Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Support our Journalism

9th Anniversary: Free Tote & Mug

India needs to stop looking at BRICS as some new world order. It’s more of a hedge

Expect the Kodak moment in Delhi this weekend. BRICS provides the room and the photograph, but its most useful parts are its least theatrical ones—far less exciting on prime-time TV.

This weekend, Delhi will host a grouping that is simultaneously described as the voice of the developing economies, the engine of multipolarity, the challenger to Western institutions and, increasingly, a possible architect of a post-dollar world.

That is an impressive to-do for an acronym invented by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to describe four promising investment markets—Brazil, Russia, India and China (not necessarily in any order, except acronymical ease).

Remember, the world had seen RIC already—the strategic triangle between a poor China, a devastated Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed and a post-1991 India—each seeking to coordinate to maximise their interests in the post-Cold War 1990s. It was Yevgeny Primakov, Russia’s then-Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister, who publicly floated the idea of a Russia-India-China ‘strategic triangle’ during his visit to New Delhi in December 1998. His logic was quite explicitly geopolitical: three large Eurasian powers should coordinate in a world dominated by the United States. India and China were initially rather lukewarm, and the first meeting of the three foreign ministers came only years later.

Interestingly, Jim O’Neill’s BRIC acronym appears to have been a separate route to almost the same destination. His 2001 Goldman Sachs paper grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China because of their growing economic weight and argued that global economic governance, particularly the G7, would eventually have to accommodate them. There is no credible evidence that O’Neill chose BRIC because he was borrowing from Primakov’s RIC triangle. In fact, O’Neill has subsequently said quite clearly that he never intended his acronym to become a political club. So in a rather nice historical accident, geopolitics produced RIC, markets produced BRIC—and diplomacy eventually married the two.

The triangle was made into a square by adding Brazil, and later into a pentagon by bringing in South Africa—and as more members kept getting added to it, its asymmetry kept growing too.

It soon acquired summits, a bank and six new members (for a total of 11), but what it still has not acquired is a common purpose.

This is where BRICS becomes a double whammy of strategic semantics. Two expressions now enjoy extraordinary popularity: the so-called ‘Global South’ and ‘Middle Power’. Nobody can quite agree what either means, but almost everybody wants to belong to one, lead it, write a strategy and, of course, organise an international conference.

Take the ‘Global South’, for instance. China, the world’s second-largest economy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a nuclear power, the world’s manufacturing colossus and a major creditor to developing countries, insists that its ‘heart’ and ‘root’ remain in the Global South. How?

At this point, the Global South is less a coherent grouping than a strategic mood. It is perhaps the only geopolitical club whose most famous members meet without agreeing to anything in principle.

But the same elasticity is useful. It creates extra leg-room for very different, often loggerheads, national interests to be packaged into the appearance of solidarity. Foreign Affairs’ Comfort Ero has warned against treating the Global South as a coherent coalition; recent scholarship in International Affairs similarly calls it a ‘booming meta category’ in which geography, income and political alignment stubbornly refuse to........

© ThePrint