The real reason to pay attention to BRICS

One of the few things about the upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa everyone can agree on is that it’s notable. But no one agrees why.

What does the body’s possible expansion beyond its core members of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa mean? Why are the BRICS even important to begin with?

Observers struggle with the unwieldy concept of BRICS. Making sense of the group is akin to maneuvering a mattress up a spiral staircase, but that may be part of the point. Similar to the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS is both just concrete enough to spur the imagination and yet vague enough to encompass almost anything its architects would like to add, including new members.

Ironically, the term “BRIC” was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist named Jim O’Neill. He used the acronym to describe the four fast-growing economies that he predicted would overtake the six largest Western economies by 2041. In 2006, diplomats from Brazil, Russia, India, and China met and a new international organization was born. South Africa was added in 2010, and an “S” was added, to make “BRICS.”

More than any shared philosophy or goals, the BRICS bloc is fundamentally shaped by its membership, which means that adding any of the roughly 40 countries that have either expressed an interest in or formally applied for inclusion will likely change the nature of the group.

What is unlikely to change is its identity as the non-West or anti-West. It is notable that South Africa extended an invitation to African countries to join the summit, while pointedly ignoring French President Emmanuel Macron’s request to attend. It is a petty example of a wider political dynamic that arguably gives BRICS its power, both outside and within the West.

BRICS expansion and the politics of resentment

The reasons for wanting to join BRICS differ from country to country: anything from high interest rates to targeted Western sanctions against local elites. What unites applicants is a broader chafing against Western powers’ ability to set discursive horizons and implement rules. This may be because of active alignment with China or Russia, but it could also be a form of maximizing economic options in the face of Western domestic political opposition to new free-trade agreements.

But overall the growing interest in BRICS across the Global South shows that a multiheaded politics of resentment about Western global leadership is emerging as an umbrella issue uniting countries as disparate as communist Cuba and anti-communist Indonesia. This new brand of transnational resentment-fueled identity politics papers over the beefs between individual member countries.

The expansion of BRICS doesn’t stand alone as a challenge to Western neoliberal power. Rather, the consensus that underlies that power is also being undermined by the anti-liberal, resentment-based identity politics cropping up within the Western world, from anti-immigration parties in Europe to anti-LGBTQ campaigning in the U.K. to crackdowns on academic freedom in Florida.

The problem for leaders like U.S. President Joe Biden is that the tools to enforce a global liberal consensus (most frequently, sanctions) both actively fan the resentment currently growing in the BRICS group and contribute to the well-trodden theme of Western “double standards,” because even as Western institutions push against (say) anti-LGBTQ crackdowns in places like Uganda, similar forms of anti-liberal activism are now becoming standard in retail politics within the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

The result is a collapsing of far and near, with resentments around Western (neo)liberalism’s horizon-shaping power driving both Global South conversations around geopolitical alignment and Western right-wing activism.

These dynamics are not the same, but they overlap in enough ways that actors like Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and Vladimir Putin can use (for example) anti-LGBTQ crackdowns as omnidirectional dog whistles.

On the global level, the resistance against Western leadership, what some call “hegemony,” is less the unified assault on Western centrality that many commentators seem to expect and more small hits coming from many sides at once.

Take the currency issue, for example. There has been much breathless discussion for and against the idea of a BRICS currency, and the bloc’s wider weakening of U.S.-dollar hegemony.

To my mind, the issue is not that the BRICS will pull an Excalibur currency from a rock that will dispatch the dollar in one stab. Rather, the more realistic scenario is that dollar centrality will receive thousands of paper cuts. Not deadly, but far from comfortable.

Right-wing actors in the Global North also want to de-westernize global systems

The structuring of BRICS around keystone regional economies means that this is already happening. China-Russia oil trade in yuan has unsurprisingly received the most attention in the context of the Ukraine conflict. However, China is working hard on yuan internationalization further afield, for example, through the swap line that recently allowed Argentina to pay off an IMF loan in yuan, and through the mBridge blockchain-based digital yuan project currently being developed in cooperation with Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

But the paper cuts also come from BRICS members who are less explicitly anti-American. Brazil is promoting trade in a proposed South American currency. South Africa is promoting trade in African currencies in the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area. India is similarly promoting rupee-based trade with its neighbors. Its new foreign trade policy, announced in late March, explicitly foregrounds trade in rupees with countries short on dollars as a way to “disaster-proof” Indian trade.

These efforts are very different from launching a BRICS-backed currency to rival the greenback. Rather, the aim is to introduce multiplicity into a previously unipolar system and to provincialize trade by switching to local currencies in keystone economies’ immediate backyards. In the long run, the normalization of all kinds of non-dollar trade will likely weaken dollar hegemony, but in a way that’s harder to counter than a single BRICS currency.

A similar provincializing agenda seems to underlie BRICS tactics more generally: carving out spaces away from Western control and in the process making the global system less Western.

In the short term, this is a smaller problem for Western power than (for example) a hard coalition forming around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the longer term, it’s a much more fundamental challenge to the centrality of Western ideas of how to run the world, not least because these ideas are also being actively undermined by well-funded right-wing actors in Washington and London. Unlike the BRICS, they don’t even need visas.