Mighty Morphin’ BRICS?

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have announced a joint BRICS Development Bank as a counterbalance against the longstanding Western alternatives. But do the BRICS’ regular meetings and bank really allow them to punch above their individual weight?

There are three main reasons why the BRICS as a group will struggle to play more than just an obstructionist role on the global stage.

1. It’s all about China. We often say BRICs when we really mean China. With a GDP over $8 trillion, the Chinese economy is the second largest in the world...and larger than all the other BRICS put together. South Africa’s economy is roughly equivalent to that of China’s sixth largest province. And the bulk of this BRICS economic growth is really just China: at the current rate, China’s economy will add an entire Russia in the next two-and-a-half years.

Developments inside China — from its reform agenda, resource appetites and cyber capacity to its political and military might — will drive the actions of the other BRICS, not to mention the Development Bank. Russia, India, South Africa and Brazil will be responding to China, both cooperatively and antagonistically, more than they will coordinate with it.

2. The politics. When it comes to their political systems, the BRICS are apples and oranges…and pears and pineapples. Brazil, India and South Africa are democracies; Russia and China are autocracies. And even the democracies are starkly different. Brazil’s is much more centralized and less diverse than India’s. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, has roughly the same population as all of Brazil (and four times South Africa’s). With more than a dozen official languages and a remarkably decentralized structure, India is a challenge all its own. And it’s under-equipped as a global diplomatic player: despite a population of 1.2 billion people, India has about the same number of diplomats as little New Zealand.

3. The economics and the energy. In Russia and China, the state is the dominant force in the economy. Brazil and India lean closer to free market capitalism than to the state-dominated variety. The same goes for their resource needs. Russia and Brazil are major exporters. China, on the other hand, is now the largest importer of crude oil, and India is fourth.

And as the geopolitics of energy and basic resources like food and water shift dramatically over the coming decade, differences among the BRICS will only grow. For its part, Russia is increasingly threatened by the energy revolution taking place in the Western hemisphere, primed to boost oil supplies and thus lower prices. Last year, oil and gas comprised about half of Russia’s government revenue. In 2007, Russia needed a Brent oil price of $34 per barrel to balance its federal budget; five years later, the figure stood at $117. India and China are not yet seriously competing with one another for resources, but as the demographics shift in the two countries and as India becomes more urban and spends more on its infrastructure, the frictions will grow. Take water, for example: China and India are home to 37 percent of the global population, but only 10.8 percent of its water. The population will grow — and so will strains on that water as industrialized processes and more upscale (and water-intensive) eating habits take hold.

The bottom line: if you wanted to pick five major economies with as little as possible in common, the BRICS would be a decent bet. The group can agree to disagree with the global status quo. They will sometimes use their collective weight to obstruct American and European plans. But the BRICS have too little in common abroad and too much at stake at home to play a sustained, coherent and constructive role on the global stage.

This piece was adapted from my op-ed in The New York Times in 2012, “United by a Catchy Acronym.”

Photo: NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images