On 1 January 2024 four emerging powers – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates – joined the BRICS, opening a new chapter for the ambitious grouping. It is now seen by some commentators as the epitome of the Global South, a geopolitical alliance to rival the G7 of the West.
Even though its ambition to unseat the G7 as the main coordinating body to influence global governance still seems out of reach, the debate about further enlargement, the addition of 13 “partner countries” (Monin 2024) and the ongoing drive to set up parallel institutions to the Western-led financial order (“BRICS pay”) signals renewed momentum for the BRICS after a period of economic stagnation in its member states (Rieck et al. 2016). Enlargement has also increased the relative power of Beijing within the grouping and sped up its tilt towards a more pronounced Chinese vision of global order (Tran 2024).
The Russian presidency has built on this momentum to launch new policy initiatives and portray President Putin as an influential and legitimate leader in the Global South, unfazed by Western sanctions and an international arrest warrant against him. Not without a dose of strategic symbolism, Vladimir Putin was able to welcome the Global South to Russia, at a time when he is waging a costly war of choice against a sovereign state at the European periphery. The non-interference principle of the BRICS meant that he did not have to fear criticism from his BRICS peers.
The BRICS in Brief
Brazil, Russia, India and China were the original four members of the BRICS, created by a foreign ministers meeting in New York at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2006. The annual summit of the BRICS heads of state was established with a Summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009 that set down the principles of non-interference, equality and mutual benefit. In the context of the Great Recession, Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh and Hu Jintao envisioned this geopolitical alliance to be an informal and flexible grouping to improve policy coordination between non-Western emerging powers to increase the voice of the Global South in the traditional fora of global governance. South Africa joined in December 2010, after lobbying by the Brazilian government that wanted more African representation and an inclusion of a democratic partner state it was already cooperating with in the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) forum (Stuenkel 2021). In its early phase and with all members in the G20, the BRICS grouping lent legitimacy to the G20 by coordinating BRICS policy and compliance for that forum. Political leadership matters in setting the tone and direction of the BRICS, as the internal struggle for the soul of the BRICS shows: non-Western does not have to mean anti-Western.
The BRICS members have never signed a free trade agreement, but they do engage in technical cooperation on things such as common standards or the newly-proposed common digital currency to de-dollarize and facilitate trade between them. The BRICS have established joint financial self-help institutions, chiefly the New Development Bank (2014) that has already seen its membership grow beyond the BRICS (Reuters 2024) and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (2015) to provide financial support during short-term balance-of-payments crises. The BRICS have become a “sandbox for experimentation with various non-USD instruments” (Gabuev/Stuenkel 2024a).
The Main Functions of the BRICS
Yet the main functions of the BRICS are not economic but geopolitical. It is also more than a mere symbolic alliance producing lofty rhetoric, as some commentators have argued (O’Neill 2024). Given China’s relative power, some BRICS members are more equal than others, it is really a “4+1” association (Rieck et al. 2016). So, three primary functions stand out:
The BRICS in Kazan
Six countries were invited to join the group at the Johannesburg Summit in August 2023, four of which participated in Kazan in October 2024 as full members: Argentina canceled its bid for membership after a change in government at the end of 2023 brought in libertarian Javier Milei and Saudi Arabia is still considering membership, at least until after the elections in the United States. Whether it joins the BRICS or not depends on the offer Washington will make to Riyadh to help bring about a postwar order in the Middle East – which will probably include American security guarantees and nuclear technology. The BRICS today is more representative of the Global South, with a strong participation of Africa and the Middle East. It also looks more anti-Western than before, with more activist members such as Iran and democracies now in the minority. At the Kazan Summit in October 2024 thirteen more countries were invited as “partner states”, Bolivia, Cuba and Algeria amongst them (Monin 2024). While this signals a certain attractiveness of the BRICS grouping, it will also increase the heterogeneity of the grouping and, in the short to medium term at least, reduce its overall cohesion, compliance and effectiveness (Yade 2024).
While China has been pushing for enlargement (Cottle 2024) for years, Brazil and India long argued against such an enlargement, fearing a more pronounced anti-Western discourse of the grouping as well as a watering down of Brasília’s and New Delhi’s exclusive relations with Beijing (Stuenkel 2024). The democracies in the BRICS want the grouping to be non-Western, not anti-Western. “BRICS is not against anyone”, as Brazilian president Lula da Silva has famously said. Until now, the lowest common denominator for the BRICS members was multipolarity and non-alignment with the West, not anti-Westernism. However, China under Xi Jinping, by far the most powerful member of the original four, is positioning the BRICS as the nucleus for an institutional alternative to the liberal international order led by the West. This points to a fundamental incompatibility between democratic and autocratic BRICS members about the direction of the grouping – a “battle for the BRICS” that Brazil, India and South Africa would have rather tried to keep under wraps and unresolved (Gabuev/Stuenkel 2024).
Conclusion: Not yet a Challenge to the West
From the very beginning the BRICS platform has been regime neutral, i.e. members could be democracies or autocracies, although regime type mattered when defining a vision for the BRICS grouping. Should it be a platform for non-alignment with the West or an alliance geared against the West? Until now, the friction at the core of the BRICS has not led to frustration, debate nor to division. But the gravitational pull of China will mean that more often than not it will see through its vision for the BRICS and its anti-Western policy agenda, risking pushback from Brazil, India and South Africa.
Are the BRICS becoming a challenge for the West? The G7 will not lose its function as the main coordinating body of Western global policy. It is driven by a decades-long process of geopolitical alignment and value-based policy coordination in an ever growing list of policy areas, from trade and finance, to health and climate change. The G7 has long outgrown its original mandate as a purely economic body. This is why – unlike the more heterogeneous G20 as well as the non-Western BRICS – the G7 should be seen not as a “marriage of convenience” but as a “community of values”. This also explains why its capacity to enforce compliance among its member states is much higher than that of the BRICS.
The Kazan Summit 2024 has demonstrated the continued ambition of the BRICS, but it has also shown the limits of policy implementation in such a heterogeneous grouping (Johnson 2024). Its attractiveness in the Global South is due to structural reasons, stemming from a deepening of multipolarity that opens up new opportunities for multi-alignment to emerging powers. Multi-alignment is in most cases not based on anti-Western sentiment, it is rather a rational choice in a multipolar world order to extract economic and political benefits from the competing poles. Equidistance can pay off for states that have pressing development needs. So, the BRICS have not yet become an anti-Western grouping – even though the latest round of enlargement seems to have strengthened its anti-Western elements as well as Chinese leadership within it.
Policy Recommendations: Accept, Assess and Invest
What does all this mean for the West, especially for Europe? Several policy options for Brussels and the member states’ capitals can be gleaned from the brief analysis above:
1. Accept: The BRICS grouping is an expression of multipolarity and it will remain impervious to Western council and criticism. Yet its influence and effectiveness should not be overestimated, the grouping will not become an alternative to the G7 anytime soon, if at all. Enlargement will only increase the diversity of its membership and will make policy coordination and alignment around a positive agenda more difficult. Europe should not feel threatened by the BRICS.
2. Assess: The BRICS have been experimenting with financial instruments beyond the US-dollar for a decade now. This is to be expected from a grouping of ambitious non-Western rising powers bent on decreasing dependence on American preeminence, but its effectiveness is still in question, as the US-dollar will remain the backbone of the global economy. Actively fighting these alternative instruments while weaponizing economic interdependence will only damage the reputation of the West more and conjure up more accusations of double-standards and hypocrisy.
3. Invest: The friction at the core of the BRICS signals to the West that its democratic members are still open for business with America and Europe. Equidistance and multi-alignment are rational responses to multipolarity but do not necessarily signal anti-Westernism. So, Europe should support these BRICS members by investing (economically and politically) in special relationships – to recognize the position of these rising states in the global system and also to lessen the impact of anti-Westernism within the BRICS grouping. At the same time, Europe should not expect these states to automatically become allies of the West. Their default position will remain equidistance and multi-alignment, a rational choice given their domestic development agenda. European states need to become attractive partners for these rising states again, but they should also invest in rejuvenation at home. Both the quality and problem-solving capacity of Europe’s liberal democracies and the dynamism of European economies need to improve to secure Europe’s voice in this debate about the future of global order – both within an effective G7 and the EU.
Bibliography
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