In a world divided between the West and the Rest, Western inability to comprehend a changing world order is giving a common platform for grievances of ‘the Rest’, no matter the friction between individual countries.
New Delhi: Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill who coined “BRIC” in 2001, spoke of a world where Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later addition, South Africa (thus, BRICS), would be the growing nations that would dominate the world economy by 2050. This has unfolded accurately, only partially. The only two countries who have, since, fulfilled this potential are India and China.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were some naysayers who had started to suggest that perhaps the BRICS grouping was starting to sputter—and at best, the story was confined to the India-China duologue. But the story of BRICS is changing.
At last count, it includes, apart from the original countries, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Ethiopia. Turkey, a NATO member state, which has a troubled history of trying to join the European Union (EU), now wants to be part of BRICS. Other countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Algeria, Bolivia, Congo, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and Comoros are keen to be part of the BRICS fold which, apart from raising unwieldy questions of what the acronym should be, underlines what the BRICS is really becoming.
Western analysts point out that despite already representing a third of global trade, and around 45% of world’s population, there are many dissimilarities among BRICS members. Of its three most powerful members, only one, India, is democratic. A world of war and conflict are widening and deepening divisions between countries like the UAE and Iran. Southeastern members jostle with, and watch warily, the advance of China, even though they are mostly compelled to cooperate with the CCP. Conflict with India and China is persistent and Russia, especially after the war in Ukraine, has a difficult status in the world. And what really connects India, China, Vietnam and even Egypt, among the three richest countries in Africa, with Congo, one of the poorest in the world?
All of this, while accurate, misses a broader point. BRICS is developing, or at least there seems to be an effort for BRICS to develop, as a “voice of the rest”. There is the West, and there are the “rest”. And BRICS is becoming a home for “the rest”.
The Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, gave new energy to BRICS. The logic of resilient supply chains became predominant, and the idea grew that countries had to be self-sufficient, especially when faced with delays in transfer of vital life-saving pharma technologies (including vaccines) and financial support from the West. Covid accelerated a process that was already shaping through the 2010-20 decade.
In 2011, BRICS countries produced a little less than one third of manufacturing GDP as compared to 15% (USA), 9% (Japan) and 15% (the four big EU countries, i.e. Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy)”. Between 1995 and 2011, there was a major shift in global manufacturing gross domestic product (GDP) from around 10% in 1995 to 28% in 2011, and over the period of 1999-2014, compared as blocs, the share of global manufacturing output of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) shrunk from 31.9% to 21.6%, the share of the European Union (EU) fell from 27.8% to 20.1%, while the share of the BRICS economies in global share of manufacturing output rose from 10.1% to 33.8%. This growth was largely fuelled by the rise of Chinese manufacturing as the “world’s factory floor”. In 1999, China’s share of world manufacturing was 6%. This rose to 25.6% in 2014. Such growing share has been noted for BRICS countries in the services sector too. According to World Trade Organisation statistics, in 2015, China was the world’s third largest exporter of services in 2015 and India the eighth, with significant successes in information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO). In 2014, the BRICS countries set up a new bank, New Development Bank (NDB), with an initial authorized capital of US$100 billion, to build resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging economies, including developing countries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the NDB sanctioned loans of US$1 billion each as assistance to China, India, South Africa, and Brazil.
The unfolding of wars in Ukraine, and then Gaza, added further worries about the sanctity of the global financial transfer system including SWIFT, and the role of reserve currencies and debts, and whether these could be weaponised.
These structural issues also have a cultural aspect. The truth is that two of the world’s largest countries by population, and economic size, today have differences with Western perspectives and interference in their sovereignty. Despite Indian support to the West on Taiwan and Tibet, India feels slighted by constant negligence of India’s sovereign needs and rights, most recently demonstrated by the callousness shown by Canada on the Khalistan issue. It is incomprehensible that several countries in the West, including in Europe, still feel that they have the right to comment on, and actively interfere, in India’s internal matters—for instance, while Trudeau commented and took a side in the farmer protests in India, similar comments from India on the trucker protest in Canada or the yellow vest protests in France, would see very hard pushback from Canada, France, and indeed the EU. And yet, such interference in India is still considered acceptable when the West does it. This is not a situation that can be sustained and as the world order changes, pushbacks from countries like India will become even more strident.
In fact, issues like these are giving common cause for narrative cooperation between China and India, and Russia and others, who have a common set of grievances against the West despite their own internal divisions. China and India are far from resolving their protracted border dispute, but both have reason to ask themselves the question of whether a fall-out with the West could, ever, lead to some kind of block out from the SWIFT financial system. India, which holds the world’s largest free and fair elections with counting completed seamlessly in one day, and has a history of peaceful transfers of power, also watches with distaste as it faces consistent attacks in the name of human rights from pockets in America (which regularly seems to struggle to finish counting votes seamlessly and where Capitol Hill can be overrun by protestors after an election result) including think-tanks even as America provides active support and cover-up for a tiny, viciously corrupt state like Azerbaijan as host of COP29, and provides funds and high-end weapons to Pakistan, despite a long history of pilferage and slaughter of minorities. While India faced strident criticism for buying Russian oil after the start of the war in Ukraine, ironically a lot of that oil was bought from India after refining by Western countries who were chastising for buying the raw crude.
The future of BRICS and the West’s engagement with BRICS will depend on finding cooperative, and respectful, resolutions to such conflicts, and in ways through which a more egalitarian dialogue could be built.
This does not necessarily mean uniform cohesion within BRICS. The smaller countries joining BRICS would also seek economic support from countries like China and India. This is already a path of further competition between China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and India’s own efforts to help build infrastructure in different countries. There are deep differences between BRICS countries, also, on issues like the war in Gaza and Lebanon, and the Palestine problem. Such differences are likely to crop up in other arenas as well in a world increasingly ridden with conflict.
But the premise for the growth of BRICS must be better understood by the West. As has been reiterated by India, Russia and others, BRICS is not designed to be an “anti-West” bloc.
After BRICS members are deeply involved in other collectives, like India in the Quad, which are widening cooperation some of which are designed to restrain excess of a BRICS member state, China. So, the situation cannot be, and should not be, seen in simplistic terms of—pro-West or anti-West. The framing of BRICS as “non-West” is therefore far more suitable. It is an evolving collective of the non-West or the rest, apart from the West.
The evolution of BRICS has a tonality of a degree of exasperation with the West—or at least parts of the West—seeking to think in terms of, and apply, ideas that are no longer relevant. These are ideas that saw normative behaviour and the creation of frameworks of ethics as a fundamental role of the West, and its aligned “free” media, which also had the prerogative of disseminating these norms and frameworks around the world, and adjudge others on their basis.
The world is far more fluid now, and some of the responses from the West, when pushed back on such framework setting agenda, varies from astonishment to indignation. But such pushbacks are growing, and are bound to grow further. Already, after the Indian subcontinent, such pushbacks are coming from countries in Africa
“The rest” do not feel compelled anymore to listen to sermons anymore and seek to see the West “walk the talk”; as President of Guyana, Irfaan Ali snapped back at a hectoring Stephen Sackur of the BBC in March on the issue of climate change, “I am going to lecture you on climate change!”
The West would do well to listen to this exasperation because this is set to grow as flashpoints of immigration, climate change, and global debt increases. It would be a pity if, in a violently troubled world, two parts of the world cannot find methods and means to understand each other’s concerns, and seek to pass judgement and expand conflict, rather than find empathetic, diplomatic solutions.
Many of the crisis that the world faces today, in fact, needs active cooperation between the West, and the rest, but this cannot happen if the basic understanding that the world has changed does not exist, and if there is a deep-seated effort to operate only by the old rules. BRICS and its expansion are sending a message that the “non-West” counts and its uniqueness and individual concerns must be taken into account.
Only by giving it patient hearing, and without cut-and-pasting fashionable ideological frameworks on societies far removed from the West, can a fruitful dialogue hope to succeed.
* Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Jindal Global University, and co-founder of the foreign affairs platform, Global Order.