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A forum to counter G-8’s supremacy

— Photo: AP

New equations: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at Yekaterinburg on May 15.

When Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov first broached the idea of a Russia-India-China triangle in 1998, it was dismissed as a pipe dream. Ten years later, the triangle is not only very much alive but is on course to expand beyond its Eurasian confines to acquire a global dimension and even challenge the Group of Eight (G-8).

Earlier this month, Russia hosted the first standalone meeting of BRIC — involving Brazil, Russia, India and China, at the level of their Foreign Ministers. The meeting signalled “new quality cooperation” in the quadripartite format, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The BRIC and RIC (minus Brazil) meetings were held separately but concurrently in the city of Yekaterinburg, which straddles the geographic border between Europe and Asia in the Ural mountains. The choice of venue served to underscore Russia’s dual European and Asian identity and its multi-vector foreign policy as it shaped up under President Vladimir Putin.

Even though the Yekaterinburg meetings took place after Mr. Putin stepped down on May 7, they crowned his outstanding record in international diplomacy. Moscow arranged the first RIC Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New York during a United Nations General Assembly meeting in 2002, hosted the first standalone meeting in Vladivostok in 2005, and presided over the first summit of the three nations’ leaders, on the sidelines of a G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006.

The BRIC acronym for a group of four fastest growing emerging economies was coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, but it was Mr. Putin who cast the concept in flesh and blood and projected it as an alternative forum to G-8.

Even though Russia has been a G-8 member for more than 10 years, it has few reasons to be happy with its involvement in the forum. During Russia’s G-8 rotating presidency in 2006, Mr. Putin sought to launch the process of transforming the West’s rich men’s club into a wider forum of the world’s major players — an informal Security Council of sorts. The Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Education and Public Health of the five outreach nations — India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico — took part in the pre-summit meetings of G-8 for the first time. Mr. Putin also spoke in favour of enlarging G-8 and stressed the need to adopt a new political agenda for it — “to try and work out a new architecture of international relations.”

However, after the Russian presidency the G-8 dialogue with the outreach nations has been downgraded again. Japan, which will host this year’s G-8 summit in Hokkaido in July, has limited interaction with the outreach countries to a working breakfast. Mr. Lavrov said Tokyo had rebuffed Moscow’s efforts to secure a more substantive involvement of the outreach countries rather than give them a place at the dining table.

“It’s no secret, and you perfectly know it, that the main opposition to G-8 expansion comes from the U.S. and Japan,” the Russian Minister told his BRIC partners.

Meeting less than two months before the G-8 summit in Japan, the BRIC countries strongly rejected Western unilateralism and called for a new world order.

“Building a more democratic international system founded on the rule of law and multilateral diplomacy is an imperative of our time,” the Foreign Ministers of the four countries declared in a joint communiqué.

Even as they favoured “continued cooperation” of the outreach countries with G-8, the BRIC Ministers made it clear that this interaction must be fair and equal.

“Sustainable development of global economy in the long-term as well as finding solutions to the acute global problems of our time, such as poverty, hunger and diseases are only possible if due account is taken of the interests of all nations and within a just global economic system,” the BRIC communiqué said.

In Yekaterinburg, the BRIC Foreign Ministers undertook to turn the group into a powerful instrument to change the world. The four nations are home to 40 per cent of humanity, three times as many people as the G-8 countries have. Their combined GDP, measured in terms of purchasing power, is only half that of G-8, and it is expected to overtake that of G-8 by 2020.

“We are the world’s fastest growing economies, we have many common interests in the globalised world and share many views on how to build a more democratic, fair and stable world,” Russia’s Foreign Minister said.

“We are changing the way the world order is organised,” Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim summed up the Yekaterinburg deliberations.

The only disagreement that marred the first BRIC meeting was China’s refusal to commit itself to supporting the bids by India and Brazil for U.N. Security Council seats as proposed by Russia. However, this did not shake the four nations’ resolve to institutionalise BRIC as a political and economic forum. The Foreign Ministers agreed to meet again on the margins of the 63rd U.N. General Assembly in September 2008 and hold their next standalone meeting in India in 2009, once again along with an RIC conference.

It would be logical to expect closer interaction between the two groups and also with the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) Dialogue Forum, which met in South Africa a few days before the Yekaterinburg meetings. India, incidentally, is the only country among the members of RIC, BRIC and IPSA, which participates in all the three groups and is therefore uniquely positioned to provide additional linkages among them.

BRIC is being built on the foundation of successful trilateral collaboration in the RIC format, which rose to a distinctly higher plane in Yekaterinburg compared to the previous RIC meeting in Harbin in China.

In Yekaterinburg, the Foreign Ministers of Russia, India and China dropped in the Harbin communiqué a dubious reference to their “divergent interests” and “reaffirmed the commonality in the approaches of the three countries” to global and regional problems. They noted progress in starting practical cooperation in agriculture, health and medicine, disaster mitigation and relief, as well as business-to-business and academic contacts.

The RIC communiqué for the first time set forth the troika’s shared views on separate international issues. This became possible primarily because India turned around on Kosovo and Iran.

On Kosovo, India joined Russia and China in denouncing the Serbian enclave’s unilateral independence as being “contrary to the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244” and calling for a resumption of talks between Belgrade and Pristina. Earlier, India had only said it was “studying the evolving situation.”

On Iran, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said India supported Tehran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, provided it fulfilled its international obligations. He called for all outstanding issues of Iran’s nuclear programme to be resolved through the IAEA, and warned that “confrontation and destabilisation” in the region were adversely affecting the situation. The joint communiqué called for “a political and diplomatic settlement” of the Iran problem “through negotiations.”

But the most remarkable shift in India’s position came on the issue of joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which unites Russia, China and four Central Asian states. Less than a year ago India, which has observer status in this six-nation grouping, indicated it would like to steer clear of aligning with the SCO in military, strategic and political terms, even as it favoured cooperation with it on trade and economic issues. However, in Yekaterinburg Mr. Mukherjee for the first time went on record to say that India aspired to full membership in the group.

“Of course India would like to be a member in SCO,” he said, replying to a question at a press conference in Yekaterinburg. He did add a caveat, though: “Our full membership is not imminent in any way,” because “currently, as I understand, it has been decided not to give full membership to any country.”

Mr. Mukherjee thanked Russia and China for encouraging India to be a hands-on participant “in all activities of SCO.” The RIC communiqué said Russia and China “welcome India’s aspirations for playing an enhanced role as an Observer State within the SCO framework.”

It remains to be seen whether the Yekaterinburg meeting marked a policy shift in Delhi towards closer cooperation with Russia and China or was a tactical manoeuvre to persuade the UPA’s Left partners to lift their opposition to the India-U.S. nuclear deal.

For Russia under Mr. Putin, the pursuance of multilateral arrangements — RIC, BRIC and SCO — was a high priority item, and it remains so under his successor. The RIC and BRIC meetings in Yekaterinburg were the first major international forums Russia hosted after President Dmitry Medvedev assumed office on May 7. Last week, Mr. Medvedev paid his first foreign visits — to Kazakhstan and China. A political declaration Mr. Medvedev signed in Beijing with Chinese President Hu Jintao said Russia and China would jointly work to strengthen both BRIC and RIC.

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