Brics meetings and summits: much ado about almost nothing? - Oliver Stuenkel, Alan Beattie

A despeito de todo o hype em volta dos Brics, não consigo perceber o que de novo, de interessante, de útil, de benéfico para a humanidade, ou para si mesmos, o grupo que não é um grupo, mas uma coisa indefinida, pode trazer de realmente de diferente para este nosso planetinha redondo.

OK, eles são mais do que reuniões de cúpula, e também tem reuniões especializadas.

Mas, estas seriam coisa mais substantiva do que meros encontros de burocratas, de alguns acadêmicos conformistas, que se reunem to talk and talk?

O que vai sair de positivo para os seus povos, e para a humanidade, de todos esses encontros?

Apenas dizer: Oi pessoal, nós estamos aqui, nós existimos, não se esqueçam de nós, OK? Tragam os seus fotógrafos, nós vamos soltar uma declaração conjunta logo, logo, confirmando que existimos, estamos aqui, fazemos alguma coisa, nos reunimos, escrevemos declarações, etc. etc. etc...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Post-Western World - BRICS: There Is More Than Just the Summits

Oliver Stuenkel - 08 Jun. 2014

When BRICS leaders come together in Fortaleza in mid-July, analysts from around the world will have a quick look at the dynamics during the meeting and the 6th summit declaration, and then offer their view on the future of the grouping. Yet believing that the yearly summits make up the entire BRICS' edifice would be mistaken. The BRICS leaders summits are an important symbolic expression of political commitment, but what truly matters is the ongoing intra-BRICS cooperation that takes place throughout the year.

A brief look at BRICS-related meetings this year shows that intra-BRICS consultation and cooperation takes place continuously. In February, the first BRICS Science Technology and Innovation Ministerial Meeting took place in Cape Town. Ministers decided to strengthen cooperation in five fields: climate change and natural disaster mitigation (led by Brazil), water resources and pollution treatment (led by Russia), geospatial technology and its applications (led by India), new and renewable energy, and energy efficiency (led by China) and astronomy (led by South Africa).

In early March, the inaugural BRICS seminar on population matters took place, where participants discussed ways to address the challenges associated with demographic phenomena and processes, including migration, declining fertility rates, rising life expectancy, ageing population and changes in production and consumption patterns.

A week later, the 6th BRICS Academic Forum took place in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together scholars from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to discuss their research. Largely due to China's participation, these meetings tend to suffer from a boring whiff of officialdom, making truly innovative/contrarian academic ideas unlikely to be voiced, but still they serve an important purpose: To connect academic communities which have historically been disconnected from each other.

At the end of March, the BRICS Foreign Ministers met on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, issuing a high-profile statement opposing restrictions on the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Australia in November 2014.

A day later, on March 25th 2014, the BRICS Seminar on Systems of Innovation and Development took place in Brasília, as a direct result of the meeting of Ministers of Science and Technology in February.

In early April, BRICS Finance Ministers met on the sidelines of an IMF/World Bank gathering in Washington DC, in which they discussed preparations for the BRICS-led development bank, a U$ 100 billion contingency reserve arrangement and the forthcoming Summit in Fortaleza in Brazil. In late April, a public seminar meant to inform the Brazilian public about the upcoming Summit took place in Fortaleza.

In mid-May, the 4th Meeting of the BRICS Cooperatives took place in Curitiba (Brazil), and less then a week later, the BRICS Ministerial Meeting on the sideline of the 67th World Health Assembly (WHA) occurred. There, the side event on “Access to medicines: challenges and opportunities for developing countries” was organized by the BRICS countries.

Merely organizing a never-ending string of meetings will not create sustainable cooperation, skeptics will argue. That is true, and the impact of several of the gatherings listed above may not have the desired outcome. Only time will tell in how far these meetings can generate more sustainable cooperation. But they do show that intra-BRICS cooperation is indeed taking place in many different areas. Those who criticize the BRICS concept can no longer just take a quick glance at the yearly leaders' summits; rather, intra-BRICS cooperation has, over the past years, grown far too complex to be easily dismissed.

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Post-Western World - BRICS Summit is Chance to Strengthen Brazil’s Global and Regional Ties

Oliver Stuenkel - 11 Jun. 2014

The BRICS are not a group. - Martin Wolf, Financial Times

It’s time to bid farewell to the Brics.- Philip Stephens, Financial Times

Lack of unity is symptomatic of the BRICS members’ underlying incompatibilities. - Joe Nye, Harvard University

Since its first Summit, in 2009, BRICS has consolidated its position as a positive force for the democratization of international relations and for the enhancement of existing institutions of international governance. It has also forged an impressive partnership carrying out cooperation initiatives in more than 30 areas between its members. -  2014 BRICS Summit website

One month before the 6th BRICS, the Brazilian government has finally launched a website providing ample information about past summits, leaders declarations, and main areas and topics of dialogue between the BRICS countries. For the first time, journalists quickly find out about intra-BRICS cooperation without hours of tedious research through non-functioning websites. Together, this information goes some way to establish a counter narrative against the general global consensus that the BRICS grouping is a weird and useless aberration set to fall into oblivion. Irrespective of who is right, the website will undoubtedly contribute to turning the debate into a more informed one, particularly since continuous intra-BRICS cooperation is virtually unknown outside a small group of specialists.

Reading the leaders declarations since 2009 provides interesting insight into how intra-BRICS cooperation has advanced over the past five years - even though, as Ambassador Graça Lima, Brazil's summit sherpa, pointed out during a press briefing, the grouping's institutionalization is still low.

While the World Cup will inevitably crowd out a broad discussion about the BRICS Summit, global attention is assured. The 2014 BRICS Summit will be one of the most important meetings of global leaders this year, bringing together the West's no.1 enemy, the leader of the soon-to-be greatest economy, the leader of Latin America's largest country, Africa's most powerful (though increasingly embattled) leader, and the man who is supposed to bring India back on track, the latter on his first trip outside of Asia. The summit will be dominated by the creation of the BRICS Development Bank, and the lingering question of whether the institution may challenge existing Bretton Woods institutions, a powerful symbol of Western-led global order.

In addition, Brazil's decision to invite all South American leaders to meet Xi, Modi, Zuma and Putin after the summit as part of an "outreach" is a shrewd attempt to position itself as the region's leader and representative. If structured in the right way, the summit marathon in mid-July would not only help strengthen Brazil's ties to the world's leading emerging economies, but also show its neighbors that Brasília has a regional project that involves connecting the entire continent to the world.
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A BRICS bank: can it outdo the World Bank?

by Alan Beattie

beyondbrics (Financial Times), Jun 19, 2014

As a coordinated entity, the BRICS grouping of emerging markets has produced little except inspiring the name of a widely-read blog.

Next month, the five governments – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are planning to erect an actual edifice amid the swirling mists of rhetoric with the launch of a development bank dedicated to filling some of the gigantic hole in the financing of infrastructure and growth in fast-growing emerging economies.

The BRICS are seeking to avoid some of what they say are the faults of the World Bank and regional development banks – too much rich country dominance and too many conditions attached to lending. But that leaves the exact function and operation of the BRICS bank open to a great deal of political jockeying and uncertainties over how it is run.

That much more low-cost finance is needed in the emerging and developing world is hardly in doubt. Two former World Bank chief economists, Nick Stern and Joseph Stiglitz, say that (registration required) the contribution to infrastructure finance from multilateral development banks and overseas aid is likely to be $40-$60bn a year for the next few years, only 2-3% of the estimated $2tn annual need.

They might have added that the environmental and human resettlement safeguards adopted by the World Bank after decades of lobbying by (mainly western-based) NGOs have made its infrastructure lending complex and expensive for borrowers. Hostility to the effects of big dams, for example, means the bank has only a handful of large hydropower projects worldwide.

Development banks already run by emerging markets have stepped into the breach with varying degrees of opacity and indifference to collateral damage.

China, for example, honed its use of the huge China Development Bank (CDB) on its own infrastructure, including the much-criticised Three Gorges Dam, which the World Bank declined to finance on environmental and human rights grounds. It has since sent it out to do China’s mercantile and foreign policy bidding abroad. The CDB, which now lends far more than the World Bank, routinely hands out low-interest loans, particularly in Africa, conditioned less on development need than on the desire to secure natural resources and promote Chinese exports – and to encourage governments to de-recognise Taiwan at the UN.

Other emerging market countries’ development banks are much more transparent, but still attract credible criticism for not going far enough. Global Witness, the campaigning NGO, last week launched a broadside against BNDES, the Brazilian development bank that is partly funded by the national Treasury. BNDES funded some of the World Cup stadia that have been widely accused in Brazil of benefiting politically well-connected companies, running way over cost and and having little lasting growth impact. BNDES argue that they finance SMEs as well as large companies, but it is hard to believe that a heavily subsidised development bank, rather than fundamental reform of capital markets and lower long-term market interest rates, is what Brazilian businesses really need.

Even plurilateral development banks have yet to match the transparency standards of their multilateral cousins. The Andean Development Corporation (CAF), which brings together sixteen central and South American emerging economies (plus Spain and Portugal), now finances more infrastructure in Latin America than the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank together, but also attracts accusations (link in Spanish) of opacity and low lending standards.

Satisfying these demands while recognising political realities will be a difficult task for the BRICS bank. Who runs the institution and how it makes lending decisions have yet to be revealed, but it is inevitable that some raw politics will be involved.

The creation of the bank has revealed how delicate are these negotiations. China, which could easily finance an institution several times the size of the BRICS bank on its own, and whose high credit rating will be enormously helpful, had to be persuaded to accept a minority shareholding. Essentially, Beijing is gaining greater credibility for international cooperation at the cost of a greater implicit financial contribution and more constraints on its action. How far it is prepared to accept the latter to gain the former remains to be seen.

Although Beijing will not be able to use the bank to buy political favours as it does with the CDB, there will be some quiet but fierce struggles if one of the BRICS feels its own interests are being threatened. Nor is China likely to be very happy if it ends up simply subsidising the borrowing of other emerging markets – including BRICS nations like India – whose companies may compete with Chinese businesses for export markets.

Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs chief economist who invented the BRIC classification, suggests the bank approve loans based on their ability to help borrowers to achieve benchmarks for governance, education and access to technology. It is an interesting idea, but probably a quixotic one. Many governments correctly take “governance” in this context as a euphemism for combating corruption, and regard loans with governance conditions attached as intrusive political meddling. Given the emerging markets want to escape what they consider to be the challenge to their sovereignty from World Bank conditionality, they – particularly China – are unlikely to want it to re-emerge in their own development institution.

The BRICS bank certainly has an opportunity to make a considerable difference. There is an unoccupied niche in governance as well as in financing. It ought be possible to be more transparent than the likes of BNDES and CAF without being choked by bureaucracy like the World Bank.

By agreeing to finance a joint development bank, the BRICS have committed to a greater degree of scrutiny than going it alone. Pooling money and credit ratings may produce financing greater than the sum of its parts. But it seems hopeful rather than certain that a joint venture of five disparate countries – whose own governance is frequently murky – will do the same for the transparency of the new bank and its decisions to whom, and for what, to lend.

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Can the BRICS avoid the “Power South vs. Poor South” Dynamic?

Oliver Stuenkel

Post-Western World, 20 Jun. 2014

Bridging the gap between the Global North and Global South was one of the key ambitions when global leaders created the G20 in response to the global financial crisis of 1997-99. In the same way, supporters of the BRICS and IBSA groupings have often argued that such outfits would strengthen the voice of the developing world in global affairs.

Yet the past decade has also seen the emergence of a new division: That of the "Power South" against the "Poor South", as Amitav Acharya argues in his recent book. Countries' quest for status as an "emerging power", he argues, can undermine its regional engagement. There is always a temptation to "leapfrog" their unglamorous neighborhood in order to pursue to global glitz and prestige that BRICS and G20 membership brings.

Contrary to previous developing country clubs like the Bandung Conference and its offshoot, the Non-Aligned Movement, which were broad and inclusive, the new outfits are exclusive and plagued by questions about their legitimacy and capacity to represent the developing world. Nations represented at Bandung, including Nehru's India, Mao's China, and Nasser's Egypt, had few illusions about achieving global power status, whether individually or collectively. The BRICS, on the contrary, harbor an individual aspiration to project power globally. The more powerful they become, the more pressing are worries in smaller developing countries about whether the BRICS of the G20 can still represent their interests? Or have countries like Brazil, India and China long joined a global oligarchy that knows little about the challenges small poor countries face?

At the same time, none of the BRICS countries enjoy broad regional support - quite to the contrary, in almost all cases, the BRICS countries' immediate neighbors are most skeptical of the emerging powers' leadership ambitions. Paradoxically, the BRICS' leadership ambitions are more recognized and even openly demanded on a global scale than regionally. The key challenge, then, of each BRICS country is how to show that their individual rise is good for their neighborhood, too.

Finally, the issue raises an important question several emerging powers have to face: How important is regional support to sustain a credible leadership ambition on a global scale? Put differently, is it necessary to be recognized as a regional leader before projecting influence globally?

These are important questions as Brazil prepares the BRICS-South America Summit in Brasília, which will take place shortly after the 6th BRICS Summit in Fortaleza. The decision to invite the continent's leaders is a shrewd one; yet Brazil should use this golden opportunity to articulate a clearer regional vision and answer pressing questions: What should UNASUR look like ten years from now? How does it think about South America's place in a global economy increasingly divided by big trade blocs? What should be the future of the South American Defense Council? And how should the region think about and respond to China's growing presence?

Organizing the summit marathon in the second half of July is a formidable logistical and diplomatic challenge. Yet if Dilma Rousseff is able to articulate a clear vision to the many participants, it would be a considerable success of a President who is generally thought to have neglected foreign policy since taking office in January 2011.