BRICS+ Summit Tests the Limits of a Multipolar World

The BRICS+ summit that took place this week in the Russian city of Kazan aimed to showcase the emergence of a more multipolar world. Attendees included the heads of state of member countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the recent additions Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and United Arab Emirates), along with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and representatives from 36 countries overall. In addition, 13 countries were announced as new “partner countries” to the BRICS+, including Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. While the group’s expansion tests its coherence, all of the BRICS+ members view it as an attractive vessel to shape a more inclusive alternative to a Western-dominated world.

Chinese attendees and media outlets were intent on projecting the latter message. Xi Jinping told his Russian counterpart, “The BRICS cooperation mechanism is the most important platform for solidarity and cooperation among emerging-market countries and developing countries in the world today.” One headline from the state-run tabloid Global Times read, “Expanding list shows BRICS’ unique appeal in ‘openness, inclusiveness, fairness and justice.’” Another article, written by a high-ranking member of the Egyptian parliament and published by state-media outlet China Daily, read, “BRICS [is] a beacon of hope for [the] Global South.” Behind the promises of Global South cooperation lie grievances against a Western world order that has disproportionately benefited the Global North. The Kazan Declaration, published at the end of the summit, criticized Western unilateral sanctions, called for a common cross-border payment system to bypass the dollar-dominated global financial system, and urged greater reforms to the International Monetary Fund. In some ways, as Keith Johnson wrote for Foreign Policy, “[The BRICS+] bloc is becoming less a club bracing for a post-American world and more a group seeking to accelerate it.” Mark John and Libby George at Reuters described how shared grievances against the West help fuel the BRICS+ alliance: 

“They (Western capitals) are not getting the importance of this thing,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow at the Bruegel economic think tank. “It’s all signalling that the West is losing power.”

[…] However this week’s talks underlined dissatisfaction with a system seen under-serving much of the world, with a collapse in capital transfers to developing economies over the past decade and emerging countries under-represented in IMF decision-making.

[…] “People see institutions which are not really representative or democratic – infrastructure established in 1945 or so after the world war, and nothing changes,” added [Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British businessman who runs a foundation that tracks governance in Africa].

[…] “You’re kind of geopolitically cushioning yourself against future friction with the West by coming up with this alternative structure [of a BRICS+ cross-border payment system],” said Hamish Kinnear, a senior analyst at global risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft, who described BRICS as “the signal and not the cause of the changing world order”. [Source]

However, the bloc is not exclusively oriented against the West. Many of its members consider themselves as non-West rather than anti-West. MERICS analyst Eva Seiwert wrote for The Diplomat that “while BRICS+ must be taken seriously, it would be wrong to interpret it as one pole of a two-sided geopolitical competition between China and Russia and the West”:

[R]eading such measures as an organization-wide proclamation of distinct anti-Western sentiment is a gross oversimplification. While arguably true for some – above all Russia, Iran, and to a lesser extent China – other member states do not wish to be seen as part of an anti-Western club. In fact, members such as India, Brazil, and the UAE continue to work closely with Western partners – expressed among others in India’s participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue alongside Australia, Japan, and the United States. These countries regularly push back on initiatives that are not in line with their own foreign policy agendas. 

For instance, earlier this month, heavily sanctioned Russia hosted a meeting of BRICS finance ministers at which Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov called for creating an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as a BRICS rating agency, a reinsurance company, and a commodities exchange. However, most BRICS finance ministers and central bank chiefs did not even bother attending and sent only junior officials instead. 

[…] Even when it comes to reducing the primacy of the dollar in international trade – something most BRICS member states generally favor – there are many differences on how this can be done. The expected rise of China’s renminbi as an alternative to the dollar does not sit well with co-member India and others. [Source]

The expansion of the bloc has allowed China to “legitimize its vision of a new world order,” wrote Harold Thibault in Le Monde, stating that “[t]hrough the BRICS and other international organizations it dominates, China has been strengthening its ties with ‘Global South’ countries, and offering an alternative to the US-dominated world order.” But more members means more possible conflicts of interest. India is part of the U.S.-led Quad, and Turkey is part of NATO. Brazil, India, and Turkey have adopted tariffs to protect against Chinese electric vehicles. And Egypt and Ethiopia have butted heads over water management along the Nile River. These tensions render BRICS+ “a testing ground for Chinese multipolarism,” as Giulia Sciorati argued in the China-Global South Project, whereby the extension of Chinese influence among developing countries depends on its ability to manage internal competition and different priorities among the BRICS+ member states.

Westerners highlighting the bloc’s divisions have not dampened the momentum behind BRICS+. As Martine Orange at France’s Mediapart emphasized, “Rehashing for the umpteenth time the struggle against ‘evil empires’ (China and Russia) cannot, according to [the West], serve as an argument against Global South countries’ legitimate demands for recognition. Similarly, at a time when they express ever more strongly the desire for independence and decolonization, it is not enough [for the West] to highlight China and Russia’s desire for imperialism—which many Global South countries are well aware of—in order to better hide its own.” Looking towards the future, Alexander Gabuev and Oliver Stuenkel depicted in Foreign Affairs a more realistic picture of how the “battle between anti-Western states and nonaligned ones will shape the future of BRICS” and the global order itself:

In the West, some critics of BRICS dismiss the outfit as a motley crew that deserves no serious attention. Others believe it is a direct threat to the global order. Both views lack nuance: the emergence of BRICS as a political grouping reflects genuine grievances over the inequities of the U.S.-led order and cannot simply be waved away. But owing to changes in Chinese and Russian grand strategy, the divergences within the group are also growing, and the recent expansion is likely to weaken its cohesiveness.

For now, China and Russia have the upper hand in the internal debate about shaping the future of BRICS. But that may not always be the case. It is true that power in the club is not distributed equally—China’s economy is larger than those of all the other founding members combined—but that does not mean that other members cannot resist the transformation of the grouping into a Beijing-led bloc copiloted by Moscow. Brazil and India have for years worked behind the scenes to tone down Russia’s more assertive language in summit declarations, and China, too, will find that it cannot ignore their moderating influence. For example, Brazil’s president explicitly rejects the framing of the BRICS as a counterpoint to the G-7 and often states that the group is “against no one.” Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the government of India, recently urged New Delhi to leave the grouping, as its expansion was tantamount, in his view, to a takeover by Beijing and its agenda. But Brazil or India still have significant leverage within the BRICS: their departure would severely weaken the entire outfit in a way that is not in China’s or Russia’s interest.

The grouping will have to manage these tensions and contradictions in the years ahead. The fissures within BRICS are likely to grow but are unlikely to lead to its breakup. To be sure, the group could face very real strains. The technology competition between China and the United States may lead to the erection of a digital iron curtain and the emergence of two separate and incompatible technological spheres, which would make fence-sitting more challenging. Finding a common denominator in the grouping will become more difficult, particularly on sensitive geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine. Those differences might make the bloc less influential on the international stage, even as its efforts to advance alternative currencies to the U.S. dollar gather strength. [Source]