The secret to the success of BRICS is not what it is, but what it’s not
The group is the antidote to a declining hegemon pursuing its own interests without regard for problems that require system-level solutions
BRICS is on the move. It already expanded at the beginning of this year, while no fewer than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining. Russian Federation Council Chairwoman Valentina Matvienko recently claimed that 24 countries are in line to actually become members.
But successful blocs comprising such a diverse assortment of nations are exceedingly rare. What could possibly compel countries so culturally, geographically, and politically disparate to band together?
Here we can offer the standard line about how BRICS does not seek to corral members into line around a narrow set of interests. Nor does it impose ideological purity tests, or insist upon a certain political makeup. It respects sovereignty. It offers a vehicle for nations left on the margins of Western-controlled institutions to have a stronger voice. This is all true but it has been said many times.
Let’s instead go for a more provocative question: what is so attractive about a group that has very few actual accomplishments to its name? It is in fact this relative lack of achievement that many naysayers have latched on to in dismissing the whole enterprise.
To find a good example of this point of view, look no further than the man who coined the acronym in the first place, former Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill. Ahead of the group’s summit in South Africa last year, O’Neill told the Financial Times that BRICS had “never achieved anything since they first started meeting” and that beyond “powerful symbolism” he wasn’t sure what its members were even hoping to achieve.
And indeed, one will notice that the group’s muscle is often expressed merely in the raw economic or human potential of its members – such-and-such a percentage of global GDP, or population, or oil production, or the number of members (current members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia). More seldom heard is what the group has actually done.
Of the concrete achievements of the bloc, perhaps the most notable is the founding of a development bank that aims to rival the World Bank. The New Development Bank (NDB) was begun in 2015 with its headquarters in Shanghai, and was seeded with $50 billion to fund infrastructure and sustainability projects. Around the same time, a BRICS monetary fund called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) – an alternative to the IMF – was created. These are institutions born out of years of frustration at the failure to reform their US-dominated counterparts.
However, they have not entirely lived up to their hype. Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, who represented his country at the IMF from 2007 to 2015 and then was vice-president of the NDB from 2015 to 2017, prepared a paper for the Valdai Club meeting in Sochi, Russia in 2023 in which he painted a sober picture of the impact these institutions have had.
“When we started out with the CRA and the NDB, there was considerable concern with what the BRICS were doing in this area in Washington, DC., in the IMF and World Bank. I can testify to that because I lived there at the time, as executive director for Brazil and other countries in the board of the IMF. As time went by, however, people in Washington relaxed, sensing perhaps that we were going nowhere with the CRA and the NDB.”
The NDB has approved only $33 billion worth of projects in its entire history; the World Bank committed $128 billion in 2023 alone. Of the projects approved by the BRICS lender, roughly two-thirds have been in dollars, according to an investor presentation cited by Reuters. Perhaps surprisingly to some who expect BRICS to offer an immediate and brazen challenge to the West, the NDB has even respected Western sanctions on Russia, putting new transactions with Moscow on hold. It is no wonder that in the halls of US-led institutions concern about this upstart rival has subsided.
The other realm in which BRICS has been expected to deliver something tangible is in launching its own currency. But here, unfortunately, a lot of loose talk has set up the group for disappointment. A wave of hype early last year, even in Western establishment outlets, touting a soon-to-be-created BRICS currency as having the potential to “shake the dollar’s dominance,” has given way to skepticism.
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https://www.rt.com/business/601140-brics-accomplishments-countries-join/