First BRICS Summit — Yekaterinburg
The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met at Yekaterinburg in June 2009 and turned an investment bank's acronym into an organisation. The term had been coined in 2001 by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs in a paper arguing that four large economies were growing fast enough that the world's economic governance would have to make room for them, and that a G7 without them would become unrepresentative. The countries themselves picked it up. Their foreign ministers met on the margins of the General Assembly from 2006, and the first full summit followed the financial crisis, which is what gave it substance — the crisis had begun in the West, the recovery was being led from Asia, and the case for changing the quota shares at the IMF was suddenly hard to answer. South Africa joined in 2010, making the acronym plural. The members have very little in common beyond size and a shared irritation at Western institutional dominance. Two are democracies, one is a one-party state; two have fought a war over their border and had troops killed in a Himalayan brawl in 2020; their economies compete more than they complement each other. What they have built is real if modest: the New Development Bank in Shanghai, a contingent reserve arrangement, and a habit of consultation. Six more members were admitted from 2024, including Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. Talk of a common currency has not survived contact with the details. O'Neill has said more than once that he never intended a political bloc and that the grouping's members have less in common than his paper assumed. The acronym nonetheless outlived the investment thesis, which is not the usual direction of travel.
- Year: 2009 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
