Like a bubble floating up to the surface of a stagnant pond, BRICS events pop into the frayed agenda of policymakers as evidence of India’s capacity to become a world leader. No country other than South Africa perhaps is as besotted with the idea of a regional grouping spanning such geographies --- united by a sense, fading no doubt, that together they represent the fastest growing and therefore the most strategic economies in the world.

The Durban summit’s posturing and the seriousness with which it is received among articulate urban Indians — excited by the possibility of helping ignite a new world order no less — bears testimony to the notion that reality would like to be like a story, even a half-baked one.

That’s what the BRICS was at first; a clever whimsy put out by Jim O’Neill at Goldman Sachs in a text the firm grandly titled, “A game-changing paper”. In this, the author looked at the performance of four countries at the turn of the millennium and found their combined GDP (in US$ on a PPP basis) equal to nearly a quarter of the world’s. Neill predicted that the developed world would have to include Brazil, Russia, India and China in future deliberations; also their combined monetary and fiscal policies would impact the global economy.

A clever idea became a tenuous being; South Africa was added ten years after the story was written, lending a closure, a phonetic gravitas to BRIC that could now lexically claim existence as a collective.

Over the years, the members of that collective have attempted to turn an acronym into a metonym; just as Ground Zero connotes calculated destruction, so BRICS must signify creation, a new world order challenging the established dominant discourse and mechanisms exemplified by the IMF and the US.

New order, really?

But what kind of re-ordering do the members seek? At the fifth BRICS summit at Durban during March 26-27, the official communique made clear at least one dreary concern and tattered self-importance: While developed countries recognise the “increasing economic weight of emerging economies” this is not reflected in the “governance model of global institutions such as IMF and World Bank”.

So the BRICS would like more representation on such bodies, failing which they would like to create new ones, in much the same way that the US and the UK did after World War II.

History does not repeat itself; it is circular. Just as there was jostling for power within the Bretton Woods players over the type of post-War mechanism that would fund long-term projects and help to monitor currency and exchange rate tensions, so now BRICS members, particularly India and China, differ on just how the new development bank that would aid infrastructure in emerging economies should pan out.

Realpolitik in BRICS

The bank idea mooted by India, accepted by the other BRICS members, needs cash and no one has as much as China. It can afford to be generous as well as stern about the bank’s initial capitalisation.

But as in Bretton Woods, money speaks its own language, generates its tensions and underlines its own urges; the proposed bank would allow China an alternate parking space for its vast reserves other than the US Treasury bonds; but equally it would allow it to acquire as much of a global importance as it has as America’s largest creditor.

Bank or no bank, China is already a ubiquitous investor in critical and core economic activity, ranging from natural resource exploitation to farming in poor African countries. The idea posed by the business conclaves in Durban for an active engagement with Africa merely second-guesses China’s diplomatic and strategic moves begun decades ago when the rest of the world looked upon the ‘dark continent’ as the site of civil wars and genocide. In 2008-09, when the economic crisis affected the mining industry in Zambia, China was the only investor to stick it out; it reaped the fruits of its strategic vision with the rise in copper prices subsequently.

But China is not alone. At Durban, Russia and South Africa strengthened their collaborative outer space arrangements with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrival at the BRICS venue.

In the meanwhile, the original inspiration for Neill’s storyline is coming unstuck. Almost every economy is going through slowdowns of one kind or other. Corruption plagues just about every country, of a kind that hampers growth. Suddenly BRICS may not seem the paragon of a new order it set out to be.

New BRICS for old

And yet it can, if only the members would look inward, to their history and recall those virtues that singled them out in history. Neill may have located the story of BRICS in GDP numbers but perhaps the reasons to exist as BRICS and remain a metonym for a new world ordering can be found in culture-as-civilisational overhaul.

No grouping in history perhaps has come together so accidentally, almost mindlessly, like the Parallel Campaign in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities inheriting such a varied and rich storehouse of alternate modes of living and exchange as BRICS.

Tolstoy in Russia, Mao Zedong in China created room for the equal treatment of mental and manual labour. Disastrously tragic as the experiment was in China, the stress on equality did position the peasant way of life as a counterpoint to the city.

India’s unique ‘gift economy’ actively practised at Vipassana centres, an ancient Buddhist practice that is spreading in pockets around the world, offers a unique alternative for breaking away from the IMF/World Bank aid model, with its notions of charity and gunboat diplomacy.

South Africa’s practice of restorative justice evident in its Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, however flawed, breaks radically with the savagery of retributive justice that not only sends criminals to the gallows but justifies violent ‘regime change’.

In the essential act of exchange between human beings, both India and South Africa and earlier Russia and China a little over a century ago, have shown that mediation and conduct can be ordered differently.

Perhaps BRICS could still make a strong case for a better, safer and gentler world.

comment COMMENT NOW