Six New Chairs

Jim O'Neill published Building Better Global Economic BRICs in November 2001 as Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No. 66. It was an asset-allocation note. Brazil, Russia, India and China were not a coalition and were not proposed as one; they were four large economies a fund manager might reasonably hold together, and the acronym existed so that a portfolio could be described in a single syllable to somebody on a phone.

Eight years later the four countries held a summit at Yekaterinburg and began using the name about themselves. South Africa was invited in 2010, adding a letter and an economy a fraction the size of any of the other four. This is a genuinely rare event in political history: a bond desk's shorthand acquiring a secretariat, a development bank, and a summit rotation. The category grew a body — which is a good joke and not an argument. Provenance tells you nothing about capacity, and the New Development Bank does not lend worse for having been named on a trading floor. The origin story is useful for exactly one thing: remembering how recently this was nobody's project.

On Thursday, Cyril Ramaphosa announced that six more countries had been invited to occupy chairs beginning January 1 — Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than forty states had expressed interest; twenty-two applied formally. The number was reported as the news, which is right, though not for the reason offered.

Consider who is now expected to sit at one table. Iran and Saudi Arabia, five months after Beijing brokered the restoration of relations they had severed in 2016. Egypt and Ethiopia, in open dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is a disagreement about the flow rate of the Nile and therefore not the sort of thing a communiqué resolves. And Argentina, whose primary eleven days ago gave the largest single share to a candidate who has campaigned explicitly on refusing this exact invitation.

None of this is a flaw in the design. It is the design.

A coalition organized around a shared negative can admit anyone who shares the negative. Membership requires agreement about what you are leaving and never about where you are going, which makes recruitment nearly frictionless and makes the recruiting number the only metric that will reliably move. So the number becomes the argument.

Shared negatives do sometimes become architecture, and the objection deserves meeting head-on rather than dodging. NATO was a shared negative and it is seventy-seven years old. The European Coal and Steel Community was a shared negative about Germany and war, and it turned into a currency. What separates those from the ones that decayed into a mailing list is not the quality of the fear. It is that joining cost something enforceable — Article 5 is an obligation that can be called against you, a customs union means surrendering a tariff schedule you used to control. A negative becomes architecture at the moment membership starts imposing a duty instead of conferring a seat. Nothing was imposed in Johannesburg. Six countries were offered chairs and asked for nothing.

We have the control group for that version. The Non-Aligned Movement convened at Belgrade in September 1961 with twenty-five states, organized around a refusal — no bloc, neither Washington nor Moscow. It grew to a hundred and twenty. India and Pakistan were both members. Iran and Iraq were both members throughout the eight years they spent at war with each other. By the Havana summit in 1979, Fidel Castro was arguing from the chair that the Soviet Union was the movement's natural ally, which is the exact inversion of the founding premise, delivered as the host's opening remarks. The movement never dissolved. It simply became a body that could not be predicted from its membership, which is a different thing than dying and in some ways a worse one.

The negative BRICS is organized around is real, and it is worth being precise about it. In 2022 roughly three hundred billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves were immobilized by the states that issue the currencies those reserves were held in. Every finance ministry on earth read that correctly, and what they read was not that the dollar has a political governor. It was that a reserve is not property. It is permission — a claim on a ledger somebody else keeps, revocable by the keeper. Every central bank on the planet learned in a single week that it had been a tenant the whole time.

Which is the strongest case against everything above, and it should be stated at full strength. An exodus from a ledger whose keeper has just demonstrated the eviction clause does not require the migrants to agree about anything. They only have to prefer a different keeper. And the real work is not communiqués — it is plumbing: settlement rails, bilateral swap lines, crude priced in yuan. Plumbing is exactly the sort of architecture that parties who agree about nothing can build together, because a pipe does not care whether Cairo and Addis ever settle the Nile.

The answer is that plumbing has a landlord too. CIPS is operated out of Shanghai under Chinese law. The swap lines are the People's Bank of China's, extended at its discretion and withdrawable the same way. The New Development Bank, founded at Fortaleza in 2014 and headquartered in Shanghai, was built to lend in local currencies and still raises most of its money in dollar markets, because that is where the money is and the market sets the price of leaving. Nothing under construction converts permission into property. It relocates the ledger. A tenant who changes buildings is still a tenant — with the difference that this one has twenty-two applicants and a single landlord.

The tell came on the first day, when Vladimir Putin addressed the summit by video link rather than in person, because an International Criminal Court warrant issued in March made South African soil a legal problem for him. It is worth being exact about what kept him out, because the exact version is worse than the vague one. It was not "the order." It was South Africa's own obligation under the Rome Statute — a commitment the host government signed voluntarily, agonized over publicly for months, and then honored. The bloc's most committed opponent of the prevailing arrangement could not enter the room convened to discuss leaving it, because the host is a member in good standing of a court that arrangement built. That is a duty imposed, enforceable, and paid. It is the only one visible in Johannesburg all week, and it runs the wrong way.

Six new chairs, then, and a communiqué everyone can sign. The question nobody put in Johannesburg is not what eleven governments are for — they may never need to be for anything. It is whose ledger they will be keeping their reserves in the next time one of them wants to leave, and what that keeper will say.