The term caught on, morphing from Western marketing jargon into a genuine geopolitical project. The first BRIC summit involving all four nations was held in Russia in 2009. By 2011, South Africa was a full-fledged member, too, adding the S in BRICS. But the bloc in the past decade has muddled along. Its constituent economies have performed unevenly, and its member states have occasionally locked horns, with India and China violently skirmishing along their rugged, contested border.
In a world of myriad regional blocs and political groupings, the BRICS seemed one of its more quixotic. What were its shared interests? Whose agenda did it serve? The heft of China’s economy obscured the woes afflicting some of the other BRICS states. The bloc’s only tangible accomplishment was the launching of an international development finance arm, headquartered in Shanghai.
“If it weren’t for China — and India, to some degree — there wouldn’t be much of a BRIC story to tell,” O’Neill wrote in 2021. “Beyond creating the BRICS Bank, now known as the New Development Bank, it is difficult to see what the group has done other than meet annually.”
This week’s annual summit, held in Johannesburg, may be another talk shop, but unlike many of its predecessors, it brims with intrigue and interesting storylines. The war in Ukraine will shadow the proceedings. Russian President Vladimir Putin, dogged by an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, is the only BRICS leader who will not be in attendance (he is set to speak virtually and be represented in person by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov). Civil-society groups, including South Africa’s branch of Amnesty International, are expected to protest outside the summit venue, calling for an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin’s crackdown on antiwar dissent at home.
The other BRICS nations have offered little to no protest of the Kremlin’s decision to rush to war. China and India stepped up purchases from Russia as Western sanctions started to bite. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested that the West was at least partially to blame for the conflict and has offered a vague proposal to help forge a truce between Kyiv and Moscow. South Africa’s government equivocated, too, refusing to outright condemn Putin’s regime while bemoaning the war’s ripple effects on supply chains critical to African societies.
In Johannesburg, a big topic of conversation will be the outsize influence of the U.S. dollar in the global economy. Talk of “de-dollarization” is rife among exponents of the BRICS, even though not formally on the summit’s agenda. Some have floated a rival BRICS-backed currency to challenge the greenback’s supremacy. But the invention of a new BRICS currency is wildly ambitious — and probably unfeasible — and the summit is expected to focus instead on options to expand the use of local currencies in trade between bloc members. Dollar-strapped countries like Argentina have already started dealing in the Chinese yuan in certain transactions.
“Why does Brazil need the dollar to trade with China or Argentina? We can trade in our currency,” Lula told reporters recently, before casting the BRICS bank as a more just potential actor on the world stage than U.S.-led institutions like the International Monetary Fund. “The BRICS bank must be effective and more generous than the IMF,” he said. “Which is to say, the bank exists to help save countries and not to help sink countries, which is what the IMF does many times.”
For Beijing, the BRICS summit carries a hard geopolitical edge. Over the weekend, President Biden hosted his Japanese and South Korean counterparts at Camp David, marking a deepening tripartite alliance on China’s doorstep — what an editorial in China’s state-run Xinhua described as the United States’ “desperate bid to salvage its hegemonic power.” In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping is making only his second foreign trip of the year to South Africa, where he’ll tout the BRICS bloc — and China’s key role within it — as an example of a different world order.
Chinese officials are keen on expanding the bloc to a possibly far more unwieldy acronym, with countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, Argentina and Saudi Arabia all knocking on the door. Leaders from more than 60 countries are expected to be in attendance at the summit. For China, an expanding bloc would present a vehicle for its more “inclusive” worldview. Speaking in Beijing’s talking points, China’s ambassador to South Africa, Chen Xiaodong, said the bloc was “an important platform for cooperation among emerging and developing nations” and “the backbone of international fairness and justice.”
Another Chinese official, speaking anonymously to the Financial Times, said that “if we expand BRICS to account for a similar portion of world GDP as the [Group of Seven major economies], then our collective voice in the world will grow stronger.”
The larger objective, even as China grapples with its own faltering economy, seems clear: “Xi Jinping is not trying to out-compete America in the existing liberal international order dominated by the U.S.,” Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told CNN. “His long-term goal is to change the world order into a Sino-centric one.”
Other BRICS members are keen not to be pulled into the rivalries of bloc geopolitics. “While some of our detractors prefer overt support for their political and ideological choices, we will not be drawn into a contest between global powers,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a State of the Nation address, in remarks ostensibly directed at Western countries in NATO. “We have resisted pressure to align ourselves with any one of the global powers or with influential blocs of nations.”
“Non-alignment” may have been in vogue during the Cold War for many countries in the Global South, but it’s a trickier proposition in an age when China’s political and economic footprint has steadily expanded across the developing world. “Given the aims of the C in BRICS, neither the B, R, I or S nor other countries that have expressed an interest in joining, such as Indonesia, can really be enthusiastic about becoming Beijing’s vassals just to teach Washington a lesson,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Andreas Kluth. “That’s one reason why the forum will struggle to project soft power, much less hard.”
Other analysts argue that’s no reason to doubt the relevance of the gathering. “For the BRICS to remain viable and make an increasing impact, it is not necessary that its core members be close friends but that they see a common interest,” wrote Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank. “Forming a coalition with Russia and China gives Global South states leverage in their dealings with the US-led West. It also helps generate a more multipolar world, long a goal of the South’s middle powers.”