Deepak Kumar was a senior banker with international financial institutions in Britain, East and South Africa. He worked with funds, banks, sovereigns and corporates from Asia, Russia and Latin America.
The BRICS countries, which we used to think of as fast-rising development stars, have lost their economic lustre in recent years. But the ill-conceived attempt to produce a cohesive grouping has failed as a policy, too.
Indeed, the Goldman Sachs report that got everyone talking about the BRIC idea (before South Africa added the "S") shows that Goldman economist Jim O'Neill didn't suggest grouping the countries together – Brazil, Russia, India and China just happened to stand out among a set of economic statistics. The countries' primary trade partners, financial investors and cultural touchstones were hugely disparate. But the hype around the acronym got so intense that governments collectively presiding over 3.3 billion people lost strategic direction and focused on living up to a single report title.
Leave aside whether fetishizing GDP growth over any other indicator of socio-political development was a good idea. Instead, consider whether there was any vision whatsoever for what the BRICS grouping was meant to achieve.
South Africa abandoned the New Partnership for Africa's Development and Pan-African parliamentary projects while chasing inclusion in the grouping. Brazil and India failed to increase their regional heft – political or economic. The less said about Russia the better, and China seems to have treated BRICS as a shop window through which politically guided investments were made.
When postwar Western Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand symbiotically expanded their economies and lessened inequality between 1945 and 1970, it took place in an environment of firmly grounded institutional frameworks, easy travel links and well-understood currency and trade policies, all held together by a roughly standardized political philosophy.
Harmonizing the economic strategy of the BRICS, however, would have involved several steps.
First, political support would have had to be built across the spectrum in each country for a common set of goals and benefits. Allowing your citizens to mingle, understand each others' cultures and benefit from scientific and educational exchanges helps societies coalesce around common values and mutual support. More ambitiously, exchanging best practices on health, social norms, poverty reduction and labour would all have been desirable. Instead, the BRICS were cleaved by their own internal contradictions on such issues as LGBT rights, religion and political participation. Even today, no citizen of a BRICS country has visa-free travel to any of the others. A Brazilian and South African need visas to visit each other, even as their common American banker won't require them for either.
Second, they would have had to leverage each country's strengths: South Africa's financial sector, India's technology, China's manufacturing, Brazil's agribusiness and Russia's energy and mineral resources. These would have needed to be integrated into a supply- and value-chain generating employment and productivity. Even then, geography, culture and politics wouldn't have been easy to overcome. Natural economic links (think NAFTA) show the role played by logistics and proximity.
Third, intra-BRICS trade and market access would have been vital. A raft of legislation to support policy-level decisions on taxation, financial investor protection, asset flows and currency exchanges would have enabled central banks, private investors and trade ministries to work together. But few steps were taken beyond BRICS memorandums of understanding and half-hearted mechanisms.
In short, the BRICS countries had no overarching political linkage or philosophy. They had no reason to consider each other obvious partners – and other than the elite of oligarchs, spin doctors and job-seeking bureaucrats, few people benefited from their decade of summitry and pageantry.