Irecently attended a seminar on ‘South Africa and Brazil in the Brics and Beyond’ jointly organised by the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) and Centro de Estudos e Pesquisa – Brics of Rio de Janeiro (which officially translates its name as the Brics Policy Centre). Brics is, of course, the acronym for the very loose Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa alignment. (The fifth Brics summit was held in Durban on March 26 and 27.)

I was yet again struck by a phenomenon that makes me uneasy – South African academics and analysts have become mesmerised by Brics to such an extent that they are devaluing the lower-key but very successful and more concrete trilateral India Brazil South Africa (Ibsa) alignment. In general, they seem to think that Brics has eclipsed Ibsa, rendering Ibsa superfluous, or requiring that Ibsa be relaunched, refocused or ‘rebooted’.

The Brazilians and Indians, however, do not share this view. Whenever I ask Brazilian or Indian officials which is the more important, Ibsa or Brics, they always reply “Ibsa”. They point out that Ibsa is far more coherent than Brics, being composed of three democracies with rule of law and similar socioeconomic concerns. The same can most definitely not be said for Brics.

Moreover, there are no political rivalries between the Ibsa countries, nor any sovereignty disputes. None of the three countries regards any of the others as potential threats. That is not the case with Brics.

For example, China claims most of the north-east Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, calling it South Tibet. (India claims a smaller chunk of territory, the Aksai Chin, in south-west Tibet, next to Kashmir; the Chinese seized the Indian-held portion of this territory in a brief war in 1962.) China recently stepped up its territorial claims against its neighbours, and last year started issuing new passports with a map (in the form of a watermark on the visa pages) showing Arunachal Pradesh (and the other territories that Beijing claims) as part of China.

Although India can and does cooperate with China or various issues, and the two countries do trade, Indian security anxieties about China are well known. Last year, New Delhi successfully tested an Agni V intermediate-range ballistic missile. This missile gives India, for the first time, the ability to hit Beijing. (By the way, China’s last territorial disputes with Russia were settled in a bilateral treaty signed in 2008.)

Indian media have reported that China has been trying to prevent, or at least substantially delay, Brazil and India (and Germany and Japan) from becoming permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Brazilian media have reported the same thing.

China has expressed “understanding” for Brazil’s and India’s desires to permanently join the UNSC, but has never expressed support for their candidatures.

Strikingly, whenever I attend a conference or seminar in South Africa on Brics – although, of course, there are many I don’t attend, so perhaps I should add that whenever I read a piece by a South African academic or analyst on Brics – these divisions and disputes are never mentioned or even indirectly alluded to. It is as if they don’t exist. But they do.

Ultimately, these disputes mean that Brics can never be a close, coherent alliance. It can only remain what it already is – a very loose alignment for very limited, although important, ends. Thus, Brics is not and cannot be a substitute for Ibsa, nor is it a duplicate of Ibsa.

As a Brazilian academic remarked to me, in conversation during the tea break, they are different alignments with different (although overlapping) memberships and different purposes and that it makes sense to have both of them and use both of them.

Ibsa, for example, has operating scientific, technological, defence and other cooperative programmes that Brics will not be able to match. It is difficult enough to develop such cooperation between three countries, using two languages and one alphabet – imagine what is involved with five countries, four languages, two alphabets and one ideogram system!

I am concerned that the strange obsession of so many local academics with appearance over reality, with Brics over Ibsa, will, in time, lead to a devaluation of Ibsa in the wider South African society. The end result would be to force Brazil and India to develop de facto bilateral cooperation, leaving South Africa out. Rather, the different benefits of both should be pointed out and active South African membership of both should be promoted. After all, the fact that the African Union exists doesn’t mean that the Southern African Development Community isn’t needed.