Alphen,
Netherlands. 27 March. They represent
25.9% of the world’s land mass, 43% of the population and 17% of global
trade. The UN Development Programme
states that by “2020, the combined economic output of three leading developing
countries alone – Brazil, China and India – will surpass the aggregate
production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States”. Today the five BRICS countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa) at their fifth annual summit in Durban will
announce a new BRICS Bank, under the catchy 1960s throwback title of “Partnership
for Development, Integration and Industrialisation”. The aim of the Fabulous Five is clear; to
counterbalance what they see as a) the western-dominated International Monetary
Fund and World Bank; and b) plug a gap in development financing caused by the West’s financial
and economic woes. Is the BRICS laying the
foundation of a new world order?
On the strategic face
of it the Durban summit would seem a natural extension of Chinese President Xi
Jingping’s Kissingeresque Moscow démarche of last week. Clearly, the vacuum created in strategic
leadership by the West’s rapid decline, accentuated and accelerated by the
EU/Germany’s incompetent handling of the Cyprus default, will see new actors
emerge. However, for all the clear
ambitions of China (and to a markedly lesser extent Russia) the five countries
are still divided on many issues.
The most obvious is the
strategic provenance of the BRICS.
Whilst China and Russia clearly think in terms of classical Kennanesque
Cold War Realism, and thus see the strategic game with the West as ultimately
zero sum, Brazil and India come from that rather woolly tradition of
non-alignment. The Non-Aligned
Movement emerged in the 1960s as an attempt by India in particular not to be
dragged into somebody else’s potentially destructive grand strategy. For a country that had lost well over a million people
fighting Britain’s grand and not-so-grand wars this made sense.
Today, India is
emerging in its own right and is as a much regional-strategic competitor of China
as partner, particularly given China’s role in nuclearizing New Delhi’s arch-adversary,
Islamabad. To that end, as an example of
constructive multilateralism a BRICS that promotes stability and co-operation
rather than competition is a good thing.
Brazil fits into pretty
much the same category as India. At
several conferences of late I have attended the Brazilians present clearly
identified their strategic interests with those of the West. Moreover, in my Oxford Handbook of War a
leading Franco-Brazilian academic summed up Brazil’s foreign policy as
essentially Latin American in focus and by and large aligned with that of the
US, so long as Washington worked with Brazil. The BRICS can thus be seen very much in the
light of a Brazil keen to remind America of its burgeoning regional-strategic influence.
As for South Africa the ANC-led government
still sees its roots as having been established in a form of colonial war and
as such is instinctively drawn to any form of non-alignment with a vague
anti-Western tinge. And, of course,
Pretoria is desperately in need of Chinese capital.
Furthermore, for all
the grandiose talk last week of a new strategic partnership between Russia and
China, Moscow has no desire to be Athens to China’s Rome, particularly if
tensions between the US and China reach a point where Moscow’s commercial and
energy relationship with Europe is affected.
That may change over time but Moscow will continue to hedge its strategic
bets.
However, if there are
divisions between the BRICS based on geography, alignment and allegiance there
are also huge gaps. Indeed, it is the
issue of capital that will most probably highlight such gaps. The choice of ‘partnership’ as the
key word for the summit is critical. If
the BRICS become seen too overtly as part of a new Chinasphere it will rapidly
fall apart. However, partnership means
equality and the word at the summit is that each member will put some $10bn (€7.8bn)
into the BRICS Bank. This figure represents only
0.1% of Chinese GDP and yet some 2% of South African.
Therefore, for the moment
the BRICS will remain far more a non-aligned movement than a counter-balancing
mechanism. However, it is the long-term
context that makes the BRICS interesting.
One report suggests that whilst Asia alone accounts today for some 24%
of world trade, it will be 42% by 2030 and 48% by 2050. Whereas thanks to the EU, Europe’s mutual impoverishment
pact, whilst Western Europe represented 48% of world trade in 1990, it is 34%
today and likely to fall to 19% in 2030 and 15% by 2050.
If the report is right
the BRICS could one day find itself at the very core of a new world order. This summit is clearly building BRICS for the
future.
Julian Lindley-French
