The theme of the ninth BRICS Summit in China’s Xiamen, “Stronger Partnership for Brighter Future”, perhaps most aptly explains the current stresses faced by the group. For several reasons, the ‘future’ of this ‘partnership’ has lately come under serious interrogation. While Brazil and South Africa have experienced prolonged internal instability, Russia has had to face continuous distractions from Georgia, Ukraine and Syria to the current US sanctions.
But no one was expecting the China-India military standoff at Doklam to become the most formidable stumbling block hurting BRICS and Chinese aspirations. And even as they have hammered out a mutually-agreed ‘disengagement’, no one expects this to provide a lasting solution.
The recent backdrop of India absenting itself from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Forum in May, and Russia, India and China failing to hold their trilateral foreign ministers’ meet, which was to be held in April, has pushed the media into repeatedly asking whether the Indian PM would attend the BRICS summit. India’s studied silence on this proved to be its strongest lever resulting in an early end to the standoff at Doklam.
Meanwhile, North Korea has ratcheted up its missile tests and US President Donald Trump has slammed China, North Korea and Pakistan; this may have also helped India’s diplomatic negotiations. The BRICS summit may have been rescued with India confirming the PM’s participation, yet all this has surely dented China’s initial enthusiasm.
But to keep the focus on BRICS, it is common knowledge that its original author Jim O’Neill was not happy with BRIC becoming a political grouping and then adding South Africa, making it BRICS. But what has really transformed BRICS is its agenda which has expanded way beyond the original expectations. The limited remit of BRICS was to reform the global financial governance structures. At a broader level, it was to pursue democratisation of international relations and provide developing nations a greater say in global governance.
But the BRICS agenda has since expanded to include several non-financial issues from climate change and terror to women empowerment, human trafficking and so on. No doubt these are important issues but such ambitious trajectories have triggered concerns even amongst Chinese experts who allude to the growing disjunction between BRICS’ expansion and efficacy. Li Xing’s book The BRICS and Beyond talks of BRICS becoming “a conjectural alliance” which is not likely to achieve “a long-term political and economic union.”
What BRICS needs today is not expansion but consolidation. Its dozens of official and inter-ministerial mechanisms, for example, would be better served by a dedicated organisation structure and its own cadre of BRICS personnel. To nourish cohesion and momentum in this increasingly disoriented grouping, BRICS will have to go beyond being satisfied with cultural cooperation and evolve a BRICS culture and constituencies.
These would synergise those fast-shifting sands from inter-state to inter-societal connections, from top-down to bottom-up planning, and from physical to social infrastructure building and nourish BRICS with the help of people-to-people contacts. There has to be not just an ad hoc method but an enduring brick-building approach in encouraging BRICS exchanges amongst youth, think tanks, academics and media. Cooperation in fields like films, sports, heritage, education and tourism should be encouraged.
The limited financial agenda of BRICS has given the world the New Development Bank (NDB) and a currency pool; both have had the positive impact of pushing Bretton Woods institutions into making changes in their voting rights so as to provide greater weightage to emerging economies. Earlier this month, the NDB also opened its African regional centre in Johannesburg and plans to invest $1.5 billion in South African infrastructure projects in the next 18 months. Since Jim O’Neill articulated the BRIC formulation, the trade of these four countries with Africa has surged from $28 million in 2001 to $377 million in 2014.
In this the decision of the BRICS trade and commerce ministers to adopt the “Outline for BRICS Investment Facilitation” earlier this month was a major step forward, especially as India had been a strong outlier on this. It is at this deeper level of their piecemeal economic integration that experts today notice BRICS multinationals evolving their distinct culture of investments, personnel and technology transfers, and market management. The Challenges of BRIC Multinationals by Rob van Tulder and others finds them emerging as a unique phenomena defying the “traditional logic of MNES (multinational enterprises).”
Intra-BRICS business now promises to take the lead in strengthening the BRICS culture to keep the nations together in these difficult times. In this, the member nations share the strong foundational norms of being proponents of state-centric economies though private companies in India (Tatas, Reliance, Adani), Brazil (Vale, Embraer), South Africa (De Beers) remain influential in their national decision-making. The technology-infused time and space shrink can be another catalyst in addressing their disruptions based on their size, nature of their politics and economies, and their inheritance that reinforces their physical disconnections.
It was in 2011 that China first hosted a BRICS summit. As China holds this BRICS summit in Xiamen, there is a need to resist the temptation of making grand declarations and focus on limited but actionable plans to provide BRICS the much-needed depth and cohesion to pursue its limited agenda of reforming global financial governance.
Swaran Singh
Professor, School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi
Email: ssingh@jnu.ac.in