BRICS Countries

BRICS is the bloc of major non-Western economies that began as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa and has since taken in further members. Its members present it as a counterweight to a global order they regard as dominated by the United States and its allies. Conservatives in the West read BRICS as a real challenge to that order, and as a test of whether nations defined by sovereignty and national interest can cooperate without surrendering to a new supranational project.

The grouping illustrates a recurring conservative theme: that the world remains organised around nation-states pursuing their own interests, not around the universal institutions that liberal internationalists expected to govern the twenty-first century.

Key Takeaways

• The acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by the economist Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs to describe fast-growing emerging markets.
• The grouping held its first formal summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009; South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS.
• A 2024 expansion admitted further members, broadening the bloc’s reach across the Middle East and Africa.
• BRICS members seek alternatives to Western-led institutions, including in trade settlement and development finance.

History And Context

The term began as an investment thesis. In 2001 Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, grouped Brazil, Russia, India, and China as the emerging economies likely to reshape global output over the coming decades. The label described a market trend, not a political alliance.

Politics followed economics. The four states began coordinating diplomatically and held their first summit in Yekaterinburg in June 2009, amid the wreckage of the Western financial crisis that had dented the prestige of the American-led order. South Africa joined in 2010. The members established the New Development Bank in 2014 as an alternative to the World Bank, and pressed for greater voting weight in existing institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

In 2024 the bloc admitted additional members, including states in the Persian Gulf and Africa, and entertained applications from many more. The expansion sharpened a long-running debate about whether BRICS is a coherent alliance or a loose forum whose members, several of them rivals, share little beyond dissatisfaction with Western dominance.

The Conservative Position

Western conservatives view BRICS with a mixture of realism and caution. The realist strand takes the bloc as confirmation that international life is governed by nations pursuing power and interest, not by the post-national institutions favoured by progressive internationalism. China and India guard their sovereignty jealously, and their refusal to be absorbed into a Western moral consensus vindicates the conservative insistence that the nation-state remains the basic unit of world politics.

At the same time, conservatives warn against romanticising the bloc. Its leading members include an authoritarian China and a revanchist Russia whose interests run directly against Western security. A conservative foreign policy grounded in national interest treats BRICS as a strategic competitor to be understood soberly, not as a model to admire. The bloc’s push to trade outside the dollar and to build parallel institutions threatens the financial advantages that underwrite Western, and especially American, strength.

The deeper conservative lesson is about the limits of the liberal end-of-history thesis. The expectation that prosperity would convert these states into liberal democracies integrated under Western norms has not been borne out. Conservatives read this as evidence that culture, religion, and national tradition shape nations more durably than the universalist theories that predicted convergence.

Differing Positions

Supporters of a multipolar world, including many on the Western left and across the developing nations, welcome BRICS as a corrective to centuries of Western dominance. They argue that a single hegemon distorts global institutions in its own favour, and that a plurality of power centres gives smaller nations room to manoeuvre and bargain. On this view BRICS is a democratising force in international affairs.

Skeptics on all sides counter that the bloc is held together more by grievance than by shared purpose. India and China are strategic rivals with a contested border; Brazil and South Africa are democracies uneasy in the company of Moscow and Beijing. Whether BRICS becomes a durable pole or remains a summit photograph will depend on whether its members can subordinate these rivalries to a common project, something history gives little reason to assume. The 2024 expansion, by adding members with their own quarrels and ambitions, may widen the bloc’s reach while diluting whatever coherence it once had.

References

1. Jim O’Neill, Building Better Global Economic BRICs, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No. 66 (2001).
2. Jim O’Neill, The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond (Portfolio Penguin, 2011).
3. Henry Kissinger, World Order (Penguin Press, 2014).
4. Oliver Stuenkel, The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (Lexington Books, 2015).