Politics is largely a series of public performances. The more public the performance, the more it is staged and theatrical. The just-concluded BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, was an international performance by its five original members and the new members of the grouping. It was a staged event and it was theatre, and its importance is precisely that. To say that it is a performance is not to be cynical. Performing politics is vital.
The American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, wrote a book on Indonesian society in which he described a “theatre state”. His point was not that we should think about a state — and its executive arm, the government — as if it merely acts theatrically in front of an audience (the public). The point instead is that the state is theatre: It performs its own power and legitimacy through spectacular public demonstrations and thereby signals what it wants and stands for.
The BRICS Summit, and summits all over the world, are theatre in this sense. Their performance is a demonstration of their power and legitimacy, and it is a signalling. Much has already been written and more will be written about the Kazan summit and what it achieved. Far more important than anything of substance in Kazan were three performances.
The first performance is the staging of BRICS. Every year, BRICS must demonstrate its continued existence and cohesion and, therefore, its raison d’etre and seriousness. The whole purpose of the meetings is to indicate that the grouping represents something consequential and is not some evanescent invention of a playful (British) Goldman Sachs executive.
This is why the joint communiques run into dozens of pages that deal with virtually every international problem you can think of: A lot of words and paragraphs signifying that the summit is not just five leaders having a good time in the marquee lights, but rather weighty interventions for the good of the world. In fact, no one expects anything material to happen in the wake of the summit. The importance of the communique is not what it contains; it is that everyone signed off on a joint document. It is its messaging of solidarity and seriousness that matters, not the actionable substance it promises.
The second performance, related to the first, is the staging aimed at one’s domestic audience — by far the most important audience. Here, the aim is to provide a moment and space in which the leader and his officials signal the majesty and competence of the state to their own public. When the BRICS leaders sit together at the same table, they offer mutual political recognition and affirm each other’s supremacy at home. The summit is also a show of competence — a demonstration that one’s leader and officials can stand toe-to-toe with the other leaders and officials. It is hard work, but diplomats love summits: They are the most public performances of their roles, which otherwise are cast in the shadows.
The third performance of the BRICS Summit is to stage its anti-Westernism and specifically anti-Americanism. Our playful Goldman Sachs impresario who coined the term BRICS did not intend to birth an anti-American grouping. But that is what BRICS is and has been since its inception. Every year, the five original member countries rehearse their anti-Americanism in full global view — there is no other stage on which they can do this as freely since there are really no dissenters here.
Behind all the boilerplate verbiage on multipolarity and multi-alignment is anti-Americanism (and anti-Westernism). China leads the anti-American play in BRICS, since in economic terms, it is two-thirds of the aggregate economic power of the group (in nominal GDP terms). The others join in, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Right now, it is Russia that is the most anti-West, but all the others harbour their own grievances against the US and its Western allies.
For Moscow, the Kazan summit was intended to tell the Americans that Russia is not isolated despite the sanctions and condemnations since February 2022. For Beijing, the summit conveyed that China is the alternative leader of the world, and it even has the grudging backing of India, a US strategic partner. For Delhi, the summit is a signal to the Americans that India has other potential partners, and Washington should not take it for granted — that the finger-wagging over human rights and democratic backsliding, the status of minorities in India, and the public accusations of assassination plots, among other things, will invite Indian payback.
BRICS’ stance against the US and its allies may be diplomatically polarising, but it is also the promise of checks and balances in the international system. For many smaller countries, a balance-of-power world is a more comfortable world even if it means a degree of polarisation between two or more camps. The positive externality, to use the language of economics, of big power rivalries is that it creates room for manoeuvre for smaller states.
To say that BRICS and its summitry is a performance is not to be cynical about it. Social life, including international social life, is thoroughly imbued with performances, more or less ritualised. Performance, therefore, is inescapable.
We can read the BRICS summits for their substance and come away disappointed at the absence of truly actionable initiatives. The point of BRICS is quite different. It is to signal the possibility of a different kind of international politics from the dominant. We may or may not agree with that politics, but BRICS has to be thought about in its tacit messaging and not in the literalness of its pronouncements.
The writer is Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies and Vice Dean Research and Development, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
