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BRICS and how international institutions work.

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Last week, when I wrote about how the international system and its underlying crises typically change very slowly at first, then all at once, a number of people on this and other sites pointed out that I hadn't made any reference to BRICS: after all, the Summit was actually happening in Kazan at that point.

That's true enough, and there are two reasons for it. One is that I try to keep these essays to a manageable length, and this necessarily involves cutting out things that I would ideally like to include. It's flattering, I suppose, to be asked to write more rather than less, but I have to keep some sense of proportion. The other is simply that I'm not an expert on international economics, nor on the major BRICS countries, and I try to limit what I write about to what I know, and ideally have had experience of.

That said, it struck me later that it might be useful to say a few words about international organisations in general--why they arise, how they develop, why they endure or, fade away--as a way, perhaps of putting BRICS into context. So in the first part of this essay I will look at three institutions that have lasted some time, and why this is so, and in the second I will speculate  about what this means for institutions such as BRICS in the future.

The first and best-known example is NATO, which I've mentioned before, and I won't go into too much detail here. It's enough to say that, happily for historians, we have an unparalleled, almost day-by-day history of how the organisation developed, what governments thought, what governments said to each other, and what they wanted.  The essential point, to which I intend to keep returning through this essay, is that the organisation was founded and modified in pursuit of specific goals, and because it was thought to be useful.

Western Europeans, with a devastated continent, exhausted by one war, and in a state of terminal fear  about another one, looked uneasily to the East, where the Soviet Union had installed Communist governments in the countries it had occupied, and had blockaded the western portion of Berlin. Although they did not fear military attack as such, national leaders were extremely worried about the intimidatory effect of massive Soviet forces a few hundred kilometres away. They hoped to invoke the United States as a counterweight, such that the Soviet Union would think twice before provoking a crisis. In the end, this led to the Washington Treaty and the famous Article V which does and doesn’t give a security guarantee. But that was all that was possible given the isolationist mood in the US at the time and it was better than nothing,

But there was no organisation at that point, because none was thought necessary. The threat was political, not military. All that changed with the outbreak of the Korean War. It was assumed—not unreasonably, given Stalin’s vice-like grip on the Communist parties of the world— that the initiative for the war had come from Moscow. Historians still debate whether and how far this was so, but at the time it caused panic in the West, as it was assumed that a strike in that direction could come in a couple of years. Thus began what historians call the “militarisation of NATO”: the creation at top speed of a military alliance capable of fighting a major war in Europe, together with a wartime command and control structure. This attack never came, but by then a wartime structure with elaborate plans for reinforcement was well on the way to construction, and we cannot understand either the origins and structure of NATO, nor its subsequent evolutions, without understanding this. The creation of the NATO structure was unprecedented in history: even countries that regarded themselves as allies had seldom gone beyond staff talks to coordinate plans. But the panic produced the felt need.

Such an organisation, once established, could not easily be closed down, even had international conditions permitted it. But, as frequently happens, members of the organisation found they could use it for their own purposes, as I’ve explained at length on several occasions. Briefly, small European states, nervous as all states are with large neighbours, found the US presence helpful. They also found it—and the organisation as a whole—a useful counterweight to the increasing strength of the Franco-German axis, especially after the 1962 Elysée Treaty. But perhaps there were two critical functions, albeit inadvertent, that NATO wound up performing. One was to help bring Germany back into the international system on terms that were generally acceptable. Hardly had the dust settled in May 1945, than national leaders began to ask each other how the “German problem” could be solved this time. Although moves towards a permanent anti-German alliance started to be made after 1945—more out of desperation than anything else—it was clear that military occupation of (West) Germany by France, the UK and the US could not last indefinitely. The solution was Germany’s accession to NATO in 1955, which put all German troops under NATO command, without the possibility of conducting national operations. Utter fealty to NATO was one of the means by which the former West Germany tried to live down its past, and to convince other states that it was fit to be an international partner once again. Thus, during the whole of the Cold War there was no more reliable NATO ally than Germany, and the after-effects of that policy are still visible today.

Secondly, NATO during the Cold War functioned primarily as a forum for discussions and decisions on European security issues and relations with the Soviet Union and the newly-formed Warsaw Treaty Organisation. The fact was that such discussions had to take place somewhere, and NATO provided the forum. In addition, smaller states outside the mainstream (such as Portugal or Denmark) found it useful to learn from and engage with the major powers, and to seek, at least, to influence them in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. Joining NATO meant jobs for diplomats and military officers, and perhaps the prestige of hosting an international facility of some kind. (Things like this are important to governments.) States joined NATO for very different reasons, mostly because they saw advantage in it: as one Spanish diplomat said to me after the end of the Cold War, “we joined NATO after the years of isolation under Franco, just as we joined the EEC, to show we’d turned a page. We joined everything.”

Likewise, NATO lasted after the Cold War because it continued to be useful. It was collectively a partner in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty that put the Cold War to rest, and if it hadn’t been there, another organisation would have had to be created to carry out the mass of duties imposed by the Treaty. It also provided a point of stability at a moment when things were collapsing, and old problems were resurfacing (the German-Polish border question, now forgotten, was one such.) NATO, for all its many imperfections, represented a form of control and coherence. Most of all, of course, nobody wanted to go through the agony of dismembering NATO (it’s not clear how that would have been done, anyway) at a time when there were a dozen other critical problems all pressing for attention.

The fact that organisations and forums can continue to be useful even if they no longer serve the same purpose they were designed for, is key to understanding why some continue and some die, and for that matter whether an organisation like the BRICS will succeed. In an earlier essay, I discussed the Western European Union, which led a ghost existence for thirty-five years before being resuscitated in the late 1980s. An even more extreme case is the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks that ran episodically in Vienna from 1973 to 1989. They accomplished effectively nothing, but NATO and the WTO kept them going because they represented an institutional channel through which communication could take place and messages could be passed, even at the most frigid moments of the Cold War. On the other hand, when it became clear that the Cold War itself was coming to an end, the Talks were wound up abruptly and with little ceremony, and immediately replaced by the CFE negotiations.

Like NATO, the ancestors of the European Union were not set up idly or out of boredom, but to fulfil a need. After the carnage of the First World War, voices already began calling for some kind of political union system that would enable European states to settle their differences pacifically, and put an end to centuries of blood-letting. Some fairly ambitious plans were actually put forward, notably the Briand Plan of 1930, named after the indefatigable Astride Briand, then Foreign Minister of France, which probably would not have succeeded, but foundered in any case on British opposition. In the end, nobody trusted anybody else enough, and even the terrible experiences of 1914-18 were not enough to persuade states to compromise. After that, it was all downhill.

By the late 1940s, the ruling classes of the West had been through something much worse, and things that had been hitherto unthinkable started to be discussed. There was a brief period at the end of the decade when the nationalists were quiescent, and the Christian Democrat and Social Democrat tendencies were relatively strong, when even politicians of the Right realised that things could not go on as before. In 1950, Robert Schuman, then French Foreign Minister, proposed a Coal and Steel Community, to include Germany and the Benelux nations. His avowed aim was not only to further economic integration, but to make an arms race effectively impossible, particularly by “the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany.” Few would have argued with that.  This was to be done by making “any war between France and Germany … not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” Few would have argued with that, either.

The Community, founded in 1951, was the ancestor of the European Economic Community, founded in 1957, and ultimately of the European Union itself. It was accepted that some sacrifice of national sovereignty was necessary to ensure that the continent would survive at all. Schuman was also helped (and this is important for the success of the organisation) by a historical and cultural context that was known to all, drawing on Judaeo-Christian traditions, and distant memories of a Europe which had been united before the Reformation. (There’s a whole argument that Brussels is the new Rome, that the Commission President is the new Pope that, that its directives are the new papal encyclicals, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.)

If the EEC was successful in reducing the scope for war in Europe over old quarrels, it also quickly became an economic bloc of some importance. The British eventually joined when they finally recognised this, the Irish because they had no choice but to follow the British. Whilst there were certainly those who had dreamt of a thorough-going Political Union long before, the actual route to that destination was long and complex, and the subsequent enlargement of the EU towards the East was not anticipated. In that case, membership of the bloc became a way of poorer countries in the East accessing funds and getting jobs and influence, which had never been part of the original plan. But organisations mutate like that.

And finally, the United Nations. But isn’t that the classic case of an institution which has not developed, which has remained stuck in 1945 and has outlived its usefulness? Well, up to a point. It’s important to recall that the United Nations were originally 23 states constituting the Allies of the Second World War. In the original concept the UN would be the sole authorised user of military power in the world, with the five Permanent Members dividing that responsibility between them. Under Article 47 of the Charter a Military Staff Committee was established “for the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council.” The direct UN  involvement in the Korean War, possible only because of the lack of a Soviet veto was, in fact, how the system was actually supposed to work. But quite quickly, superpower rivalry squashed any idea of the UN becoming the world’s policeman. Massive de-colonialisation, unanticipated in 1945, increased its membership enormously, and turned it, by the 1970s, into something of a World Parliament, a stage on which leaders of small, new countries could perform, and where, through non-permanent membership of the Security Council, they could increase their nation’s visibility, and hope to have an influence. For the West, the UN was a minor issue, a place where they suffered endless criticism by the Third World, only occasionally useful for low-level peacekeeping and mediation, and frequently criticised as a waste of time and money. (Inevitably, the West provided the majority of the organisation’s funding.)

This changed with the end of the Cold War, and the political chaos into which the Soviet Union and then Russia descended. Suddenly, western diplomats began speed-reading the Charter and realised that it could be useful. The 1990-91 Gulf War was conducted entirely in accordance with Security Council resolutions, and large-scale peacekeeping missions like UNPRFOR in Bosnia and UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone were conducted under UN auspices. The two ad hoc Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda were subordinate organs of the Security Council, which had the practical advantage that all countries were obliged to contribute to their budgets and support their work. But this couldn’t last, obviously, and by the time of Gulf War 2,0 the UN was not willing to underwrite another war. The no-fly zone over Libya in 2011, which many nations thought NATO had exploited unfairly for its own ends, was really the last time when the West was able to extract much value from the organisation.

This was not to say that others couldn’t. The return in force of Russia to the international scene, the arrival of China as a major player, and the increasing degree of organisation and coordination in what was once called the “Third World” has changed the nature of the organisation. It’s significant (a point to which we’ll return) that the BRICS countries actually value the UN quite highly, and want to see it continue in an amended form. As it is, the UN has been a powerful forum for the condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, in front of a large audience, broadcast on television all over the world during the General Assembly. And respected UN organisations have documented the suffering in Gaza for all to see.

What these rather breathless summaries show, I hope, is that organisations only endure if they are seen to be useful, but that this utility can be of different types for different nations and groups, and develop over time. Conversely, organisations once set up for whatever reason, can be extremely difficult to close down, and can rapidly find themselves used (or even abused) for other purposes. But to round out this section, let’s take a look at two organisations that have not really proved useful, including one that never actually got off the ground, in spite of massive efforts.

Few people today have heard of the European Defence Community. Since it never really began its work, in some ways that’s not surprising, for all that it was a hot political topic in Europe and the US for a number of years. Briefly, in parallel to the Coal and Steel Community proposed by Schuman, another French politician, René Pleven, then «Prime Minister, put forward the idea of the EDC. Given the weakness of European forces at the time, the US (and many in Europe) considered that the rearmament of Germany was essential if adequate forces were to be generated. Given widespread hostility to such an idea, Pleven’s plan was intended to prevent the Germans having direct control over their own forces. There was never any real agreement over the level of military integration or the practicalities of command, but the proposal was attractive to those who wanted a European defence “pillar”outside US control, and one in which Germany was prevented from operating independently. But the proposal stalled when the French parliament showed itself unwilling to ratify the Treaty. Things stagnated until Pierre Mendès-France, the greatest statesman of the Fourth Republic, became Prime Minister. He tried to introduce protocols that would have made the Treaty more acceptable and, when this failed, submitted it for ratification in the knowledge that it would be defeated. The US, which had lobbied furiously for the Treaty, was incandescent with rage, but powerless to do anything. Eventually, Germany joined NATO and the Western European Union instead.

That episode—of which I’ve provided only a very outline summary—is interesting in that it demonstrates that even if institutions are politically attractive and (as here) further a number of agendas, they do actually have to look as though they might work. And it was clear from the beginning that the EDC could never work. Partly this was because it was impossible to strike the right balance between sovereignty and integration, even with special rules for Germany. But partly it was because the institution was far too ambitious, and recognised to be so, and would never have functioned in practice. It is a good example of the truism that there are no technical answers to political problems.

The final institution I want to look briefly at is the African Union. Ironically, Schuman’s 1950 Declaration included a commitment to “the development of the African continent” as one of Europe’s “essential tasks.” But that was a time when Africa could actually be considered as a whole, when you could travel overland from Cape Town to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) by reliable rail service. What followed, of course, was independence, massive fragmentation, independence wars, and political instability. The original generation of independent African leaders were generally educated in Europe or by Europeans, and accepted without question that Africa had to “modernise”  and follow western models with western assistance. By the time it was realised that  bringing what Basil Davidson memorably described as the “curse of the nation-state” to Africa involved certain difficulties, it was already too late. And with the end of the Cold War, legions of NGOs, development agencies, foundations and consultants descended upon the continent, keen to promote national agendas and international norms, often having nothing in common save the ability to offer money in return for acceptance of their different ideas. If anything, western norms were more powerful and accepted in Africa after the Cold War than at any time in history.

Thus the AU. There had been an Organisation of African Unity since 1963, but during the nineties pressure began to mount for something more ambitious, along the lines of the new European Union. Some ideas—notably those of Libya’s Gaddafi—called for a United States of Africa, with a single Army. But the eventual AU launched in 2002 in Durban was ambitious enough. Indeed, at the time I had a number of discussions with some of those involved in the drafting of the original documents, who accepted that its aims were extremely ambitious, but felt that there was a political need for Africa to impose itself on the world stage, in a world where regional organisations were rapidly becoming the norm. Even so, the challenges were enormous:  the AU has more than twice as many member states as the EU, three to four times the population, a much larger surface area, massive disparities in wealth and population density, poor internal communications, and the need to work in at least six official languages. And no matter the political resonance, given the continent’s history, of its objective to “defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its Member States,” it was recognised from the beginning that few African states could secure their own borders, let alone those of others.

It’s understandable that in the last twenty years the AU has suffered much criticism, especially from Africans, and the rights and wrongs are far too detailed to go into here. It’s unfair to criticise the AU for not improving the lives of ordinary Africans: its objectives were always elsewhere. But even if the AU is now established as an international actor (it attends G-20 summits for example), with a splendid new headquarters in Addis Ababa built by the Chinese (who fiercely deny having planted listening equipment in it) and if it has an impressive list of institutions and committees, not everyone is convinced that the time and effort (and considerable donor involvement) in trying to create something modelled predominantly after the EU has been wise. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s not evident that you can create a strong organisation out of weak states. Creating international institutions of any kind always means a constant struggle to find, retain and replace competent people, and African states, for all that they don’t lack intelligent and capable people in government and elsewhere, have found it a huge challenge to spare enough of them to run the AU as well. Inevitably, donor funding and donor secondments have taken up some of the slack, which it might be felt rather undermines the objective.

All of these issues are relevant to BRICS, but first let’s just set out some of the different possibilities for international cooperation, since there’s no automatic reason why BRICS has to imitate any of the structures already described. It’s convenient to divide the contacts governments have (and there are many) into four basic types, in increasing order of complexity.

The first consists simply of the kind of bilateral and multilateral dealings that governments have all the time, on every subject you can imagine: forestry, higher education cooperation, customs procedures, cultural cooperation, disease prevention … the list is endless. Such meetings will be periodic, maybe once or twice a  year, and involve very little organisation. Membership will be informal and may change. Some are related to ongoing crises: there is, or was, a Group of Five States (US, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) trying to find a solution to the political problems of Lebanon.

The second is where a group of states decide that they have an interest or a problem in common, and decide to meet regularly to talk about it and coordinate their activities. In this case there will probably be a regular schedule of meetings, and a certain amount of permanent bureaucracy. Often, a country will host the annual or six-monthly meeting, and provide the secretariat for a while, or even permanently. There are also likely to be fixed points of contact in other nations. These bodies tend to grow in size and complexity over time to the extent that they are useful. A good example is the Australia Group, which works to harmonise export regulations for chemicals that could be used for military purposes. It now boasts 36 member states, as well as the EU, and meets regularly in different countries around the world. States can leave and join as they wish.

Note, however, that it is quite different from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is a full-time, international executive agency, established under the Chemical Weapons Convention. The CWC is a treaty-based regime (it has 193 adherents at the moment) with a series of duties and responsibilities for signatories. Both joining and (potentially) leaving are important legal and practical steps for governments. The OPCW has a large international staff and facilities and carries out inspections and issues reports. There are many other treaty-based regimes of this third type: the International Criminal Court established under the 1998 Rome Statute is perhaps the best known, but they all follow much the same template. Such regimes often spawn representative or consultative groups: the two mentioned above have Assemblies of States Parties, for example. The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty was mostly run by states, but had a Joint Consultative Group until its demise.

The final type consists of the major, permanent organisations, several of which have already been mentioned. For the UN, NATO, the EU etcetera, membership is an important political step for states, and leaving even more so, as we saw with Brexit. Such organisations have their own subsidiary bodies: in the case of the UN this includes UNESCO, the World Health Organisation, and literally dozens of others. Many of these organisations are themselves large enough to offer entire careers to an international staff.

So against that background, where do we situate BRICS? Once again, it depends what the members want the organisation to do. The origins of BRICS, and most of its practical activities, are in the area of economics and finance. The latest summit Declaration, a massive document which you should invest twenty minutes in reading, covers just about every conceivable subject, but limits itself largely to declaratory statements on non-economic and financial issues. This is consistent with the main theme of the Declaration, which is not to replace international organisations, but to change the way in which they work.

This puts BRICS in something like the second category above. It is not a treaty organisation, and, whilst membership requires unanimous approval, there seems to be little formality involved, either in joining or, no doubt, in leaving. Members take on no legal obligations, although it seems to be accepted that they will do their share of organising and hosting. It is much more a coordination mechanism than an organisation as such.

That is why the Declaration, like past BRICS statements, situates the group directly in the mainstream of the international political and financial system. The difference is, they want that system to work in a way that they would qualify as “better.” For example, the Declaration calls for a “more equitable, just, democratic and balanced multipolar world order,” as well as a commitment to “multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) as its indispensable cornerstone, and the central role of the UN in the international system.” But that is in the context of an “equitable and inclusive” geographical representation in the UN staff: ie more people from the BRICS. Likewise, they seek “comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more democratic, representative, effective and efficient, and to increase the representation of developing countries in the Council’s memberships…” Now two of the five BRICS are Permanent Members of the Council, and they are clearly not going to agree to anything that undermines that status, yet the group as a whole is seeking more influence, and thus the wording has to be relatively general.

But that does, in fact, handily illustrate how inter-governmental groupings of this kind work. After all, no two states ever have identical interests. What you get, rather, is a Venn diagram, such that  where the interests of states overlap sufficiently, the organisation or the grouping will function properly. The larger the organisation and the more ambitious the objectives, the larger this overlap has to be if the organisation is to work effectively. This was always one of the fundamental problems of NATO, where a large and ambitious structure was made up of nations with often different or even conflicting interests, and also started to become a problem when the EU moved away from its core membership of the former Holy Roman Empire and France.

So on issues such as the UN and the international system in general, BRICS is best seen as a coordination mechanism, such that its members, or subsets of its members, can work to increase their influence and further their objectives in different subjects. It’s not necessary to have unanimity on any, let alone all, subjects, and I don’t think there’s going to be much effort to establish a “BRICS position” on Ukraine (there is an extremely bland paragraph on the issue.) Indeed, on certain subjects it’s quite possible that the nations will have opposing views. But this only matters if we assume that BRICS has to resemble something like the EU, with formal structures and a need for unanimity. This is why, I think, some western commentators have dismissed BRICS, pointing out that (correctly) that there are massive political and societal differences between the major players. That”s true but it doesn’t alter the fact that in many cases their political interests converge, and cooperation makes sense. The West, I often find, has a rather innocent and naive belief that nations must “like” each other in order to cooperate.

Thus, the desire to “strengthen cooperation on issues of common interests,’ notably in the General Assembly, and in the bodies whose members are elected by the GA, and so outside the control of the Security Council. One that is mentioned is the Human Rights Council, “taking into account the necessity to promote, protect and fulfil human rights in a non-selective, non-politicised and constructive manner and without double standards.” The finger could not be more obviously pointed at the West and its incessant criticisms, and the intent is clear: to cooperate to secure election of non-western states to control of the various UN bodies.   

BRICS does have genuine common purposes, though, and this is more obvious in their financial and economic activities and in what is said about them in the Declaration. Here too, though, the emphasis is on continuity. There is praise for the G20 (of which they are members) but not the G7. Significantly, it is the former which is described as the “premier global forum for multilateral economic and financial cooperation,” and no doubt the four states will push for common objectives at G20 meetings. For example, the Declaration refers to the need to “reform the current international financial architecture to meet the global financial challenges including global economic governance to make the international financial architecture more inclusive and just.” Once again, the objective is clearly to cooperate, to change the balance of international financial institutions and regimes from the inside. Much of the second half of the document is concerned with BRICS initiatives in the financial and economic area, and the list is impressive in its length: far more so, I suspect, than most western commentators realise.

BRICS is not seeking to overturn the world financial order, nor replace it with another one. Their objectives are more modest: to provide alternatives for those who wish to escape, in whole or in part, from the current US and western-dominated financial system, and to progressively modify the way the system works from within, by organised cooperation. The Partner Country system is likely to mean less the formation of a new BRICS-based “bloc” in the Cold War sense, and more an increasing ability for countries in and around the BRICS area to play the West and BRICS off against each other.

To this extent, BRICS is not an alternative to the current international system, but rather the creation of a powerful bloc of countries who have a common interest in substantially changing the way it works. This is hard for westerners to understand and accept, since we are brought up to think in Manichaean terms, and of unbridgeable differences between groups and ideologies. But BRICS and its partner system represent a different model: it is hardly “new” since it is how most of the world has always worked. It relies on “sufficient” commonality of interest for nations to cooperate with each other in particular areas. It recognises that on other issues the countries may have different views, or even be totally at odds with each other. It acknowledges that international politics is a massive series of Venn diagrams, not an assembly of strictly regulated geometric shapes separate from each other. BRICS is an example of an institution that flows naturally from such an recognition, and may well inspire others. For that reason, together with the suppleness of the concept itself, BRICS is likely to survive and develop, and to continue to be a puzzle to western pundits.