Since the founding of the BRICS 15 years ago, many Western analysts have predicted its demise. Its members were heterogeneous, often disagreed on various issues and were spread across the world – a difficult “recipe”. But the BRICS resisted.
Even after the global geopolitical earthquake caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the worsening of tensions between China and the United States in recent years, interest in joining BRICS has grown, with many developing countries seeing the group as a vehicle useful for your “navigation”. in the coming years.
The group’s acronym comes from the first letters of its five founding members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – but has now expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia also participates in the group’s activities, but has not officially joined. Together, these ten countries represent 35.6% of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms (more than the G-7’s 30.3%) and 45% of the world’s population (the G-7 represents less than 10 %).
In the coming years, the BRICS are likely to expand further, as more than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining, including emerging powers such as Indonesia.
At the end of October, x-group will meet in the Russian city of Kazan for their annual summit. The meeting will be a moment of triumph for its host, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin will be able to assert that, despite Western efforts to isolate Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, his country is not only far from an international pariah, but is now a key member of a dynamic group that will shape the future of the international order. .
Unable – or unwilling – to join the “aristocratic” clubs of the United States and its partners, such as the G-7 or US-led military blocs, and increasingly frustrated by US-backed global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, many countries wish to expand their options and establish ties with non-American organizations. BRICS stands out as the most important, alternative and strongly influential solution.
But despite their charm, the group has to deal with an internal rupture. Some of its members, mainly China and Russia, want to position the group against the West and the world order shaped by the United States. The addition of Iran, a major rival of the United States, only increases the sense that the group is aligning itself on one side of a broader geopolitical battle.
The members, namely Brazil and India, do not share this quest. Instead, they want to use the BRICS to democratize and encourage reform of the existing order, helping to move the world from the fading unipolarity of the post-Cold War era to a genuine multipolarity in which countries can move between the US and from China. . This battle between anti-Western and non-aligned states will shape the future of the BRICS – with important consequences for the world order itself.
Russia’s ties with fellow BRICS members China and India have allowed the regime to resist the Western sanctions campaign. But US sanctions against Russia still affect countries that do not intend to punish the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine. U.S. pressure forced many Chinese banks, for example, to end transactions with their Russian counterparts this year, disrupting payment systems and increasing transaction costs for Russian importers. Moscow was concerned to discover that Washington’s toolbox affects not only payments in US dollars, but also payments in Chinese yuan. These punitive restrictions also apply to the BRICS-founded New Development Bank (NBD), which Russia had hoped to serve as a source of financing as Western sanctions cut off other avenues.
Despite the complications, the BRICS still play an important role in Russia’s current strategy.
Russia may be the furious leader of the effort to use the BRICS to create an alternative to the US-led world order, but China is the real driving force behind the group’s expansion. During the global financial crisis of 2008-2010, Beijing shared Moscow’s desire to make the BRICS more important.
In 2013, under Xi Jinping, Beijing conceived the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure investment program. At the same time, China helped launch regional financial institutions on which it would have strong influence: first the NDB appeared in 2014, and then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, created in 2016. The People’s Bank of China also pushed for the internationalization of China. the yuan, expanding the use of the Chinese currency for commercial settlements. Through the NDB and efforts to create a set of national reserve currencies, the BRICS are playing an important role in building multinational institutions that increase Chinese influence in the current world order.
In the West, some critics of the BRICS consider the group to be a heterogeneous group, unworthy of serious attention. Others believe it is an immediate threat to world order. Both opinions ignore the details: the emergence of the BRICS as a political group reflects discontent with the injustices of the US-led order and cannot be ignored. But due to changes in the grand strategy of China and Russia, divergences within the group are also growing, and the recent expansion could weaken its cohesion.
Countries in the global South want to escape dollar hegemony when they see Western countries, for example, freezing Russian central bank reserves in 2022 in response to the invasion of Ukraine, but receive no punishment for similar illegal military interventions in the Middle East and in Africa. Rich countries can also be better problem solvers for poorer countries, including by sharing technology and helping with the green transition.
And the West should make stronger efforts to democratize the world order, eliminating, for example, the anachronistic tradition that only Europeans lead the IMF and only US citizens lead the World Bank.
Editor: Katerina Atsi