's outcome, it does not tell the whole story. As with last May's contest for the IMF, the fight for the top job at the bank starred a dog that barked loudly but did not, in the end, bite. Last month, the leaders of Brazil, India, China and South Africa met in New Delhi in the fourth such summit of the world's rising economic powers. They voiced support for breaking the Western monopoly of the top jobs at global institutions such as at the bank, and even started exploring the option of creating a rival development bank. Less than a month later, only the South African government stood behind Okonjo-Iweala. Anything other than a show of unity from a continent in which the bank does a lot of its lending and work would have been a major surprise. Although none of the other leaders who were in the Indian capital gave their public backing to Kim, they almost certainly did so to The White House in private. So the lesson Okonjo Iweala drew is not the only one to be taken from the past month. It has also underlined that the acronym BRIC - coined by a Goldman Sachs economist to refer to the rising economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China - not only has its limitations, but can be downright unhelpful when trying to understand the world. Looking through a Western lens still badly cracked from the financial crisis and tepid recovery, it is too easy to impose a unity of purpose on a grouping as diverse as the BRICs. Given the intense rivalry between China and India, would the Indian government really have supported a Chinese candidate if Beijing had put one up against Kim? Or take the case of Russia, where the government did offer public backing to Kim as the best man for the job. Is it naive to see its support for the American candidate as anything other than a small and potentially helpful negotiating pawn in the complex web of relations between the two countries? "The BRICs won't look good," Domenico Lombardi, a former executive director at the World Bank, told me at the end of this contest earlier this week. But it also tells us that the emerging economies are not the European Union - they are not a unified bloc. China and other BRIC members may well be fed up with the institutional stitch-up at the World Bank and the IMF. And their support for Kim is likely to have come with conditions. Do not be surprised to see Kim appoint a Chinese national to a senior position at the bank, as Lagarde did shortly after her victory at the IMF. But the bigger point to take away is that BRIC rhetoric used so frequently in the West and by leaders of the BRIC countries themselves, is sometimes just that. Okonjo-Iweala said that this spring's competition for the bank will change future races. She is right, given it was the first time the US candidate had a rival stand against them. But the reality for those countries that held out the possibility of support for the non-American is that their bi-lateral relations - particularly with the US - still carry the greatest weight as they pursue their interests in the world. That may change in time, but Kim's victory shows it has not yet.