The BRICs and the Washington Consensus: An introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors and authors would like to thank the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University for funding and hosting the October 2010 workshop that started this special issue. We would like to thank especially Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Patrick Heller, Richard Snyder, Ling Chen, Jason Jackson, Vivek Chibber, Johana Bockmann, Michael Kennedy, Jose Marcos Nayme Novelli, Jose Itzigsohn, Marjo Koivisto and Oddny Helgadottir for their feedback on the project. Notes 1. Interestingly, the BRICs group is a lot less institutionalized and less coherent than IBSA, a platform for intergovernmental cooperation between India, Brazil and South Africa. While the BRICs is a more heterogenous group, the IBSA are all developing economies, with democratic regimes, net debtor positions, current account deficits, floating exchange rates and no permanent seats in the UN Security Council. Despite this, the IBSA have remained in the shadows of public and scholarly attention, while the BRICs have gained the limelight (Emerson, 2012). 2. Since 2011, the BRICs have had several annual summits and even announced they might establish a multilateral bank. So far, beyond a number of aspirational statements, attempts at further institutionalization have been delayed. 3. For Zaki Laïdi (2012 Laïdi, Zaki. 2012. BRICS: Sovereignty Power and Weakness. International Politics, 49(5): 614–632. September doi:10.1057/ip.2012.17Crossref , Google Scholar), for example, the BRICs do not seem to be willing to converge with the liberal internationalism of the G7 as they remain wedded to a realist view of national sovereignty and international institutions. Zooming into this issue, Hooijmaaijers and Keukeleire (2012 Hooijmaaijers, Bas and Keukeleire, Stephan. May 2012. Voting Cohesion of the BRICS Countries in the UN General Assembly: Analysis and Possible Implications for EU Foreign Policy. https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/346895 Google Scholar) have explored the voting cohesion of the BRICs in the UN General Assembly committees.