The Brics summit last week laid bare South Africa’s real geopolitical position in ways that no talk of non-alignment can hide. I have always been critical of our government’s embrace of Russia despite its invasion and continued bombardment of Ukraine. I see no value in aligning ourselves with one of the most brutal dictators in the world, while alienating the most powerful economies.
I still held to the hope that sanity would prevail and that South Africa might still make an about-turn. Instead, the South African government gave the US in particular the middle finger. I threw up my hands in despair when President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the addition of six states to the group: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
One of the central tenets of economic sociology is that the economy is fundamentally a social institution based on shared values such as trust.
There are as many types of capitalism as there are cultures and institutions among countries, and there is no such thing as a free market disembodied from the social networks and social values of the society in which it operates. Since the announcement of these additional Brics members, I have been trying to find what values and institutional cultures they have in common, and the only ones I could identify were mostly negative. The majority share a “strongman” approach to leadership.
Egypt is a military dictatorship; the incumbent president, Gen Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ousted the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, whom he left to die in prison four years ago. Iran is a theocracy suffering under the weight of US sanctions. Ethiopia is forever in the middle of regional wars. Argentina has been no stranger to dictatorships, but has also become synonymous with hyperinflation. The UAE is of course a family enterprise.
The similarities in the political and institutional culture should not blind us to the differences, which emerged as soon as the summit began. India has expressed reservations about the anti-Western rhetoric that has marked public statements from China and Russia, and perhaps from South Africa itself. How long India will remain in the group remains to be seen.
Despite its inclusion, Saudi Arabia has been lukewarm about the idea, saying it first wants to study the terms & conditions. The geopolitical rivalries are thus not just between the Global South and the West, but also divide the Global South itself.
Attention has focused on the new members, but by definition inclusion also means exclusion. I wonder how those African countries that are not among the chosen few — including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Angola, Tanzania and others — will receive the snub. Might their exclusion create new rivalries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and might Washington reach out to them and leave South Africa in the cold? And what happens when there are changes of government in these countries? Is there enough political, cultural and institutional consensus to sustain their Brics membership?
I wonder how those African countries that are not among the chosen few — including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Angola, Tanzania and others — will receive the snub.
In the absence of a shared sense of values, relationships in the expanded Brics are likely to be transactional rather than transformative, more tactical than strategic. While I understand and share the anger that countries of the South have towards the global economic system constructed in favour of the US and other Western countries, it is sheer wishful thinking that this motley crew might usurp the G7 countries from their perch in the global economic order.
Partly, this is because of what historical sociologists sometimes refer to as path dependence. At the risk of oversimplification, this describes the way institutional patterns tend to reproduce themselves over time.
This is not to say that change is impossible, only that a departure from the existing pattern requires introduction of a variable powerful enough to undermine it. Colonialism set in place a Western-dominated capitalist system based on factory-based manufacturing. The invention of the microchip in the late 20th century altered patterns of economic production and unleashed the economic power of Japan and the so-called Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong).
There has been a great deal of excitement about the inclusion of oil-rich countries in Brics, but fossil fuels are a dying commodity. The future belongs to those who own the technologies and sources of energy of the future. As things stand the US leads the world in technological innovation, in no small part because there is not a single country in the world that comes close to its system of higher education. In other words, short of a major technological innovation or a major catastrophe befalling the US or the West generally, it will be some time before the expanded Brics can disrupt the path dependence of the global economic system.
This eventuality is not as improbable as it might have seemed only a few decades ago. The greatest threat to the US comes from the kind of domestic terrorism displayed by the white supremacist groups that attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021.
Instead of an alliance of dictators, what the world needs is an alliance of democracies. If anything, the formation of Brics+ should be a wake-up call for the US, which has largely ignored Africa. While the African Growth & Opportunity Act has benefited African countries, what matters even more is the cultivation of shared values and representative global institutions based on justice and fairness.
However, a new global architecture must go beyond governments to include civil society, the real site of democratic values. Most of the new-look Brics group — Russia, China, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE — have no civil society to speak of, and where it exists it is under severe state repression. I would have preferred that South Africa were part of an alliance of democracies, but I fear the horse may have already bolted. We may have truly reached the point of no return.
* Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at George Washington University
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