BRICS should discuss human rights related issues as well

BRICS (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) emerged as a stabilizer, as well as a potential challenger to the old US-designed system and the first summit was held in 2009.

With its 15th summit in Johannesburg, South Africa from Aug 22-24, expansion was expected to be on the agenda. The proof that things are not quite working in the West-led model is the fact that dozens of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Egypt, are lining up to join BRICS. There is a palpable demand across the Global South for responsive governance institutions that are not handmaidens of a single major power or bloc.  BRICS’ weakness that it lacks the cohesiveness of the West, and that its members are not part of a common security or civilizational community, is actually its main virtue over the long term. The norm of equality has been enshrined as a conscious antithesis to the hierarchical Bretton Woods format. Whereas some countries have bought into this process precisely because it is based on democratic governance structures, others are joining because they don’t want to answer for their human rights records according to laid out international norms. BRICS must also address human rights issues of member countries and their sympathisers.

We can point to three contributions of BRICS to the world. The first is normative power. While the majority of the world’s economies, including BRICS members, would like to increase their engagement with globalisation and with the West, they want to pursue this without having to change their political system, culture, domestic policies, foreign policies or civilizational identity in the process. BRICS legitimises such an inclusive globalisation model. In this sense, BRICS is not revolutionary in its world order outlook at all: it is merely seeking to buttress the concept of sovereignty and free will in international relations. The strings-attached approach of Western geo economic engagement is being resoundingly rejected by the world.

Second, the most visible success for BRICS at an economic level has been the founding of the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2014 headquartered in Shanghai China. Since its launch, the NDB has financed almost 100 projects with $34 billion, mainly in core infrastructure sectors (water, transportation, clean energy, digital etc.) that do not typically attract conventional forms of credit. Expanding the bank’s membership and hence its capital base will widen the development finance role of BRICS over time. According to one study, by the mid-2030s, the NDB could reach a loan stock of $350 billion, exceeding World Bank finance. Another pressing issue that the BRICS has been vocal about for years is the need for a sustainable global financial architecture that can support a trading and investment system of interdependence that is not dependent on a single currency. The Ukraine war, or rather the Western response to it, has finally brought home the systemic risk in persisting with the old framework. Not only are countries that seek to voluntarily engage in a variety of commercial, energy and financial transactions being held hostage, the stability of the entire economic system is being jeopardized by the policies of a single power. This is an unacceptable and unsustainable state of affairs, especially if we are talking about a multipolar world order. But also, BRICS and other countries lining up to join must know that the US is not the leading economy by chance. It’s by design. It’s not like Uganda where we fumble here and there. The US is the biggest country in research on anything. If the dollar is being threatened by any of BRICS alternatives, the US experts know. Like President Biden said “A bet against the USA is never a good bet”.

Therefore, devising means to insulate and protect economic interdependence is now a common strategic objective for BRICS. The other big shock to BRICS has been the US attempt to freeze $300 + billions in Russian foreign currency reserves held in US treasury bonds. The US Treasury Secretary recently admitted, “We have on this small scale seized assets, but there are certainly legal challenges in doing more than that.” But the damage has been done. China, India and dozens of other countries who invest heavily in US government bonds and park their gold reserves overseas must now reckon with the prospect of their sovereign assets being frozen or forfeited in a future crisis scenario. As Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov remarked last month, there is a desire by all BRICS members to develop financial mechanisms that secure them from “the arbitrariness of any external player”. He also clarified there are many ideas on how to achieve this.

The irony about BRICS and those that want to join, though, is pretty rich. Russia, after all, is waging a war on Ukraine that Putin has justified in starkly imperial terms. And the end of the unipolar world, in Putin’s view, seems to mean that Russia can go about the bloody business of occupying Ukraine unfettered by international norms, under the false banner of liberation.

If the 2008 global financial crisis was the initial impetus for BRICS, the ripple effects of the Ukraine war have been a turning point. The US weaponisation of public goods has alarmed even those states not hostile to the West for the necessity of a truly inclusive globalisation. BRICS is poised to play a vital role in the evolution of this process.

Phillip Kimumwe, [email protected]