The recent summit of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in Durban, South Africa, completed the group’s first cycle of summits. The summit declaration contained the usual pieties about “solidarity” between the BRICS and their “shared goals”.
However, unlike previous declarations, this one contained the first steps towards creating BRICS institutions. The most publicised among them, the BRICS development bank, has been greeted with the usual western scepticism. Until recently, such scepticism tended to focus simply on comparative growth rates.
With the BRICS taking steps toward institutionalisation, there is a new element: can the BRICS development bank really rival the IMF and the World Bank?
For the New York Times, the BRICS don’t have “enough in common and enough shared goals to function effectively as a counterweight to the West”. Such scepticism is misleading.
The BRICS countries do have a mortar that binds them: their common experience, and rejection, of the neoliberal development model of the past several decades and the western-dominated IMF and the World Bank that still advocate it. Their rapid development over the previous couple of decades was despite, not because of, this.
Once this is understood, the BRICS’ increasing coherence becomes evident. They have long called for the reform of the IMF and the World Bank only to meet with resistance. Rather than waiting, they have decided to act.
The BRICS common agenda of pushing international economic governance away from neoliberalism and western dominance was also manifest when they complained that austerity in the West was holding back world growth and that the central banks’ unconventional monetary policy encouraged speculation worldwide rather than growth domestically.
Given the recent attacks from countries in the West on the work of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which has been critical of western financial institutions, the BRICS made a particular point of calling for “strengthening UNCTAD’s capacity to deliver on its programmes of consensus building, policy dialogue, research, technical cooperation and capacity building”.
The Durban declaration did not avoid international flashpoints either. On Syria it asked for “all parties to allow and facilitate immediate, safe, full and unimpeded access to humanitarian organisations to all in need of assistance” and there were also statements on Mali, Palestine, Iran, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Finally, for the first time, “China and Russia reiterate[d] the importance they attach to the status of Brazil, India and South Africa in international affairs and support[ed] their aspiration to play a greater role in the UN”.
The Durban declaration did not avoid international flashpoints either. On Syria it asked for “all parties to allow and facilitate immediate, safe, full and unimpeded access to humanitarian organisations to all in need of assistance” and there were also statements on Mali, Palestine, Iran, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Finally, for the first time, “China and Russia reiterate[d] the importance they attach to the status of Brazil, India and South Africa in international affairs and support[ed] their aspiration to play a greater role in the UN”.
Not since the days of the Non-Aligned Movement and its demand for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s has the world seen such a coordinated challenge to western supremacy in the world economy from developing countries.
The Guardian