In 2001 Jim O’Neill, an economist at Goldman Sachs, came up with the acronym “Bric” while explaining that he believed the next wave of growth would come from emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Years later, foreign ministers of the Bric met to begin the process of formally organising the group into a bloc. The mission was simple: to co-operate, on an equal basis, on politics, trade and investment.
In 2010, SA’s luckiest year, the Bric group invited SA, Africa’s largest and most sophisticated economy, to join, adding the “s” to the acronym we know today.
Since then the bloc has scored some commendable wins. On global platforms the group has sought, but not always succeeded, to speak with one voice. One of its biggest achievements has been the establishment of the New Development Bank, better known by its unofficial name of Brics bank.
Although smaller than the World Bank, the IMF and other regional development finance institutions, its importance goes beyond symbolism. It has funded infrastructure projects within the bloc and outside it, and today the combined GDP of Brics has surpassed that of the Group of Seven (G7) — the club of the richest nations.
Its members are able to retain affiliation to other multilateral and regional groupings. A case in point is India’s foreign policy, which is more pragmatic than ideologically driven and allows it to maintain relations with anyone, including the West, a source of irritation to Beijing.
The Brics members have struggled on the trade and investment front and with people-to-people relations. For example, during the Covid pandemic there was little deliberate co-operation. SA, the smallest economy, turned to Western countries to source vaccines and slow-rolled the approval of Chinese and Russian vaccines.
During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, which ended in 2022, Brazil also looked more to the West than to Brics. Only China, which has an insatiable appetite for minerals from Brazil and SA, has been an outright beneficiary of Brics. It now accounts for much of intra-Brics trade.
This isn’t hard to figure out. The bloc has no free trade area arrangements. It relies on the general system of preferences and some inter-governmental pacts, which means the increase in intra-Brics trade is occurring despite — not because of — the bloc.
The recent joint military exercises in SA with Russia and China, which annoyed the West, also had very little to do with Brics and were more to do with bilateral relations.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 there was no common Brics position on the war. India sat on the fence, as did Brazil. After flip-flopping for a year, SA cobbled together an African — not Brics — mission to try to persuade Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to start peace talks.
This failed. That Putin didn’t take the mission seriously was soon revealed by his opting out of the Black Sea grain initiative, an agreement to allow Ukraine to export grain to the world. It was only days before the Russia-Africa summit that he offered free grain to the poorest African countries.
China’s Xi Jinping may have some influence over the future of the Russia-Ukraine war, not the Brics bloc per se. The Kremlin has turned its back on the world, at least for now. It is unlikely that Putin would have travelled to Johannesburg to attend next week’s Brics summit even if there was no International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him.
Even so, attempts to get Putin to stay home and avoid SA having to execute the arrest warrant have dampened spirits ahead of the summit. As host, SA has invited 70 leaders. As well as the symbolic importance of being the first in-person summit after Covid, the summit is significant for the challenges it faces. Until now it had been a by-invitation-only club, but for the first time in its 15-year existence it now has membership applications from more than 30 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.
The more serious applications include those from Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, Ethiopia, Iran and Turkey. Nigeria, which has a new president, has been lukewarm but might warm up to an invitation from the founders.
The Brics’ attraction can be explained in at least two ways. Under Donald Trump, the US backed away from its global role in military, development, trade and investment co-operation. Washington became consumed in its trade and currency war with Beijing, and Europe was dealing with immigration and the UK’s messy exit from the EU. This fuelled the belief that the West is an unreliable partner to the developing world, which then gravitated towards China.
The second reason is the West’s growing anti-China posture over Beijing’s rise to superpower status.
Switching from a “by-invite only” admission criterion to a “knock-on-the-door” one has been hard. For months Brics diplomats have tried to negotiate and agree on criteria for the expansion of the bloc. Understandably, progress has been slow.
Accepting all and sundry now will be risky. Consensus in a bigger bloc will be as hard as reaching agreement at the UN Security Council. A more sensible approach would be to agree on a structured system of processing applications when they are received. This would also allow the bloc to thoughtfully fashion an approach driven by values other than the desire to be just an ideological counterpoint to the West.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is CEO of the Small Business Institute.
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