GPPi participates in workshop on India's global role and the BRICS group

On 11 June 2013, GPPi Associate Director Philipp Rotmann took part in a research workshop on ​“India’s Role in Global Cooperation: Curbing or Shaping World Politics?” The conference was jointly hosted in Duisburg, Germany, by the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/​Centre for Global Cooperation Research and the Institute for Development and Peace. 

During the workshop, Rotmann commented on a presentation by Ramesh Thakur of the Australian National University, who had been asked to address the topic ​“BRICS as an avenue to changing global governance?” Thakur and Rotmann shared the panel with Silke Weinlich and Huang Meibo, both with the Center for Global Cooperation Research. 

Thakur characterized the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as mostly a lobbying group for emerging powers whose flexibility allowed its members to hedge their bets rather than committing exclusively to any one way of influencing global affairs. Thakur argued that the BRICS have come together on the basis of shared grievances rather than a shared vision, and that their long-term impact on global governance will remain doubtful if they fail to generate common ideas about world order. 

Following a comment by Silke Weinlich that focused on India’s role in the BRICS, Rotmann called for a clear distinction between the short-term and the long-term analysis of the BRICS and similar loose groupings such as IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China). In the short-term over the next five to 10 years, BRICS will likely remain an important feature in the world order, but that analysis in itself says little about their longer-term relevance since the short-term is a period of transition: Many new things might not last long. 

In particular, Rotmann argued, it says little about the future shape of the world order. The fear that the present state of global governance might unravel into a system that would resemble historical examples of multipolarity might therefore be overblown. Institutional choices made today in Delhi or Beijing to deal with some issues bilaterally, with others through the UN and yet others in the BRICS format, should not be taken as the beginnings of a new order. Instead, analysts should allow for experimentation and not draw premature conclusions from the different stages of these experiments.