This Paper analyses South Africa's position as a member of both BRICS and IBSA, especially the broader strategic implications arising out of its membership of the two organisations.
South Africa’s entry into the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) forum in 2011 alongside its membership in the trilateral forum of India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) raises a number of issues in the nature of trends analysis. These have to do with the relationships among the developing countries of the so-called global South, overlapping into the realm of emerging powers. These can be considered semi-developed countries exhibiting robust rates of growth, development, rising living standards and growing regional geopolitical influence in an increasingly multipolar global environment. This paper attempts to analyze how South Africa relates to this scenario, given its unique role and positioning on the African continent, as well as how Africa figures in this picture, linked as it is to the broader strategic implications arising out of South Africa’s membership in both IBSA and BRICS.
These groupings, in turn, are suggestive of an important geostrategic dimension of connectivity between Africa and Asia via South Africa’s additional positioning within the Indian Ocean nexus. As such, with South Africa as the point of departure, this dimension should illuminate the comparative advantages of the BRICS and IBSA groupings as platforms of multilateral utility for their members, as also to serve as points of reference for drawing some observations about South Africa’s partners in these groupings, with particular reference to India and China.
From the vantage-point of how South Africa navigates its bilateral relations within these multilateral frameworks, questions of foreign policy identity and strategic autonomy have emerged in the intellectual and policy debates and discourses concerning the utility of the country’s membership and participation in them. Whereas IBSA was seen as a natural outgrowth of South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy trajectory prioritizing Africa and the South and evoked no controversy, its commitment to BRICS remains a controversial issue.
For all the controversy surrounding its BRICS membership (unlike the case with IBSA, which has generated little visibility in media and public commentaries—much to its disadvantage—), BRICS has enjoyed a high level of visibility rarely seen in regard to issues concerning South Africa’s foreign policy commitments. And herein lies the difference. The original quartet of Brazil, Russia, India, and China arose out of the championing of the emerging market by its Wall Street guru at Goldman Sach, chief economist Jim O’Neill, through his prognostications about future growth opportunities for overseas investors.
BRIC caught the instant imagination of the international financial and business media. As such, it was perhaps inevitable that this Wall Street acronym would stimulate the geopolitical imagination of the countries being targeted to all this hyped international high finance and investor attention. Irrespective of the Wall Street capitalist motivations that drove O’Neill, the BRIC quartet individually and collectively were motivated by their own geo-economic compulsions interacting with the fast evolving geopolitics of global economic governance that had been propelled by the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. This was especially so in the case of Russia and China.
In essence, the co-leaders of the Eurasian ascendant Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Russia and China, had apparently made a strategic calculation: there was something to be gained in their already launched campaign against the reserve currency hegemony of the American dollar by roping in India, already a ‘strategic triangle’ partner at a foreign ministerial level, with ‘out of area’ emerging power of the southern western hemisphere, Brazil.
India, moreover, was already an observer member of the SCO, though in an ambivalent position. In the event, a pragmatic convergence of interests among four emerging and/or re-emerging resurgent powers (two of them permanent members of the UN Security Council) gave natural logic to the coming together of a BRIC quartet, Goldman Sachs’ hype not with standing.
Obviously, the formalization of a catchy marketing acronym into a real-life political organism fed the proprietary Western capitalist ego of Mr. O’Neill and, indeed, has been a piece of baggage that seemed hard to shake–that is until South Africa, much to O’Neill’s annoyance, was brought into the club. So, as BRIC has become BRICS, the resulting quintet, in jazz-like fashion, has retuned itself in accordance with the rhythmic beat originally intended—one having nothing to do with the increasingly discordant notes in the global financial districts of an occupied Wall Street.
That said, the ‘BRIC to BRICS’ controversy within South Africa was an inevitable outcome of the wake-up call that suddenly registered in our capitol, Tshwane-Pretoria, when, out of the distraction of political infighting within the ruling African National Congress (ANC), awareness dawned that South Africa’s IBSA partners appeared to have deserted it in favour of a more internationally compelling coalition of forces.
Although at present there is an ongoing South African civil society debate over whether the country should or should not be in IBSA (and, indeed, whether or not the membership in BRICS has made IBSA redundant), the fact of the matter is that the ‘original sin’ that spawned the controversy was committed when South Africa was left out of BRICS in the first place.
Many of these concerns were first raised by this author in 2009, immediately in the wake of the formal launching of BRIC in Yekateringburg, in an IGD ‘Global Insight’ publication exploring the implications of South Africa’s exclusion from this auspicious creation. In what was billed as ‘BRIC laying in New Delhi,’ this analysis relied upon the ORF’s ‘pre-BRIC summit preparatory meeting’ and the document thereof as a point of reference for exploring issues raised by BRIC’s launch for South Africa.
Many of the issues raised at the time have come to the fore now with South Africa’s entry into BRICS. As such, this paper attempts to continue reflecting on how South Africa fits into the emerging power scheme of things in the ambit of what now is a BRICS-IBSA equation—a study that demands an assessment of the comparative relevance of each of these formations in relation to their geopolitical and geoeconomic potentialities. These considerations relate to South Africa’s positioning in the broader continental context.
They also bring into the IBSA-BRICS equation Africa’s connectivity to Asia via what Martin Walker, senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, calls the ‘Indian Ocean nexus’ that links China, India, the Middle East and Africa (CHIMEA). Thereby, an intriguing scenario of a SA-Sino-Indian ‘triangle’ straddling BRICS and IBSA emerges as a factor in evaluating how each of these actors may contribute to a further fleshing out of the fledgling multilateralisms posed by each grouping; what options they offer in contributing to a st defining of the contours of a 21 century multipolar order. However, for South Africa, whether and how it is able to build synergy between its African and emerging power/global South agendas becomes a key consideration in assessing how it stacks up in the unfolding geopoliticaleconomic sweepstakes.
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