The BRICS group has existed since 2009 and has done little to distinguish itself in 15 years. They created a mid-sized development bank, but other than that, the bloc’s accomplishments have been rather modest.
That’s now starting to change as the BRICS doubled in size to ten members, with around thirty other countries now on the waiting list.
At the latest BRICS Foreign Ministers gathering in western Russia last week, new initiatives harmonizing AI standards, currency transfers, and developing new business parks were among the issues on the agenda. While these may seem trivial in this era of war and Great Power rivalry, getting lots of small things done is actually a big deal.
Gustavo de Carvalho, a senior researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, is among the world’s foremost scholars on the BRICS and joins Eric & Cobus from Johannesburg to discuss why it’s time to start paying closer attention to this group.
Show Notes:
- BBC: BRICS: What is the group, and which countries have joined?
- United States Institute of Peace: What BRICS Expansion Means for the Bloc’s Founding Members
- Reuters: China urges greater BRICS role as Western sanctions mount by Liz Lee
About Gustavo de Carvalho:
Gustavo de Carvalho is a Senior Researcher on Russia-Africa ties at the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at SAIIA. Gustavo has over 15 years of experience supporting policy development, capacity building, and research processes in Africa, focusing mainly on multilateralism and the relationship between African stakeholders and external partners. He has worked with various international organizations and think tanks, including the United Nations in Guinea-Bissau, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), and Global Witness. Gustavo holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Brasilia.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander and, as always, I’m joined by CGSP’s Managing Editor, Cobus van Staden, in Johannesburg, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, last week, foreign ministers from across the global south, the 10 member states of the BRICS, along with a number of other foreign ministers, went to Western Russia to get together for a BRICS foreign ministers ministerial meeting. And it was really interesting. And I had a change of heart, Cobus, this week because you know that I’ve been regularly saying on this show and in some of our writing that I don’t really understand what the BRICS is. It’s a group that’s been around for a long time. It doesn’t have a lot of accomplishments to its name. It’s gotten bigger. In fact, I think it’s doubled, you know, last year. But when we look at the actual accomplishments of the BRICS, I’ve said this before, it’s got a mid-sized development bank. And it seems to be more of a forum where people can come to air grievances particularly about the West.
Now that’s what I’ve been saying up until now because I just haven’t seen a lot of tangible outcomes from the BRICS. However, I am now evolving that thinking because when we see what the kinds of things that they’re talking about, it’s not the big things. I was looking at the BRICS currency, for example, and that is never going to happen because the Indians will never compromise even a shred of their monetary sovereignty for China to have any control over that. But rather than look at the big parts of this agenda, what I’m starting to kind of understand about the BRICS is that it’s the small things that they’re talking about. So, at this foreign minister’s meeting, they talked about improving payment mechanisms, expanding the role of national currencies in mutual payments. They talked about facilitating contacts between science parks and business incubators in different BRICS countries, vaccine research at their vaccine research and development center, harmonizing standards in digital and in artificial intelligence.
And so it’s a lot of these small things that are happening out of sight, and that maybe don’t generate headlines, but are incredibly important. Just one quick point on that national currencies issue, the head of the New Development Bank, Dilma Rousseff, who is the former president of Brazil, she now runs what’s used to be called the BRICS Bank, she announced that the bank is going to issue its first-ever yuan-denominated loan. So that’s using the Chinese currency. They’re going to do this as part of a pilot program later this year. And again, these are these small little things that month in, month out, year in, year out, will probably start to add up to something substantial.
The other thing that I noticed, Cobus, in the coverage of this, and maybe I’m wrong and somebody’s going to find an example of this, not one major Western or international media outlet covered the BRICS Foreign Ministers meeting. Not one. Really incredible. It’s as if it never happened. And it reminded me of the launch of the Global Development Initiative when 70 plus foreign ministers got together at the United Nations in New York to launch the Chinese Global Development Initiative and not a single piece of press coverage about it. So a lot of this is happening now out of sight of mainstream publics in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. But it was just all of that together is making me rethink how I see the BRICS.
Cobus: Yeah, it’s very interesting in terms of one’s own kind of evolution in seeing how the BRICS, because the BRICS, in so many ways, is almost a kind of a discursive concept. So, it’s then very interesting to see how it’s now actually being institutionalized and implemented. You mentioned this role of grievance in BRICS. I think it’s true. I think that is certainly a big part of it. Also I think it has a little bit that framing, also has the effect I think of making stakeholders who should be noticing what’s happening in the BRICS less likely to take it seriously because I think a lot of Western newsrooms, for example, as you were saying, tend to think of BRICS as this kind of like grievance, airing talk shop. That then predisposes them to ignore it, I think, and then kind of miss all of these incremental changes that are actually happening as a form of actual institution building and mechanism building in the BRICS. So, it’s all very interesting to see in action.
Eric: Well, the irony of that is that these same newsrooms ignored, in 2016, the grievance politics that was driving Donald Trump’s rise. And then all of them had this kind of this moment of clarity that says we have to pay more attention to the grievances of the white working class in the United States, we have to pay more attention to the forgotten that Trump was talking about. So, they had this awakening on that, but yet I think, to your point, they’re not paying attention to this, what they see as a grievance club. However, grievance today is modern-day politics, whether it’s in Europe, we saw that in the EU parliamentary elections. Anti-immigrant grievance is driving a lot of the politics in Sweden, in Germany, and in France. And even certainly in China, grievance is a major currency of politics. So that alone shouldn’t be the thing that makes them ignore it.
But I just think when you get 20 foreign ministers together, that warrants a story. But apparently not. But let’s now get a perspective of somebody who studies this. And again, he’s going to help us hopefully get a better understanding of what is the BRICS, what does it want to be, what it’s not. Gustavo de Carvalho is the senior researcher on Africa’s relations with global powers, BRICS, and multilateralism at the South African Institute for International Affairs in Johannesburg, South Africa. Gustavo, we have been following each other for a long time. We’ve been hearing all about your great work. I follow you on Twitter and all your amazing posts, and it’s a thrill to have you on the show for the first time.
Gustavo de Carvalho: Thank you very much, Eric. Likewise, it’s so great to finally be here talking to you and Cobus.
Eric: Well, let’s get started with this very simple, almost rudimentary question, what is the BRICS? Now we know it’s 10 countries, it’s promoting multilateralism. We know the talking points that they put out. You are somebody who’s immersed in this world, you think about it a lot. Help us understand a deeper level as to what is the BRICS.
Gustavo: I think it’s not a simple question because I think a lot of my work these days is to try to understand what BRICS is and what BRICS is not. And I think in your introduction and what you and Cobus were mentioning earlier is you certainly talk about some of these elements. And perhaps I can start briefly with what BRICS is not. BRICS is not a trade bloc, it’s not a bloc that provides special tariffs for its members. It’s not a bloc that has really operated in that particular space. It’s neither has fully operated as a bloc or a group for coordination or foreign policy. Meaning that, as a group, it’s not really an alliance. And I think part of the narratives that we often see about BRICS is this idea of a number of countries joining together and trying to change, and for some to destroy the global order.
I think there is some very particular reasons for why BRICS was created. There are particular reasons why BRICS takes the shape that it does now. And I think, to a certain extent, the demands that these countries do and have been doing since 2009 are very much related not to, it’s not intrinsically part of a grievances with the West, but it’s much more in relation to how do they see their relative size within the global economy and global politics, and what has been their ability to really influence decision-making, particularly when it comes to international finance and to some other aspect as well? So, when we see BRICS being created in 2009, like with the changes that we saw in 2008 with the G20, had a lot to do with some of the risks that the global order is presenting. And what are some of the things that brings these countries together?
And I think for the first few years we saw BRICS kind of in a way developing this identity and having discussions around how this initially four countries with Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and then South Africa being invited to join in the first expansion in 2011, to really identify some of the mechanisms, institutions that they would like to have a stronger say. And in that sense, coordinate views and positions around those areas. And I think it very much leads to that second phase of BRICS that led to the creation. And you well mentioned of the new development bank in 2015 where some of the grievances and complaints and challenges that they saw with institutions like the World Bank, they realized that perhaps we can create an institution that doesn’t replace those international financial institutions that we are members of and we engage with.
But really provides a compliment to them. And as you all mentioned, the new development bank remains as a mid-size development bank. It’s not a priority source of income or resources for any of the BRICS members, but it does provide the opportunity of trying out new approaches to engage with new strategies. But all of this for me changes in the last couple of years, and particularly in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine when BRICS becomes much more related and involving geopolitical issues. And trade becomes a geopolitical issue. Their ability of engaging with one another becomes a geopolitical issue. And that’s when we see a much stronger momentum within the group to really look into, how do we reduce the risks that the global order brings?
And to a certain extent, it’s not a direct response to the invasion of Ukraine, but largely in relation to what happened with the sanctions to Russia, and particularly when Russia gets kicked out of Swift. Because in that sense, it gives a warning sign for many countries within the global south that no country is too big to be sanctioned. And if such large countries become sanctioned, when we rely heavily on trade with countries like China, with countries in the West, Russia perhaps more of a symbol than it is tangibly an important trading partner of the global south, that means that for them they’re starting to look for alternatives. And this is when we start seeing the big points of discussions that we have within BRICS at the moment that is not a de-dollarization process like it’s often presented, but rather creating new mechanisms that in the event of increasing tension between global powers, global south countries are able to continue interacting from a trade point of view.
So that’s largely what we are going to see. We’ve seen in a number of the meetings that have been held in Russia this year, which is chairing BRICS in 2024, and some of the decisions that will be made in October in Kazan in Russia in relation to creating new mechanisms and tools for increasing trading local currencies but also the realization from BRICS countries that they needed liquidity, they needed new partners, they needed new members to make sure that this process, it’s actually viable when they’re looking into all of those options.
Cobus: So, the foreign ministers’ meeting that Eric mentioned in the intro was kind of the debut of the new members that joined last year. So, for people who haven’t followed it, they are Ethiopia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. So, I was wondering, from your perspective, what kind of new ideas or new themes or what kind of inputs are these new members kind of bringing into the BRICS grouping?
Gustavo: And I think it’s an important question. I think the first point is that we are all still waiting to hear whether Saudi Arabia will indeed join. They did participate in the foreign ministers’ meeting last week, but we haven’t yet received a formal confirmation that they’re actually joining. And that has to do with geopolitics-
Eric: And is that because of pressure from the United States, or why are they hesitating?
Gustavo: I would say it’s partially due to that. I think there is the context of the Middle East at the moment, and certainly what is happening in Gaza is taking a lot of the time and effort. We know that Saudi Arabia has been, for a number of years, talking to the United States in terms of new security guarantees and agreements and particularly the pressure that the Saudi Arabia has been doing on the United States to have some kind of an agreement similar to the ones that the U.S. has with Japan or Korea. But it also, I think they are trying to figure out what are their losses and what they can gain by being part of it. Certainly from a trading perspective, countries like India and China are major trading partners for Saudi Arabia. The role of the U.S. is much smaller at this stage. And we are hoping at least that by October we would have that confirmation.
But when we are looking to all of these new countries, I think in all of these meetings have been attended this year, in the conversations we’ve been having with different countries, it’s certainly important to give this country some time to figure out the structure of the group. We’ve seen, for instance, countries like Ethiopia being very active in many of the discussions. Egypt, that is an important trading partner of many BRICS members, also being very active. Iran trying to identify what are their views and positions in UAE with a similar way of looking into that. Certainly, I thinking the short term, we should expect a continuation of discussions from what has been happening in recent years.
And an issue around currencies, systems of payments, and trade, not as a trade bloc as I mentioned earlier, but maybe what I call at times of thinking about trade infrastructure of those issues that enable countries to trade with one another should certainly dominate much of the debate this year Kazan, but also which will have a spillover next year in Brazil when Brazil takes over the presidency of BRICS. BRICS agenda tends to be quite broad, but, to a large extent, I think these are the issues that really is what policymakers in these countries are thinking about at this moment.
Eric: So, one of the challenges of the BRICS is that it’s a consensus-based organization. And that is easier to do when you’re five members. It gets more difficult when you’re 10 members, and then when you get to 15, 20 members, getting consensus is extraordinarily difficult. We see that in the European Union, we see it at the United Nations and many of these multilateral groups. And then you have highlighted some of the geopolitical fault lines that exist within this membership. So, the UAE-Iran relationship is fraught today. The Saudi-Iran relationship, although has improved, is still, underneath, it has a lot of pent-up suspicion and mistrust. But none of that compares to the India-China relationship.
These are two countries that can’t stand each other right now. They have barely any diplomatic representation, no journalists, no direct flights, a very heavily militarized border with tens of thousands of soldiers facing each other on each side. In fact, the Chinese just deployed a small cluster of J-20 stealth jets to the Himalayas that kind of got everybody upset. At the BRICS meetings at the summit meetings, and there was one in South Africa, Narendra Modi, who just was elected for a third term, can barely look Xi in the eyes and they can barely talk to each other. How does a group where its two largest members hate each other, the way that India and China does, get anything done if it’s a consensus-based organization?
Gustavo: And I think is a very important question, and I usually say that BRICS is a group that agrees to disagree all the time. What do I mean by that? So, when you’re…
Eric: That sounds like my relationship with my wife. That’s how we have a happy marriage by the way. So, we agree to disagree.
Gustavo: Maybe we can call it some kind of a harmonious conflict within the group.
Eric: That’s right.
Gustavo: And I think within the discussions, this type of approach has usually played a very important role. And I think it brings a number of challenges because when you have such deep level of rivalry between some of the members of misunderstanding or even the geographical distance of many of these members and the different importance that it brings to them, what you eventually have is a process that looks for minimum common denominators. And I think BRICS has been fairly good in doing that in the sense of it does not expect that all of the members are going to align their views and positions of the world, but to a certain extent focus on those that are really the ones that are important for all of them.
And I think the issue of currency, once again, is a quite an important one because irrespective of the tension that is very visible, as you say, between India and China, there is a common idea and common view of the fears and the risks that the global order brings and how they can actually find new ways of engaging with countries within the global south and countries within the global East as well. So, what we are expecting at this stage is that will be a certain degree of continuation of that. When I look into communiques from summits, for instance, I tend to split those discussions into and what has been decided into those that have been an effective negotiation between the members. And those are usually presented, right in the beginning, in a very heightened way in the communique and in the recent years that have related to issues around the reform of international financial institutions. The issues of systems of payments, trade with local currencies, the expansion, the creation of institutions like the New Development Bank.
But it often brings a lot of the softer issues for members. And these are issues that you don’t really find a lot of disagreements between them, whether it is BRICS endorsing, last year, the Brazilian candidacy for COP that is going to happen next year in Brazil, or discussions or highlights in the importance that South Africa often highlights on the role of woman mediators in conflict and so on. So, those are not really issues that will take the sleep away from any of the policymakers. And when you have really great division between members, I think BRICS members tend to find two ways of resolving that. One is simply taking it off the agenda, and we’ve seen in a few cases that happening, or the other one, presenting those issues in a fairly diluted way.
And I think the issue, for instance, of security council reform where India, Brazil, and South Africa, the IBSA portion of BRICS have been putting a lot of pressure in the last 15 years around that. And until very recently, this have been presented in fairly vague terms, very general, the language is very diluted to a point that it brings, to a certain extent, the views from the IBSA countries that it’s one, and the views from China and Russia that it’s often not the same. So, to a certain degree, I expect that we’ll continue with the new members. I think there is certainly a space in the future for BRICS itself becoming a forum for dialogue at the end of the day. Despite all of the challenges that India and China have, BRICS provide them a very regular space for interaction and conversations. And I think that can in itself present an opportunity for the group, especially where now we see the rivalry between Egypt and Ethiopia, Iran-Saudi Arabia, and India and China as we mentioned as well.
Cobus: Mentioning Egypt and Ethiopia, they drew a lot of attention as the two new African members. And, as you say, they come with a kind of a notable conflict built in around water access particularly. And so, yeah, I was wondering what you made of the choice of those particular two countries, why you think they were the ones that ended up getting in, and why they also particularly kind of went for it considering that there seemed to be a lot of ambivalence in some other notable African countries like in Nigeria, for example, about joining BRICS.
Gustavo: I attended a summit last year in Johannesburg and followed quite closely the negotiations that took place. And I think, to a certain extent, I think it brings once again the idea of consensus within the group despite the fact that South Africa, as the chair of BRICS in 2023, developed a number of criteria of what types of countries we’re looking for and what are the criteria that we would be using in that selection. I think, at the end of the day, it became largely related to how individual members looked into the expansion of BRICS within their own regions. And to a certain degree, that is what eventually pushed the member states to identify the options they did. And I think what we saw throughout the process was initially countries like Brazil and India and South Africa to a lower degree, but for a much shorter time, being quite concerned about that expansion and the fear that the expansion would dilute their own visibility and power.
I think for India, the China that I mentioned was also very much part of their thinking, to a point that while India made up their mind just before the summits and came to the summits, and Modi, in his first statement within the summits, spoke about the fact that India was not against the expansion, it was actually in favor. And Brazil only made their mind in the last minutes of the last day of the summit just before the communique was being drafted. South Africa had a lot to do with how that expansion in Africa was then done. Egypt was always seen as a natural choice as particularly due to the fact that the Middle East was a region that had not been represented before within BRICS. And the Middle East presents itself, I think for all of the BRICS members as an important hub in terms of trade, where most BRICS members tend to trade a lot with Middle Eastern countries.
The choice of Ethiopia was certainly a much later choice and I think far less obvious to many of us at that particular stage. Nigeria had presented their interest in potentially joining BRICS but had not really provided a formal application to the group. So, the fact that Nigeria wasn’t chosen had a lot, I think much more to do with the fact that Nigeria had not really formally applied at that particular stage. And for South Africa, it was important to increase the African representation in the bloc, particularly when it comes to some of the big foreign policy priorities of the country at the moment, and especially when it comes with the implementation of the African continental free trade area and the needs and views that bring in more African countries can bring a good degree of complementarity between this major African policy process that wants to increase complementarity, wants to increase int African trade.
And when are we talking specifically about systems of payments, when we’re talking about developing mechanisms that we can trade with our local currencies, this is a process that is very much been internalized within the continents for many years. And when we are looking to the Pan-African payment system when we are looking to all of those tools that are currently being developed and implemented to ensure that African countries are better inserted within the bloc. I think we, of course, have some of the countries that have not been chosen, and I think Nigeria and Algeria, two of the countries that perhaps who we’re still going to be hearing more about in the future, what will happen and whether they will potentially be joining us. I think there is the case of South America where Brazil remains quite concerned about diluting its own visibility and influence within the bloc especially where we know that Argentina has been invited to join the group and did not accept that invitation after President Milei was elected late last year.
And what would be potentially a new South American country to join, I think Columbia is perhaps the strongest contender. And the other country that we should be really looking into is the role of Indonesia. Indonesia was invited to join the group did not accept immediately, they immediately said no, and I think for two reasons. One, and I think the most important one, the very electoral process that Indonesia was going through the elections are now finalized now in February. But also for them it was important that they could discuss in Southeast Asia with other members of Asia and what would be their collective understanding. But I think it would be, for a BRICS’ member, another natural partner to potentially join the group while it looks into this regional representation.
Eric: But there was some concern in Indonesia, and at least among some analysts, that a group that includes China, Russia, and Iran is potentially quite partisan and could challenge Indonesia’s long-standing non-aligned positions. And so some were concerned that this might become more politicized. I think those concerns about politicization have diminished a little bit in seeing how the group has evolved recently. But the lack of any Southeast Asian representation is a glaring omission in the BRICS today. I mean, this is a region of 700 million people, and it’s one of the most dynamic in the world and yet it doesn’t. Now, Thailand has said that it wants to be the first Southeast Asian country to join. Also Turkey has indicated that it too wants to join.
So, these major players in global south regions in Asia, Africa — well, Asia and the Middle East, and Turkey in this case — that is, again, drawing more attention that this thing is quite significant. Now, we’ve talked about it from a global south perspective and you’ve talked about all the things that it is from those different regions. It didn’t get any press coverage in the U.S. or Europe, and that’s an indication of how little people are paying attention to what’s going on in the BRICS and how much, how little they actually care. What should people in Washington, Brussels, London, and Tokyo think about the BRICS?
Gustavo: It’s usually, if we spend a lot of time here in South Africa trying to educate our own audience of what BRICS is and what types of benefits, I think it’s also incredibly important they work to, that these countries in the global West, or at least in this expanded version of the global West, what is the challenges and what are really some of the opportunities that BRICS can bring? And I think certainly if the foreign ministers’ meeting did not get coverage, I am 100% sure that the summits in October this year will get quite a lot of coverage to especially as-
Eric: The summits get coverage. That’s correct. Yeah, the summits definitely get coverage.
Gustavo: And especially these are the spaces where really decisions are made. I think when we look into the foreign ministers’ meetings, those tend to kind of highlight some of the issues that are still being discussed. But all of these issues to a certain extent become presented to heads of states and, in a way, decisions are made. And we saw a similar pattern last year with BRICS in South Africa as well, where there was a very limited attention throughout the year despite all of the meetings that were happening. South Africa hosted over 200 meetings. Russia is hosting now over 250 meetings within this BRICS calendar this year.
So, I think, to a certain extent, there is a few points I think how Western countries should look into that. I think one is that the expansion to a certain degree brings a new space to move beyond seeing BRICS as that simplistic view that is a group entirely dominated by Russia and China. I think certainly these are two countries that are quite influential within the group and have, of course, the ability of influencing bilaterally but also in the collective of the group. But it’s certainly not the only voices that matter within the bloc. And I think increasingly we’ve seen much more attention from IBSA country, India, Brazil, and South Africa, to revitalize their own coordination, which was really important in the 2000s and since the creation of BRICS in 2009 reduced quite considerably.
And the larger the participation of global south countries is certainly less this idea of being an anti-West and pro-China and pro-Russia group. And I think increasingly we see that when we look into the bilateral relations within the group, not only the difficult ones and the rivalries between India and China that we spoke about, but even on the way that some of these other members have been navigating this quite a complicated process, whether it is Brazil recently with the new tariffs towards Chinese products, or even South Africa’s readjustments last year in terms of foreign policy when it starts engaging not only with Russia as a historical, and often a nostalgic partner for many leaders within South Africa. But also becoming a very active member of the debates around Ukraine, or what is called now the Zelensky piece formula that will lead into the Switzerland Conference this month, to really further highlight and further clarify this idea of non-alignment.
And I think one of the problems that many countries within the global south have in terms of their own views about what nonalignment is, is that is not really an idea of presenting an equidistance between different global powers or really kind of being on fence. But it seems to me that it’s much more a process of pursuing autonomy. And I think that is precisely, I think, what BRICS is offering to many of these countries, is that many BRICS members, either old or new, have strong relations with Western countries and we would want to remain dealing with them regularly and constantly. But at the same time, they also have strong relations with other parts of the world. So that idea that wow for Russia, and in particular for Iran, certainly BRICS is… There is no other alternative than BRICS. They are so isolated from the international community at this stage that BRICS become super important.
I think for a country like China, the possibility of future sanctions in the same style for those of Russia brings a lot of concerns. But for the other members that are much smaller, BRICS becomes much more as an insurance. That in case we have increasing dispute between global powers, we’re still able to trade with both sides, and the both sides that it’s so important to us and neither of big blocs, whether it’s China, whether it is the United States can really replace or even win the order when it comes. And we see that with our on trade balances when we are looking to South Africa where China and the U.S. are very similar in terms of importance in terms of the levels and numbers for a country like South Africa.
I think for countries like Brazil, and even for countries like India, despite a lot of the challenges that they have with the Chinese, there’s still a lot of trade that is being done within their own region. And any possibility of destabilizing that becomes a process that is really complicated. And I think this is perhaps one way in which I think the West should be looking into BRICS, not into a direct threat for their own position, but rather a space in which countries are looking to exercise their own foreign policy autonomy.
Eric: Let’s close our discussion having you take out your crystal ball so we can look into the future. I said at the beginning of the show that my own feelings about BRICS have evolved considerably over the past couple of years. It’s still evolving because I still can’t really put my mind around what exactly this thing is. As you pointed out, it’s a pretty amorphous concept, but it is changing. What are we going to be talking about next year in your view? How is this thing evolving in such a way that we can give some definition to it about what the topics and what the agenda will be in 2025, for example?
Gustavo: I think there will be two important topics seen in the next couple of years, and I think they all are leftover topics from the presidency of South Africa in 2023. I think the first of them will be in relation to what heads of states will decide in October this year in relation to the discussions around currencies and the discussions about systems of payments. So, as you probably know, in the communique this year, member states tasked governance of Central Bank and Minister of Finance of all of BRICS members to provide options and, to a certain extent, almost like a roadmap on how to increase the capacity of BRICS members to trade with one another with different currencies but also particularly the use of new systems of payments that will enable that to happen.
And while we can expect some decisions to be made this year, certainly this will not be ready before 2026 or even 2027, in my opinion. I think the technicalities and the decisions that that will still continue for quite some time, and I think it’s certainly, for me, the most important issue for us to follow. The second issue I think for me will be in relation to not regarding a new expansion, and I see at the moment a very low appetite within BRICS to add new countries in the short term, but rather to provide a space for two things. One, to give time for the new members to adjust and to adapt and to provide their own voice and views within the group. And I think that will take time. And we’ve seen that within a lot of the BRCIS meetings that are happening this year that all of the new countries are still trying to figure out their own space and their own interest within a very, even though there is focusing certain issues as more important, the agenda remains very broad, but also BRICS members have been very active at the moment to try to better clarify the differentiation between full BRICS members and what they call BRICS partner countries, to what used to be called the BRICS+ for many years.
And I think this year we should certainly see a little bit more clarity around those partner countries and what is their linkages with decision-making and what they can actually benefit from it. So, I would say those two of the most visible things that I see at the moment, certainly with the very geopolitical nature that BRICS took in the last couple of years. Contextual developments will have an impact and I think will speed up or delay certain processes. But to a certain extent, we should always look into geopolitics these days into how BRICS is framed and how BRICS positions itself within global discussions.
Eric: Wow, a lot to think about. Gustavo, thank you so much for your time today and for all of your insights. Again, it’s a big giant data dump that we’re going to have to process. Gustavo de Carvalho is the senior researcher on Africa’s relations with global powers, BRICS, and multilateralism at the South African Institute for International Affairs. Gustavo, could you give everybody your X handle? Because you have some amazing posts that you put there, some really fascinating essays. And if people want to follow what you’re reading and writing and some of the ideas you’re sharing, where can they find you on X?
Gustavo: Sure. My X handle is @gb_decarvalho.
Eric: And we will put a link to that in the show notes, and I’ll put a link to some of his posts so you can see all of the fascinating insights that Gustavo’s putting out there. Thank you, again, for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Gustavo: Thank you very much. It’s been really a pleasure.
Eric: Okay, Cobus, so my thinking now has evolved yet again on the BRICS after talking to Gustavo. And this is the way I think we have to approach the BRICS. If you come in with a hard-and-fast that it’s this or it’s that, it’s going to defeat you because it’s a little bit like the Belt & Road where it’s ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. And I think that gives it more flexibility to define what it wants to be and to resist being defined by others, particularly by the global West. Okay, so again, I talked about how, in the beginning of the show, we shouldn’t focus on the big things, you know, the de-dollarization, how BRICS is going to take down the western oil supply and all these other kind of, this hoo-ha that you see on X and social media about it.
It’s really the nitty-gritty of the small initiatives that form the backbone of policymaking. And because BRICS is a consensus-based organization, they’re never going to go for big things, even though the Russians, and maybe a couple others will try and push big things, but you’ll never get all 10 of these countries and eventually 15 or 20 of these countries to agree on big things. So, the attention should be on the small, on the nuts and bolts of harmonization, of currencies, of technology, on health issues. This is where the BRICS magic is taking place in my view.
Cobus: Yes. I mean, magic might be a strong term, but…
Eric: Magic may be overstating it, but this is where it’s happening.
Cobus: Yeah. If one takes a step back, I think one of the big important issues that BRICS raises is that historically we are emerging from what a lot of people in this kind of IR world is calling the end of a Western unipolar window. Obviously, Western countries weren’t the only people with power, but they had a kind of a very strong overlap between actual hard power and the softer power of setting norms and setting essentially kind of horizons of what we think of as real or necessary. So, the BRICS is a strong challenge to that role of the West, and in the process, that translates into setting a whole set of different norms and setting, establishing whole sets of other institutions, including things like a development bank, for example.
It’s just in all of these different fields, there’s an alternative set of things being established, be those rules, be those ideas or discourses or norms, whatever you want to call them. And that I think is a big job considering how central Euro-American thinking has been in setting the rules of the road in a bunch of different fields. So, I think that is really, historically, one of its really big implications. And with that, we also then see what is essentially the development of, of multipolarity, you know, kind of the west isn’t going away, the BRICS isn’t really replacing the west is just also next to it. There’s now a parallel, you know, kind of set of systems being set up. And that parallel is more powerful in some cases than in others, but it still is notable considering that the West was essentially the only real game in town for a long time.
Eric: Many people in Washington or the global West, as you would frame it, say that the BRICS is part of a Chinese effort to build in parallel governance architecture. That includes the New Development Bank, that includes the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the 3Gs, that’s the global development initiative, the global civilization initiative, and the global security initiative. And so we have these emerging organizations that are forming some kind of alternative to some of the institutions in the West. I guess my question for you is how much does the BRICS fit into this Chinese parallel architecture, and how much of it is a global south thing that is it’s not a Chinese initiative, it’s a Russian, Brazilian Indian South African initiative that’s going to be joined now by potentially Thailand, Nigeria, and many other countries?
Cobus: I think it’s kind of both at the same time. I can see what people mean when they talk about this kind of China-centricness of BRICS. And of course, China is this huge economy, is by far the biggest economy in in the BRICS. It’s dominant in many ways. And China is bringing a whole set of very well-developed kind of like set of ideas and initiatives to the table. So, I’ve seen that kind of dismissal like, oh, this is essentially like a bunch of small countries in China. But, of course, that is exactly that kind of dismissal of these kind of global south countries that these global south countries are chafing against. So, I think there is also an alternative way of looking at BRICS where it’s a space for teeny tiny countries like South Africa to exercise a kind of a thought leadership or norm entrepreneurialism, whatever you want to call it, to try and reform global systems or change them at least, which also then has the might of China and other big countries backing them up.
I think kind of both of those things are true at one, and it depends a lot on the particular issue and the particular forum and the particular… one of these hundreds of meetings that Gustavo mentioned. I think it shifts within different ones. But I think one kind of has to keep the mental flexibility to realize that yes, China is really important there, but it’s not just China as the sun and the rest are little planets drifting around it. That the point of BRICS is to heighten these kind of global south voices that have found themselves sidelined, who feel sidelined. South Africa is just one example of how much ambition there is to try and kind of like get their voice in there.
Eric: We talked about the role of grievance. I think it plays a more prominent role in binding these countries together that oftentimes have very stark fissures along… We talked about the fault lines within them. The thing that unites them in many respects is their frustration at the system and the way it is set up. Either this dollar-based system, and many of these developing countries have run out of dollars. In fact, there’s a funny story circulating in China right now this week, and we put it in our newsletter today, that Huawei has become the largest meat importer into China. You think yourself, why would Huawei become a large meat importer? And again, this is circulating both on Taiwanese media and in China as well, on SINA and on Phoenix, Feng Huang. And the idea was that because Argentina had run out of dollars, it couldn’t pay its debts to Huawei in dollars, so it had to pay in local currency.
Eric: Well, the local currency, if then Huawei converted that back into dollars, which it probably does for its savings, they would lose a ton of money. So, they took the payment in local currency and then bought assets with it. And in Argentina, you buy beef. And so they bought a lot of beef and have brought it back to China and they’re now selling it online on beef stores. I don’t know if this story’s true. It’s getting a lot of attention. People have seen, and there are screen grabs all over, and not just from one or two sites and lots of different screen grabs, of online Huawei meat sales in China, which is just surreal. Okay? But it points to the problem that many developing countries are having in terms of their limited access to dollars.
And the Chinese play a part in this. Another story that came out this week is that China accounts for a quarter of Kenya’s debt servicing costs now for its debts, and all of that debt is paid back in dollars. And so there’s a lot of frustration that countries like Kenya have to ship a whole bunches of dollars back out to service debts. They have to use it to buy imports. So there isn’t a lot left at the end of the day. So, their ability to trade in other currencies is something that they desperately want. Remember we’ve talked to Charlie Robertson and other people in the financial services sector who’ve said, “Listen, there is nothing stopping any country today from trading in Lira or trading in pounds or trading in yen or yuan or any currency that they want.” People trade in the dollar because they trust it more than other currencies, especially the RMB, which is not a convertible currency and doesn’t have the transparency behind it.
And so I think this grievance is rooted in real tangible things. That they can’t change the system just feels unfair. And we hear this all the time that every time the U.S. Central Bank raises interest rates, developing countries get shafted because the cost of their debt just goes up. So, they’re fed up and they want to change the system. My question for you, and this is a topic that you and I do get presented from time to time. Let’s say Anthony Blinken comes to Johannesburg, and says, “Cobus, this BRICS thing, what am I to make of it?” What would you advise? Again, the same question I put to Gustavo, the Global West Capitals, people like Anthony Blinken, what would you tell him about what he should take away from the BRICS? Now, remember, this is a group that has three of the U.S.’s foremost rivals — Russia, China, and Iran.
And remember the politics behind that in Washington. So, we’re not going to see the United States become a member of the BRICSs anytime soon or be an observer to it or anything, or participate in it. That being said, what would you tell Secretary Blinken over some kind of snack or barbecue in South Africa?
Cobus: There’s many things to say to him. One of the main ones, I think, would be that there is a discourse in the US and Europe that BRICSs is driven by anti-Western grievance. And definitely there is an aspect of truth there. But the way that that is then immediately translated in Western discourse is that, oh, we, as the West, are so human rights focused, so humanitarian. And then there’s all of these authoritarian countries who chafe against our norm setting for the greater good, and now they’re creating this grievance club. And obviously Russia is invading Ukraine. There’s many, many atrocities happening there. This is part of the discussion to a certain extent within BRICS. However, there are very significant structural exclusions that these kind of global south countries undergo that they also don’t see any kind of like real chance that the U.S. or Europe or other Western powers who benefit from these kind of international structures are going to challenge anytime soon.
So, there are very limited expectations for the U.S. and Europe to lift some of these kind of structural limits to make it easier for them to operate. And that is, to a certain extent, where this push for alternative architectures coming from countries that are, in lots of ways, still very strongly affiliated with Western structures. So, for example, Turkey wants to join BRICSs, but Turkey is a NATO member. That’s an indicator of the kind of complexities that these global south countries are facing. And a lot of those complexities are structural. It’s not necessarily, oh, they just hate democracy, or oh, they just want to make it easier for them to kind of bully local minorities, or whatever way that that kind of grievance is then translated in places like Washington frequently in a quite a kind of a self-serving way by western stakeholders. There are other structural beefs that these countries have with the global system, which, in order to kind of deal with them would mean that the U.S. and Europe would’ve to give up some structural privilege. Obviously, they don’t want to do that. And therefore we are now seeing the growth of full alternative architectures of governance, financing, and so on.
Eric: There’s no room in the politics in these countries for that to happen. So, okay, well, let’s leave the conversation there. Wow, just so much to think about, and that’s just… My head is kind of spinning from this one because I’ve been thinking a lot about the BRICSs lately. And again, I was so skeptical of it, and I still am kind of skeptical, but coming around a lot more. And I think a lot of people are struggling to figure out what this thing is. This is the kind of thing we do every day over on the site at China Global South. And we would love for you to join a reader community, to become a subscriber, to support the work that Cobus, Jony, Antonia, the whole team that is doing in Asia, Africa, and around the world. We’ve got some super cool things coming down the line, some amazing data projects that are coming out, some very cool research tools that are coming out.
But all of it needs your support and we’re just so grateful for those of you who subscribe already and get the daily work that we produce, and you’ll get this newsletter in your inbox every day. You also get full access to our AI tools, to all the podcast transcripts. You get, obviously, the huge archive that we have. All of that comes with your subscription. Go to chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe. If you are student or teacher, you get half off. Email me eric@chinaglobalsouth.com, and I will send you the links for the discounted subscriptions. Again, totally worth it. We’re just so proud of all the work that the team is doing and we think you will enjoy it as well. So, Cobus and I will be back again next week with another edition of the China in Africa podcast. For Cobus van Staden in Johannesburg, I’m Eric Olander — thank you so much for listening.
Outro: The discussion continues online. Tag us on Twitter @ChinaGSProject and visit us at chinaglobalsouth.com. If you speak French, check out our full coverage projetafriquechine.com and AfrikChine on Twitter. That’s Afrik, with a K, and you’ll also find links to our sites and social media channels in Arabic.
