Malaysia’s decision to apply to BRICS for membership is visionary, but fraught with problems. These problems are mainly external, non-governmental, it should be said, and will probably continue to nag the application process and bedevil Malaysia’s actual membership and participation in the BRICS.
The likely challenges Malaysia faces, more especially the Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, would likely come from at least three constituencies; domestic, regional and globally. Malaysia could learn important lessons, and gain valuable insights, from South Africa, where BRICS membership and participation continues to be derided, most notably by the minority who came to the country during the colonial era. We can return to this domestic resistance, later.
Regionally, South Africa has been lucky with its BRICS membership and participation. There are none among the neighbours who abandoned their African identity for the sake of high finance and shopping malls as means of associating themselves with the Tom Wolfe’s masters of the universe, and necessarily opposed everything that has anything to do with anyone but the West, such as it is. South Africa’s neighbours have generally been supportive; they have been critical, but none of it has been driven by resentment or notions of exceptionalism. South Africa’s BRICS participation has always deserved critical scrutiny, but neighbouring countries have, at least, acknowledged the move as progressive, and the prerogative of South Africa.
Domestically, entry to BRICS received fierce criticism from a minority of South Africans, those legatees of colonialism who are opposed to everything that does not start and end with what “the west” expects or demands. This has generally been true of the white minority who owe their presence almost directly to European colonialists and settler colonialists, and who would insist that they are best suited to govern the country…. They remain the most vocal resistance, mainly because of their historical power and influence, and dominance of key sectors of the economy. This minority has consistently presented themselves as indispensable, with notable support from allies and expatriates around the world who would, generally, prefer a non-indigenous government and give primacy, again, to the power and influence that the majority enjoyed for most of the colonial and settler colonial period.
Not to be ignored, they have vocal support from public intellectuals, individual actors and agents (nothing conspiratorial is intended by the word “agent”), and institutions; think tanks, scholars, researchers and journalists, that contribute to knowledge production that shores up, or strengthens status quo patriotism. This status quo patriotism imagines that the world has to be excepted as it is, and that the post-war liberal international economic order, and existing institutions of global governance, shaped on an anvil of European political and legal thought, cannot be disturbed, and is the best possible arrangement for the world and almost seven billion people. This rests on that intellectually embarrassing endism and triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War.
The BRICS formation, flawed and fraught as it may be, is precisely a signal that that order and the intellectual accompaniments, is that there are countries (people) who believe that another world, presumably a better world, is possible – beyond the liberal/financial capitalism that has dominated the world since the end of the Second World War. Immediately, the eternally irascible among us will raise spectres of populist revolutionaries under the bed.
It is, actually, not “progressives” or “leftists” who have set off the alarms about liberal/financial political economy and global capitalism. Two books, here on my desk, and available at any decent bookshop, details the “Crisis” of liberalism; Edward Luce’s Retreat of Western Liberalism and Bill Emmott’s The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea. Luce and Emmott are hardly leftist radicals; one is an Associate Editor of the Financial Times, and the other a former editor in Chief of The Economist.
There are, of course, several other thinkers and scholars, economists like Branko Milanovic, who is quite possible the best economist in the world, today, have produced quite exceptional work on the decline of Western Liberalism and the emergence of the Chinese model.
Milanovic does not easily fit in among the status quo patriots who dominate discussions on global political economy. Indeed, given the tenor of political and social discourses, it is probably more effective to present conservative and or mainstream references, lest everything written here is dismissed as radical, or populist or revolutionary (or nativist, for that matter). Again, this is not some populist revolutionary statement. For the better part of three decades, mainstream scholars and thinkers and global public policy-makers – all fairly orthodox people – have been calling for a reconsideration of the “architecture of global finance,” and an alternative to the post-war liberal economic order. The most prominent, and certainly the most vocal of these orthodox thinkers has been Barry Eichengreen, “an American economist and economic historian” and Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The first related text by Eichengreen was Toward a new international financial architecture: A practical post-Asia agenda, published in 1999.
Most recently, in May this year, Michael Krake, executive director for Germany at the World Bank, acknowledged that the post-war liberal international order, specifically the “international financial architecture” may have generated wealth and prosperity in the world, but it’s outcomes were not equal. Indeed, this order’s “main target” may have been the creation of a better world, than the period between 1914 – 1945 “an era of global conflict and economic chaos” in favour of “stability and a rules-based order that ensured predictability”.
Anyone who has followed global political economic affairs over the past three decades or so, may readily acknowledge that the world has gone through unspeakable violence and cruelty (ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Genocide in Rwanda; wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and apparently intractable conflict in Myanmar), recurrent economic and financial crises (South East Asia, the Dot-Com crisis, the 2008 crisis), and the spread of communicable disease (SARS, Ebola and the Covid pandemic).
This is the world into which BRICS was born. The BRICS formation is not perfect, and not without contradictions. Anyone who would insist on comparing it to Eurocentric models is misguided. Specifically about BRICS, Milanovic has said:
“The expansion of BRICS membership is directly related to the expansion of NATO and NATO-like alliances around the world [but] the two organisations could not be more dissimilar. The new globalized NATO is a hierarchical, monolithic, and military alliance. None of the four terms applies to BRICS. BRICS is non-hierarchical; the members are extremely heterogeneous and often in political disagreement with each other; BRICS’ objectives are not military; and it is not an alliance but a mere organisation.”
All things considered, we have come to accept, at least in South Africa (I have also been part of global and discussions), that resistance to BRICS is typically ideological – people are alarmed by the false idea of populists and revolutionaries under the bed – but mainly a type of identitarian opposition. There are people, as we have in South Africa, who have been holding on to iniquitous systems of accumulation and the pecuniary gain that came with being chosen ones during colonial era (there is no other way of describing South Africa’s minitory white community), and anything new that emerges, threatens the hegemonic hold they have on financial and economic systems.
To be clear. There is very little “economic” reason for South Africa to be in BRICS, but the alliance was never (only) about economics. We have to consider a range of sources of capital (social capital, symbolic capital, economic capital etc), and start to imagine a future beyond the existing post-war liberal economic order. That, ultimately, is what the BRICS is about. It was never going to be easy.