BRICS is an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Originally identified to highlight investment opportunities, the grouping evolved into an actual geopolitical bloc, with their governments meeting annually at formal summits and coordinating multilateral policies since 2009. Bilateral relations among BRICS are conducted mainly based on non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit.
The founding countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009, with South Africa joining the bloc a year later. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates joined the organisation on 1 January 2024. Saudi Arabia is yet to officially join, but participates in the organisation's activities as an invited nation. Recently, Turkey one of the big economies in the world has reportedly submitted its request to join the bloc.
To know more about the bloc and the role that it can play in the future of the world orders, we reached out to Larry Cata Backer Professor of Law and International Affairs at Penn State University, USA. He is also a member of the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute.
Following is the full text of the interview:
NATO member, Turkey has recently applied for BRICS membership. Earlier some other big economies like Saudi Arabia and UAE had joined the BRICS. Why is the desire to join the bloc increasing among world countries, especially among Asian and African countries?
There seems to be a general tendency among States that are not at the apex of global power to join organizations where either they may engage in collective activity among themselves, or where they might attach themselves to an apex State. The era of the Non-Aligned Movement, closely tied to the historical period of decolonization, has now effectively ended. That ending is in some ways tied to another ending, that of the post 1945 unitary vision for globalization with which this Non-Aligned camp had quite dynamic and sometimes contentious relations. While their respective narratives are still powerful, they might usefully be contextualized in the trajectories of the emerging ordering of States and powerful non-State actors. Thus, in a sense, one can understand the tendency to value membership in BRICS in the way that other States now value membership in NATO, or the Arab League, or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). In all of these instances, membership brings the benefits of community—though those benefits and assurances will be unique to each constitution of communities of States. Those benefits are invariably defensive (against larger others or against the interests of those in the group itself) and they are offensive, as a means of levering inter-governmental aggregated power to further national development plans or build solidarity.
Membership in these communities of State actors in this new era of historical development are not exclusive or a zero sum game. A State may join as many as suits its interests—and it can come and go more or less as it likes—with the usual political benefits and consequences. Indeed, many States have again rediscovered the utility of hedging their relationships—both in kind and quality. BRICS offers States an intergovernmental framework that leaves a substantially broad space to pursue their own interests as they like, while serving as a useful, though episodically applied, united front where national interests align. In a sense, BRICS might be understood as a platform in which the producers and consumers of aggregated action can come together and draw from these relationships whatever they find of value from time to time. The greatest value of BRICS, perhaps, is the ideological narratives around which its platform structures are established. The value of the ideological framing ought not to be undervalued. A common ideology grounded in historical grievances refashioned for a contemporary era can be effectively deployed against both competitor and partners as BRICS states seek advantage in the projections of their power abroad and in the defense of their own interests where power in projected inward from outside powers. This is especially useful where BRICS members, like those of other similar collectives, seek to aggregate power and strategies against initiatives and objectives of larger powers that they may find inconvenient on economic, political, or ideological terns. At the same time BRICS offers a “family” space in which States with similar interests can protect them against each other. India and China presents a useful example—States that are both competitors and sometimes adversaries, but at the same time also aligned in many ways against common “obstacles” to their strategic objectives.
BRICS also provides a very useful and loosely configured space within which this community can further individual and mutually advantageous strategic objectives within an institution that is designed for maximum flexibility and minimum regulatory restraints. BRICS, like MERCOSUR, provides an inter-governmental institutional framework free of the managerialism of a stronger centralizing Secretariat apparatus and one that avoids constituting the institution as an autonomous and disciplinary force. That suits States that might need to use its institutional and solidarity reinforcing power from time to time, but also which permits them a broad freedom to pursue their individual strategic relations with anyone and State they find useful at the moment. Certainly, for States navigating the perilous and dynamic spaces in which the largest States tend to operate, such flexibility might appear quite appealing. Turkey operates in those sometimes tiny spaces between the EU land, the United States and its own ancient ambitions both in Turkish central Asia and in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia might find BRICS a useful space from which it might negotiate better arrangements with its traditional partners and new ones as it navigates the quite tricky challenges within the region it seeks to retain its traditional role—one in long term conflict with the ambitions of certain Turkish leaders. China and Russia find the space convenient for their own aims; the former as an enhancement to the structures of its Silk Roads initiatives; the latter as a means of organizing its resistance to the strengthening opposition to its territorial ambitions in Europe. African States might find the organization useful as leverage within the African Union, one the one hand, and the EU/US on the other hand as it negotiates the use of its natural resources and access to its markets. Brazil, of course, has its own ambitions, ones that in some ways mimic those of the United States but within its own continent—an ambitions made more difficult by the continuing effect of the consequences of the Treaty of Tordesillas.
How did the US and its European allies' policy in using the dollar and global banking system as a political weapon against their rivals motivate the world countries to look for alternatives like BRICS?
It might be useful at the outset to reframe the question. The dollar and the global banking system were not conceived as a poetical weapon. For decades it was the basis for developing a stable financial system not so much because of the fear or need to control either decolonized spaces or the Marxist Leninist spaces then in existence, but rather with the turmoil of the last decade of the 19thcentury and the catastrophe of the third and fourth decades of the 20th century firmly in mind. The rest, as important as it may be in the minds of some today, was consequential and to some extent innovative, achieving its current form from the 1960s onward. Indeed, starting from a position of stability of the international financial order, it would only be a small step to then use the system to protect itself, and its integrity, against groups or actions that would be deemed threatening. The issue, then, might be better understood not as a criticism of the use of defensive measures to prevent instability in financial markets and the banking systems as its critical pathways, but rather as a critique of the arrangements under which the power to deploy these measures is assigned.
That brings us to the heart of the question—whether there is an adequate replacement for their structures of control of the oversight of global financial stability than the United States-Europe-Japan. And the proffer, certainly directed by the Chinese side (but also from time to time by the Brazilians) is to offer themselves (and their currencies) as a happy alternative. That certainly has some surface appeal to those who believe they might in the short term derive advantage form the new direction. However, such purported solutions do not solve the problem which was the predicate for “reform.” Rather it would merely displace one “master” group by another. In the long term the structures and effects remain the same—it would be just that the States against which complaints would be lodged—the same sort of complaints—would be different. That might well suit BRICS leaders; but it ought to provide little comfort to anyone else if they mean what they say in the criticism of the system in place to ensure financial stability.
Nonetheless there would be a difference in style and objective, if not in the form of the practices of those charged with the oversight of global financial stability. That would be especially felt with respect to the use of BRICS as a political weapon against their rivals. There are two issues. The first is the willingness of the new controlling States to put their economies at risk in undertaking their obligations as the shepherds of global financial stability. None of them have indicated a willingness to do that entirely. Capital controls and the need to protect their currencies have made them their own worst enemies in pushing forward effectively a change in the management of global financial markets and banking pathways integrity. The second is the potentially deleterious effect of such authority vested in the members of an organization which prides itself on a certain level of lack of disciplinary authority. Such a shift would expose the tensions among the group and might impose too great a strain on its integrity. Certainly at some point the national ambitions of key players within BRICS may get in the way of a united front , a solidarity, necessary to impose discipline on global financial markets and to ensure its integrity—especially if the focus shifts to using those instruments for political ideological ends. At that point they will have won the battle for control but lost effective control of financial markets stability that would invariably shift elsewhere.
That said, it ought to be noted that just as the U.S. and its European allies are criticized for using the financial power of its banks to further what is criticized as national goals, so too virtually every other State that finds those rules inconvenient has adapted to the rules systems and done as they liked (or as they could) to advance their own political interests. No innocent parties here; every State that feels aggrieved has undertaken any number of actions (or inactions) that manage to aggrieve others or the integrity of the system itself for its own ends. With respect to sanctions, the issue is compounded by those of interpretation and application. Sanctions regimes could be understood as an effort to effectively protect the integrity of the banking system, for example, against misuse by illegitimate actors for illegitimate objectives. The issue isn’t that this is bad; in this case the issue is that the US (in this case) and its allies have misused the system to advance their own aims. The US would disagree; and the ultimate answer within the global community must eventually be determined by the community of States—one way or another. That determination is inherently political—and the political nature of those choices then create a dissonance with the ordered rationality of systemic stability on which the structures of this system were initially conceived. That can’t be helped; and substituting one set of political actors for another changes nothing fundamentally—only short term targets.
The point is that there is no binary here—no good actors and bad actors. There are just actors. And one might be excused for thinking that the better road to reform is to focus not on the actors but on the architecture to protect and enhance financial stability and the integrity of the banking system beyond and despite the short to longer term objectives of those who might wish to use both stability and pathways as narrowly tailored instruments.
How do you see the future of BRICS in the long term? Can we expect a new order?
I think that the BRICS will grow and mature as an intergovernmental institution of convenience to its members. The greatest value of BRICS is as a political instrument. It generates the counter-narrative to those of mature liberal democratic developed States. But that narrative is only effective at a relatively high level of generality. India, China, Brazil and Russia each have deeply valued political-economic modes that differ as much among themselves as they might, in some respects, differ with those of OECD States, for example. More importantly, BRICS can serve as a powerful means of disciplining strategic interventions in international organs like the United Nations. These can serve as the instrument of a multi-national bloc in the style of the old Cold War bloc but updated with post-Cold War discursive tropes and narrative objectives. Nonetheless it bears recalling that these blocs will not operate unchallenged. And the challenging States may be powerful. I do not necessarily refer only to the old leadership of the OECD bloc—but also to the aggregations of States at the bottom of the State system hierarchy of powers. These may eventually see very little difference among masters and ultimately may play a decisive role in managing both groups against the other. In this sense there will be no “new order” but perhaps a reshuffling of the roles played by old actors reprising even older roles. I will consider this a theatrical revival, perhaps even a rebooting; but certainly not anything approaching a new order. For that to happen something far more cataclysmic will need to happen.
More than the BRICs alignment—as against the OECD, are the possibilities offered by the fracturing and reconstitution of supply chains and trade routes in and through States. States, at least those beneath the apex States are more and more likely to be disassembled in some respects—especially with respect to the nexus of connections that join them to global supply and production chains. For example, a moderately prosperous State with exportable natural resources might be understood as a single and integrated political entity—for example with respect to its police power. However, the integrity of the State dissipates, that is becomes functionally fractured, with respect to economic productive forces organized within and along trade routes, supply and production chains. These would subject those portions of the State’s productive forced to the overriding authority of investment treaties, trade relationships, and international rules (public and private law-based) divided along functional lines and divided further among the variety of superior States that serve as the home for those entities that have managerial authority over specific field aspects of production. Thus the entities and regulatory inclinations of State X may affect the garment sector in State P, but State P’s ship disassembly sector may be managed through relationships with State Z. If State X and State Z are competitors with distinctly different regulatory frameworks, then State P may find itself managing multiple regulatory orders simultaneously. This is not an abstraction. The effects, for example, of the European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive on the sovereign authority of States lower on supply chains may effectively alter the nature of and the practice of sovereignty within a downstream State. BRICS appears as an alternative but where its apex members also project their regulatory models outward, the difference for receiving States will be hard to see. The new order, then, may come from out of the emerging frameworks of dividing economic spaces among territories of production rather than on the more old fashioned control of geographic spaces through their political State organs. For BRICS States then, the future may not be BRICS but rather BRI related on the Chinese side, and human rights compliance based grounded in dense webs of related investment instruments on the other. That would be a quite distinct new order indeed! In this context, BRICS is perhaps better understood as new wine in old bottles; where the problem is the bottle. That follows from the critique that gave rise to BRICS in the first place—the argument that fundamental structural unfairness supports the current system. If that is the case changing the actors but not the system merely perpetuates the inequities but in new form. One might find it hard to convincingly argue that on the one hand the essence of the problem is the system and then on the other argue that the solution to the problem is to change the identity of the States in charge of the otherwise unchanged system. That, in the end, is the problem with strategic discursive tropes—sometimes they can get in the way of more directed strategic objectives. And its solution will require a different form of discursive intervention than the perhaps historically hobbled one on which the current discourse is undertaken.
Interview by Payman Yazdani
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