Skip to main content
Support
Article

Latin American Program in the News: Guest post, defending the IBSA model

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan published this article in the Financial Times’ blog Beyond BRICS. Kurtz-Phelan talked about the rising importance of the emerging countries at a global scale. This article is based on a longer article to be published in the Spring 2013 Americas Quarterly, titled Latin America Goes Global.

In 2003, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva found himself with his counterparts from India and South Africa on the sidelines of a G-8 Summit in France. They had been invited to the summit as observers but the invitation served mostly to underscore a common frustration. “What is the use of being invited for dessert at the banquet of the powerful?” as Lula later put it. “We do not want to participate only to eat the dessert; we want to eat the main course, dessert and then coffee.”

This coming June, the leaders of the three countries will meet in New Delhi to mark the 10th anniversary of the IBSA Dialogue Forum (for India, Brazil and South Africa), a group created to address that frustration years before the Brics had become anything more than a catchy acronym. In 10 years of existence, IBSA has spawned dozens of MOUs and working groups, launched joint development projects and diplomatic missions, made the expected grand proclamations about a new global order, and gotten its leaders and foreign ministers together at more or less regular intervals (no small accomplishment).

But the New Delhi summit is unlikely to generate the kind of effusive headlines that attended last month’s meeting of the Brics in Durban. If anything, most observers seem to expect that – given the overlapping membership and the economic and geopolitical weight brought by China and Russia – the Brics will eventually make IBSA just one more failed multinational body on the ash heap of history.

In order to read the complete article, please click here.

Related Programs

Latin America Program

The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action.  Read more

Latin America Program

The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action.  Read more