* Brazil min. says BRIC to discuss dollar, global institutions * BRIC concerned about dollar role as reserve currency * BRIC may take unilateral action on currency
By Gleb Bryanski
MOSCOW, May 28 (Reuters) - The leaders of the biggest emerging market economies will debate the dominance of the U.S. dollar and developed nations' role in global institutions at a summit next month, a Brazilian official said on Thursday.
Brazil, Russia, India and China are trying to strengthen their clout as the producers of 15 percent of global output by building up their BRIC grouping into a powerful world player.
BRIC officials are meeting in Moscow this week to set out the summit agenda, which will include a wide rethink of global institutions, Brazilian Strategic Affairs Minister Roberto Mangabeira Unger told Reuters.
"What is now being proposed is that we go beyond the debate about political and economic issues within the regime and develop the debate about the regime," Mangabeira Unger said.
He said officials would discuss the role of the U.S. dollar, strengthening the G20 group, reshaping of the world trade regime, reform of the United Nations and nuclear disarmament.
Mangabeira Unger said BRIC countries were deeply concerned about the dollar being the world's sole reserve currency but that they did not want a new global monetary authority with wide discretionary powers.
"We don't want a European style central bank made global. We don't want a global Brussels," he said, adding that the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights were an option as long as the issuer's powers were limited.
He said BRIC nations could undertake unilateral action to lessen their dependency on the dollar similar to a recent decision by Brazil and China to settle mutual trade in their currencies without using the dollar.
"We bilaterally in our trade with China have already begun to replace the dollar. We are not waiting for some kind of international agreement," Mangabeira Unger said, adding that unilateral initiatives on other issues were also possible.
BRIC SUMMIT
BRIC leaders will meet in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on June 16. They met for the first time as a group in July 2008 on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Japan. A meeting of BRIC finance ministers this year produced the group's first joint statement.
"On the whole what we want is a maximum of economic openness with a minimum of institutional imposition," he said, adding that it was premature to institutionalise the group.
"The five themes that I describe appeal to all the four countries. Although I acknowledge that we are still very far from having a common programme," Mangabeira Unger said.
"If the BRICs begin to develop a shared set of attitudes about these fundamental themes it would be impossible to ignore their position," he added. He said the BRIC nations' move to set out a common agenda should not be viewed with suspicion in the United States as an attempt to curb U.S. influence and change the global balance of power. "I hope that the U.S. will not see this ... in the spirit of the Congress of Vienna and will sympathise with this experimentalist impulse," he said in reference to the European peace agreement after Napoleonic wars in the 19th century.
He said the trade rules developed under the World Trade Organisation "have tended to impose in the name of free trade a commitment not to the market economy in general but to a particular variant of the market economy".
Such rules have prohibited under the name of subsidies "all the forms of strategic coordination between governments and firms that the countries now rich had used to become rich."
Mangabeira Unger said that the decision by the United States to go to war in Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council had led to the United Nations system becoming "like a balloon which is sometimes filled with air and sometimes empty".
"This is very dangerous for the whole world including the United States," he said, calling for BRIC initiatives that would increase the political price that superpowers would have to pay for straying outside the existing system. (Editing by Stephen Nisbet)