The IBSA Dialogue Forum had its institutional birth in 2003 at the ministerial meeting in Brasilia with the primary objective of promoting South-South co-operation. However, the first official summit took place in Brasilia in September 2006.
This Gondwana alliance gave IBSA a critical geostrategic dimension of connectivity among the three continents—Asia, Africa and America. Significantly, India found this rare high-profile platform to trumpet its affinity for other democracies.
The German Institute of Human and Area Studies, in its working paper, described the IBSA Dialogue Forum “both as a strategic alliance for the pursuit of common interests of developing countries in global institutions but also as a platform for trilateral and inter-regional South-South cooperation.”
Only a year earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his discussion with US President George Bush had endorsed a Global Democracy initiative and contributed $10 million to the UN Democracy Fund. The world took note of this new constellation. As Elizabeth Sidiropoulos of the South African Institute of International Affairs put it, IBSA emerged as the “G8 of the South”.
The essence of the grouping was what President Jacob Zuma called “back to basics”, a platform to demonstrate that democracy and development can work together for a better and dignified life.
Why is IBSA so invisible today? It is sad that IBSA allowed itself to be overshadowed and gobbled up by BRICS. If today IBSA finds itself “under the pile of BRICS”, it is only itself to blame. Now that BRICS has expanded, IBSA is breathing heavily.
After a gap of more than six years, the 8th IBSA Trilateral Ministerial Commission Meeting was held on October 17, 2017, in Durban. Only half a dozen IBSA Leadership Summits have been held so far. The 5th standalone IBSA Summit was held in Pretoria on 18 October 2011.
India has made efforts to keep the IBSA forum afloat. In September 2022, India hosted the 10th India-Brazil-South Africa Trilateral Ministerial Commission Meeting. As IBSA Chair, India hosted the 6th IBSA Summit on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in November 2022.
Last year, Minister of External Affairs Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and his Brazilian and South African counterparts, Mauro Vieira and Ronald Lamola, held a meeting on the sidelines of the 79th Session of the U N General Assembly on 26 September 2024 in New York.
The Ministers agreed that the fight against poverty and hunger remained a priority and a long-standing area for cooperation among IBSA countries. They agreed to leverage international cooperation to ensure food security and nutrition at the global level. The Ministers encouraged further progress on the IBSA Fund for the Alleviation of Poverty and Hunger which improves financial support for South-owned, South-led, demand-driven projects under national ownership across the developing world.
The IBSA Forum is now in its 20th year. It can’t claim to have crossed many pinnacles or climbed many summits. The emergence of BRICS, with the presence of Russia and China, overshadowed its growth. IBSA hasn’t lost its path, but hasn’t found the way either. In 2006, IBSA embarked upon a change of epoch, now it must embark upon an epoch of change.
Oliver Stuenkel, Professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo, has suggested that India, Brazil and South Africa should resurrect IBSA. When Stuenkel speaks, the world listens.
Stuenkel’s perspectives on the South, geopolitics and global order are refreshing and credible. In his recent article for the Foreign Policy journal, Stuenkel offers three reasons for reviving IBSA. First, he argues that BRICS has changed fundamentally over the past three years.
Second, given the geopolitical uncertainty caused by Trump’s unpredictable policies, IBSA countries need to deepen their ties.
Third, IBSA’s perspectives on how to address major challenges facing developing democracies are very relevant.
One could add another reason. IBSA members are good BRICS. The two have been conceptualised differently. One should not grow at the cost of the other. IBSA continues to bea strategic partnership, which BRICS is not. IBSA isessentially akey organisation of the Global South,which BRICS is not.
South-South cooperation was conceived and launched in the spirit of Bandung. The process that culminated in the birth of IBSA in June 2003 began in the 1990s, when South African Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin had envisioned a G7 for the South.
IBSA may have been born in Brasilia, but it was conceived in Evian, France, on the sidelines of the G8 Summit only a few months earlier. It was on that occasion that President Lula made a historic statement:
“What is the use of being invited for dessert at the banquet of the powerful? We don’t want to participate only to eat the dessert; we want to eat the main course, dessert and then coffee.”
Brazil was the driving force behind IBSA. One story has it that President Lula was pushing India to okay the formation of IBSA, but New Delhi was taking time. At one stage, Brazilians threatened to approach China if India didn’t make up its mind. That clinched the issue.
On 6 June 2003, Yashwant Sinha, Celso Amorim and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, foreign ministers of India, Brazil and South Africa, met in Brasilia, where the IBSA Dialogue forum was formalised through the adoption of the “Brasilia Declaration”.
BRICS is turning out to be an economic elephant in the room. But IBSA remains a feel-good factor in international politics. If BRICS is a marriage where jealousy is greater than love, the IBSA allianceof three democraciesstill has romance in it.
A vibrant IBSA is the need of the hour. The global system finds itself at a point where there is no referee, no one to blow the whistle and throw a red card at you when you abuse power. Two of the founding members of BRICS include one former superpower and the other is a superpower in the making. They have their own agendas.
Many analysts believe, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump are all using fierce nationalist rhetoric to justify their imperialist designs. International relations theorists will need to invent a phrase to characterise such behaviours.
Alexander Dugin, theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism, talks of civilisational states and advocates a vast new Russian empire. Today, Russia has gone back to thinking of itself as the empire, not the nation.
By leveraging BRICS policies, China is seeking to reduce dependence on the U.S. China accounts for 60% of the BRICS GDP. It is the primary trade partner for Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The rise of BRICS must be contextualised within the ongoing competition between the US and China. The rivalry between the world’s two largest economies is likely to intensify in the coming years, shaping the contemporary global order.
The time has come to not only revive but also expand IBSA. Brazil has invited Chile to this year’s BRICS meeting. Chile can also be invited to join IBSA. Indonesia from Asia and another from Africa must also be invited to join. IBSA, café-co-leite (coffee with milk) alliance, is the right platform to build alternative global narratives when Trump’s world has become a disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals, and brazen lies.
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