Sino File | Are the BRICS cracking?
Cultural diversity and competing interests for China, India and Russia underscore inherent contradictions and challenges
Fifteen years after Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the concept in 2001, BRICS, as the first important non-Western global initiative of the post-cold war world, has become not just a talking shop but an influential international organisation to challenge Atlantic dominance.
The grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa comes at a critical historic juncture as the world reshapes its economic and geopolitical order.
In 2000, before the term was actually coined, the then four BRIC nations, initially excluding South Africa, only represented eight per cent of global economy on GDP basis. Today the bloc represents 42 per cent of the global population and about 25 per cent of the world’s GDP. It holds nearly half of the global foreign exchange and gold reserves.
As the most important engine for global growth, BRICS are also forming a joint force to provide new alternative narratives to overhaul global governance. The BRICS-backed New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have all aimed at filling the “gaps of global governance”. They also discussed setting up their own credit rating agency, aimed at challenging the domination of the Western “big three” of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch.
The club has also reached out to other regions in an effort to start a debate over globalism versus regionalism, as illustrated by the BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach Summit, also attended by Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand.