Yves here. Our recent discussion of the Syrian collapse and what if anything it might signify for BRICS produced very insightful comments, one of which from reader hk we are hoisting below. While we are very sympathetic to the aims of BRICS, we remain doubtful as to whether BRICS will live up to these aspirations, although it does seem set to achieve an important near-term goal, that of setting up systems to facilitate bi-lateral currency transactions, allowing participating countries to bypass the dollar for trade.
Our concern has been and remains that there is a fundamental conflict: The multi-polarity impulse at its core is about strengthening national sovereignity. Yet if BRICS is to have any muscle, member nations will need to concede some sovereignity to suprrnational entities and/or rules. Recall, for instance, the long-standing issue of trade and resulting financial imbalances. Parties that participate in bi-lateral trade with their own currencies will often find one member of the pair accumulating more in the way of currency and financial assets than it deems worthwhile. Keynes’ answer was the bancor system, which included punishments for both sustained creditor (surplus) and deficit (debtor) nations. But accepting those economic strictures is a diminution of sovereignity.
We also pointed out that when Putin threw down the multipolarity gauntlet, at the Munich Security Conference, he called first and foremost for a new global security architecture. Again, in the BRICS context, that would mean surrendering some control over national armed forces in the name of the global regime.
Some commenters, notably Alexander Mercouris, who was kind enough to mention our post, questioned that these issues were really a concern, since the Global South has more population and controls more resources and manufacturing capacity, and thus would and could dominate without having to compromise on BRICS ideals. In other words, principles and loose coordination could still carry the day with a bigger and more rapidly growing bloc.
But reader hk pointed out that the so-called Collective West, even in its diminishing state, has far more ability to mobilize its many capabilities, and thus can and will continue to punch above its weight. By contrast, it is contrary to notions of what BRICS amounts to coordinate closely. particularly when there is likely to be consensus only on high level aims, meaning it will not be obvious how to operationalize them. From reader hk:
hk
I suppose the problem is that the West, fwiw, is committed to a proactive program of doing certain things, while the BRICS and its hopefuls are not. The former have an agenda–we may think they are illegal and/or immoral, wasteful, and all that, but they do want to take things, control things, and so forth, and they are directing their energy and their resources at achieving these goals. In pursuit of these goals, they are organized hierarchically–the clique in Washington (whoever they are exactly) formulates the goals, use their control over institutions to direct the resources, plan out what they are going to be doing, and issue the orders to their underlings who carry them out more or less faithfully (or get replaced for daring to stop them.) The analogue is unfortunate, but one thing that has been consistently pointed out as to why Germany and its coalition, despite the lack of resources, was able to punch above their collective weight was that they were goals driven in their purpose and were highly hierarchical in their organization: everything was directed from Berlin and there was little that Budapest, Sofia, or even Vienna (WW1) or Rome (WW2) could do about them, other than obeying. Even near the end of its power, those who dared to defy them too close to German power suffered consequences (the ouster of Horthy, the crushing of the Slovak uprising, and the assiassination of US-appointed mayor of Aachen, etc).BRICS is neither a “goal-driven” nor a hierarchical organization. In fact, it was created in opposition to them. They do not want want to be subordinated to someone’s design but they are not really agreed on what they want to do about it–other than they do not want to be subordinated. While this can and does potentially make it more attractive, it still means that it cannot easily function without exceptional diplomacy at its core: it has to formulate some set of goals/aims/guidelines (which, by necessity, will need to be loose and milquetoast, at least in their formulation) that all or most members can buy into and herd the members along into doing what they can and would to achieve them, knowing that they will all cheat and try to take advantage of others and, by the nature of the enterprise, you can’t punish them. This is a bit analogous to the politics of Allied powers during WW2 (and also WW1). We also know that both kinda failed (although the victories cloud how badly they failed.) Britain and France were very bad at cooperation during WW1. There was no cooperation worth speaking of between USSR and the Western powers during WW2 and the Western powers were able to get along because everyone depended on USA for, well, everything and the team of FDR, Marshall, and Eisenhower were very good at diplomacy. Maybe Putin, Lavrov, Wang Yi, etc are modern day incarnations of FDR, Marshal, and Eisenhower, but with a major problem: neither Russia nor China is quite the analogue of USA. China comes close, but not quite. I’d suggest that they are more like France and UK during WW1–friendly at “personal” level (like King Edward VII loved everything about France), aware that their medium to long term prosperity and, to a degree, even survival are tied to each other, but also regarding each other with justified suspicion (anyone who says otherwise is delusional.) even while cooperating closely.
What do all these say about prospects of BRICS? Not a whole lot, I guess, other than it could go anywhere, but any sort of success will require both keeping the goals modest and widely acceptable and exceptionally delicate diplomacy to keep everyone more or less happy, chiefly by not being asked to do too much. It’s not a “revolutionary” movement, but a coalition of “not doing.”
hk
To carry the analogy further, what was the situation that faced UK and France in Fall, 1939? I suppose the Germany-equivalent of today didn’t exactly conquer “Poland”: Syria (the Poland equivalent) has been gobbled up by Turkey (playing the role of USSR, I guess?) and Israel (kinda like Germany, I suppose–I wanted to be silly and call it Slovakia, and Netanyahu does sort of look like Josef Tiso if you squint a bit). The best that France and UK could do was to engage in what people called the “Phoney War” and ridiculous and magical schemes in which they could somehow beat Germany (and USSR, too) on the cheap, precisely becaue they couldn’t think of a way to beat Germany directly and they suspected that the other would abandon them to bear disproportionate cost (they weren’t too wrong about that–especially the French). One should hope that Putin and Xi are better than Chamberlain and Daladier, but I also tend to think the latter two got bad rap from the people who eagerly look to history to draw wrong lessons for today.
The post below was republished by InfoBRICS, even though it comes from the Mercator Institute, which was counter-sanctioned by China for spreading anti-China “lies” after the EU imposed sanctions on Chinese over alleged mistreatment of Muslim minorities.
Note that the article describes marked differences of view with BRICS as the posture it should take towards Western countries and entities. As we pointed out yesterday, the Kazan Declaration depicted BRICS as seeking to work with many important Western institutions, for instance, endorsing the notion that the IMF continue to serve as the center of the global financial safety net. And when you get to the very end, the author points out that this fracture line can be exploited by making some concessions to BRICS’ member concerns about Western domination of major international institutions, as well as cultivating relations with relations with Western-friendly nations on an individual basis.
By Eva Seiwert, an analyst and project coordinator at Mercator Institute for China Studies. Originally published at Mercator Institute for China Studies; cross posted from InfoBRICS
The first BRICS+ Summit after the group’s enlargement in January 2024 allowed Russian host Vladimir Putin to style himself as a non-isolated world leader, but the lack of substantial developments on core topics highlights the disparities among its nine member states’ ambitions for the organization, rather than their unity. While BRICS must be taken seriously as a growing economic organization comprising numerous Global South countries, it would be wrong to interpret it as one pole of a two-sided geopolitical competition between China and Russia and the West.
The summit in Kazan which took place from October 22-24 received much international attention, partly due to Putin’s presentation of it as one of the “largest-scale foreign policy events ever” in Russia and the admittedly impressive list of participants. Besides eight of the nine full member states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE) present (Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took part online due toa recent head injury), over 20 other countries were represented, many of them heads of state. Prominent guests included Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and United National Secretary-General António Guterres. As is common at multilateral summits, several leaders also met bilaterally on the sidelines of the summit, with Putin having 17 bilateral meetings on his agenda. Noteworthy was the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, which was the first between the two leaders in five years, facilitated by a breakthrough agreement on the Sino-Indian border dispute, one day before the summit began.
Non-Western or Anti-Western BRICS?
Many Western observers view BRICS as an increasingly anti-Western organization, noting that the summit was held in warmongering Russia, while the group welcomed Iran as a full member in January 2024 and its growth is taking place against the backdrop of China’s geopolitical contest with the US. It is true that the BRICS countries share an explicit ambition of diminishing Western dominance in global governance and strengthening the international influence of Global South countries. Establishing a “more just and democratic world order” has been a core interest emphasized by all members, old and new. BRICS as a group also criticizes Western countries’ use of sanctions and wants to increase the use of local currencies in member states’ financial transactions to decrease their reliance on the dollar.
But reading 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.
Summit declaration similarly calls for reforming the Bretton Woods institutions, rather than creating full-blown alternatives. Additionally, the member states agreed “to discuss and study the feasibility of establishment of an independent cross-border settlement and depositary infrastructure, BRICS Clear, an initiative to complement the existing financial market infrastructure, as well as BRICS independent reinsurance capacity, including BRICS (Re)Insurance Company, with participation on a voluntary basis” (emphasis added) – an arguably lukewarm response to Russia’s initiatives. Even when it comes to reducing the primacy of the dollar in international trade – something most member states generally favor – there are many differences on how this can be done, and the expected rise of China’s renminbi as an alternative to the dollar does not sit well with co-member India and others.
Taking Members’ Interests Seriously Without Overegging the Group’s Influence
BRICS have indeed seen a rise in applicant states and comprise impressive economic numbers. Its member countries account for 29 percent of the world’s GDP and 40 percent of crude oil production. But there is no need to fear the development of a major geopolitical anti-Western bloc. For this, their interests are far too diverse and include too many countries that value the organization only as a non-Western rather than anti-Western group.
Europe should focus on taking seriously the criticism that binds together all BRICS+ countries, ‘non-Western’ and ‘anti-Western’ alike, which includes Western states’ unfair dominance in core international institutions that no longer reflects contemporary international power realities. But let’s not overinterpret the supposed ‘threat’ of this loose platform. Considering BRICS’ appeal as an alternative to Western-led institutions, there is a clear need for European countries to reassess their strategies for engagement with countries in the Global South. Maintaining and nurturing relationships with individual BRICS countries – like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is currently doing on his visit to New Delhi for the 7th Germany-India Intergovernmental Consultations – is essential to keeping BRICS+ from ever becoming a truly anti-Western pole.