The Brics by Cooper Andrew F

Author:Cooper, Andrew F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198723394
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

A long transitional moment

The loose club style allows the BRICS to project a confidence about its rise, with a considerable degree of sustainability. Biding their time and focusing on converging interests and values, BRICS members have channelled their long-standing sense of frustrated ambitions into a collective mechanism.

Such a cautious attitude is consistent with the image of the BRICS not as a radical challenger to the global system, but as a group that desires full recognition of its economic and diplomatic achievements. Well rehearsed in the context of the global financial crisis, the BRICS members contrasted their own orthodoxy to deleterious policy actions by the United States and the European Union, destabilizing actions that continued with quantitative easing by generating ‘excessive liquidity’ and fostered ‘excessive capital flows and commodity prices’. Turning the tables, they called for the advanced economies ‘to adopt responsible macroeconomic and financial policies, avoid creating excessive global liquidity and undertake structural reforms to lift growth that create jobs’.

Equally, the club approach has mitigated the prospects of the BRICS foundering as a major force in the global system not because of resistance by the old order but due to serious differences of values and interests among the group’s members. Although these differences persist they have not been so obvious as to fracture the group. The ability of the BRICS to navigate change successfully was reinforced by South Africa’s entry. Notwithstanding the diplomatic and material rationales for its inclusion, this move may have been detrimental to the South African–Indian–Brazilian trilateral relationship through IBSA. Any worries about this consequence, though, were kept private, as the club culture emphasized the complementary synergy between the BRICS and IBSA.

If this ability to overcome differences on widening the group’s composition deserves credit, the deepening of the BRICS to allow issue-area coordination poses a more serious standard to pass. Until some form of key deliverable becomes operational, the interpretation that the BRICS is all declarations with no real tangible action is difficult to dislodge. As such the push by the BRICS to establish the NDB is extremely important.

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