Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa: Could they change the way the global economy works?
When leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa meet this week, many observers may ask: Could this group of countries challenge the US and West?
Before the summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described “a common desire to have a more balanced global order” and said, “We will not be drawn into a contest between global powers.”
The five countries constitute BRICS. It’s not a formal alliance, but instead an informal group largely focused on economics. Leaders of the BRICS countries meet annually and a decade ago established their own development bank. But due to their own differences and in the face of a largely US-run global financial system, their efforts have been in many ways symbolic.
Still, that symbolism is potent. As many as 40 countries want to join BRICS, according to South Africa’s 2023 summit chair. At a particularly tense political moment as the West lines up to support Ukraine against Russia, and as the US and China escalate a new Cold War in the making, many countries are seeking alternatives.
Some scholars see echoes of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the Cold War, Asian and African countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to forge an organization that sought to transcend US-Soviet competition.
“This is Bandung all over again,” says Patrick Heller, a sociologist at Brown University. “There is still a really strong sort of anti-colonial reflex in all these countries, that Europe and the US have dominated everything for as long as anyone can remember.”
Yet a reversal of that domination is a long way off. Each of the BRICS countries is experiencing economic slowdowns; and unlike the Non-Aligned Movement, the five countries don’t seem to represent more than a sum of their parts ideologically or politically. But if the parts could come together, it would really be something: more than 3 billion people in those countries alone.
The summit is unlikely to provide that clear vision. Not just because the divisions between Russia and China, and India and China, run deep. The paradox may be that the BRICS won’t be able to unite over a shared agenda as Russia’s war on Ukraine continues. (Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t attend the summit because South Africa is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, where Putin faces charges of alleged war crimes for the Ukraine invasion.) With Russia at war in Europe, and China effectively in a cold war with the US, the BRICS format becomes less of an alternative third vision for the world, and more a way for each US adversary to shore up friendships with middle powers.
BRICS vision for a different type of world order is as of yet not on offer — but there’s a desire for one. And that’s a reality that the Biden administration must reckon with.What is BRICS?
In 2001, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined an acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, and China — BRICs. At the time, the four economies comprised only 8 percent of the global economy, but were rising rapidly. O’Neill wrote that they offered investment opportunities and their growth posed serious questions about global governance. “Over the next 10 years, the weight of the BRICs and especially China in world GDP will grow, raising important issues about the global economic impact of fiscal and monetary policy in the BRICs,” O’Neill wrote.
It is also a time capsule of a different moment: with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 and before Xi Jinping took high office, a US consensus suggested that economic growth would lead China toward democratization.
