What are the BRICS?
Together as a bloc, the five BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – control a quarter of the earth’s land mass but 42% of its population. The BRICS are relatively inwardlooking economies; although they host 46% of the global workforce, they are responsible for just 14% of world trade and 19% of world Gross Domestic Product (although this rises to 27% if measured in purchasing power parity terms – in which per capita GDP is also low, with only Russia enjoying an income higher than the world average of ($11,800).The bloc was, however, initially named and celebrated – as BRIC, without South Africa until Beijing invited Pretoria to join in 2010 – by Goldman Sachs Assets Management chair Jim O’Neill in 2001. The first formal BRIC gathering was in 2006 when foreign ministers met at the United Nations, followed by heads-of-state summits at Yekaterinburg hosted by Vladimir Putin in 2009, by Lula da Silva at Brasilia in 2010, Wen Jia Bao at Sanya in 2011, Manmohan Singh at New Delhi in 2012, Jacob Zuma at Durban in 2013, Dilma Rousseff at Fortaleza in 2014, Putin at Ufa in 2015, Narendra Modi at Goa in 2016, Xi Jinping at Xiamen in 2017, and Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg in 2018.
There is extensive ceremonial pageantry and back-slapping at these events, although they usually last just two days. Parallel conferences of business leaders typically have access to the state officials, unlike other official civil society BRICS events, which are kept on the sidelines and are usually held weeks before.
(There is also usually an ‘uncivil society’ summit held by leftwing critics simultaneous with the BRICS leaders’ summit, e.g. in Durban in 2013, Fortaleza in 2014, Goa in 2016, Hong Kong in 2017 and Johannesburg in 2018 – under the ‘brics from below’ or People’s BRICS rubric, which in Johannesburg will be expressed as a “Break the BRICS” protest.)
Beyond state and business summitry, there have also been regular meetings of BRICS trade unions, since Moscow in 2012, but in the form of a parallel summit starting with Durban in 2013. The ‘Civil BRICS’ of civil society groups began meeting in Moscow in 2015, sponsored by the Putin regime (along with Oxfam) and hence carrying so little credibility that the main Brazilian development network (Rebrip) formally boycotted the inaugural Civil BRICS.
Dozens of other BRICS-related events occur in between on different schedules, including meetings of ministers responsible for economies, security, agriculture, health and municipal government, as well as think tanks and interested academics.1 These have had a 1 The following are some of the institutions and networks that have been catalysed by the BRICS: New Development Bank, Contingent Reserve Arrangement, BRICS Business Council, BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues, BRICS Think Tanks Council, BRICS Academic Forum, BRICS Trade Union Forum, Civil BRICS, Customs Cooperation Committee of BRICS, BRICS Economic Partnership, BRICS Anti-Corruption Working Group, Anti-Drug Working Group, BRICS degree of official support, in large part because they generally refrain from offering tough criticism. As a result, the ‘academic’ analysis is causing substantial controversy in South Africa, as shown below.
