These BRICS fall in one heavy thud

Sam Schramski

Why, one can almost hear the clankety-clank of shackles dragged across the hull of the ship and lapse into honeyed reminiscence. Or the cacophonous interlacing of Portuguese, Umbundu, and the crack of a whip. Ah, yes, those were the days when two regions of the Earth were connected in healthy commerce!

It is without a hint of irony World Bank declares that “after 200 years” the World Bank is declaring “robust engagement” between Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa. These “natural partners” with such strong ties as slavery, colonialism, and love of football are increasingly presented as long-lost brothers--or more likely high school sweethearts who experienced a renewed passion in their golden years.

These pages, and thousands of others, have gone into great detail how the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, Indian, China, and South Africa) and IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) coalitions are establishing formidable counterweights to the usual imperial overlords in the US and EU, but all too often the conflation of these states is flimsy at best (and horrendously slapdash at worst).

Developmentalist thinking has been for years that historically “underdeveloped” nation-states who have seen positive economic growth over the last few decades are natural coalition partners. The Russian Federation often makes little sense in this configuration, but then we are told by thought-leaders to consider the idea of its GDP in terms of a beta distribution beginning at the end of the Cold War until present. Regardless, these partnerships do seem to make sense. These are corners of the planet that represent almost half the world’s population, a majority of its wealth, and are (mostly) composed of people of colour. That same World Bank report even speaks of shared vegetation, for goodness sake.

Writing as I am from Brazil, a country whose stark inequality pales only in comparison to that of South Africa’s (and in non-statistical, physical form can appear to be eerily similar), I can’t help to think that these much-touted south-south relations should arouse suspicion. Of all institutions least interested in the solidarity of formerly colonized peoples, one would think that the World Bank, IMF, and para(normal)-institutions like the G8 would have little interest in developing markets and middle-income countries forming a bargaining bloc that would have both economic and political weight.

The fact is that the forces driving these coalitions are firms, often investment-driven but not exclusively, who have no interest in the assertion of powers of the formerly oppressed. This is not a vision of the world revolution called on by Soviet communists (nor of the proletarian form from Marx before him), or even of a ringing endorsement of a new form of capitalism with a human face so much championed by screeds the likes of Amartya Sen and company. If anything these alliances are about engaging in advantageous trade deals that further the exploits of corporate shareholders and the possibilities of tapping promising markets. For South Africa this means sub-Saharan Africa; for Russia, Central Asia; Brazil, Latin American; India, South Asia, and China, everyone, but definitively Southeast Asia. But these bonds are also about tapping each other’s neighbors as well, but often animus surfaces.

Take the disputes between South Africa and Brazil as a case in point. South Africa has accused Ordem e Progresso of dumping chicken on their markets and has been steadily increasing tariffs in response. This while the rest of the BRICS fraternity demands free trade status across the board (friends don’t let friends engage in protectionism, right?). The same stories can be told in countless form between often openly antagonistic China and India.

But these economic assertions of might have little to do with day-to-day national imaginations. While I’m not familiar with the populaces of India and China, I can very definitely say that Brazilian footballers (and Brazil football in general) are immensely in Africa. And Brazilians, apart from their complicated relationship with race withstanding, have an affection for their African heritage (predominantly from what is now Angola and Mozambique) in food, music, art, language, and religion. While products, services, and tourists be increasingly be swapped betwixt their continents, it’s not clear the notion of south-south partnerships in a meaningful way, say focused on labor, poverty, and (to a lesser degree) race. If one thinks of ecosystem health and that pacts such as BRICS and IBSA might provide for its maintenance, the possibility of drifting further into dolor is evident.

If solidarity is a goal, let’s not whitewash the past or create an imagined vision for how the new world order will be imagined from below, using the methods and the lexicon from those above. The result may be a huge boom for national brands and regional trade, but its fatuity is not hard to sniff out. If such configurations were serious, the shouts of those protesters on the streets of Sao Paulo this past summer would have been echoed in Johannesburg (and dare I say Delhi, Beijing, and Moscow?). They would have been led by the grassroots, from women’s rights to gender to labor to green groups and beyond. The movement of global capital and accumulation subjugates and enslaves in only a slightly more sophisticated version of mercantilist human trafficking from those glory years 200 years back.

* Dr. Sam Schramski is a human-environmental geographer whose work focuses on issues of climate change adaptation in the Global South and is currently a visiting scholar at Indiana University, USA.

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