Russia-hosted BRICS summit shows determination for a new world order – but internal rifts will buy the west some time
For the west, the global east may be beyond redemption, but there is still a massive opportunity to (re-) engage with the global south.
The 16th BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan from October 22 to 24, 2024, was less notable for what happened at the meeting than for what happened before, on the margins, or not at all. Its Kazan declaration rehearses the well-established lowest common denominator among its members and summarises of long list of aspirations in a total of 134 paragraphs on 32 pages in the English translation.
BRICS enlargement stalled
Among the notable things that did not happen was another expansion of the organization. Since the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates at the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, which almost doubled the number of member countries from the original five—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—further enlargement has stalled.
Not only that, Argentina, which was also invited in 2023, declined to join. Saudi Arabia, another 2023 invitee, has not acted on the offer to become a member either, and its de-facto ruler, crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, was among the notable absentees in Kazan.
Kazakhstan, Russia’s largest neighbour in Central Asia, decided not to join shortly before the summit, drawing Russia’s ire which promptly banned imports of a range of agricultural products from Kazakhstan in retaliation.
While invitees have declined the opportunity to join BRICS, a long list of applicants have not been offered membership. According to a statement Russian president Vladimir Putin at a meeting of senior BRICS security officials on September 12, 2024, in St Petersburg, 34 countries have expressed an interest in closer relations with BRICS in some form.
This appears to be a substantial increase in interest in BRICS membership, compared to a year ago when the South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor listed 23 applicants ahead of the 2023 Johannesburg BRICS summit. The fact that since then only six invitations have been extended and four accepted indicates that formal enlargement of the organisation, at least for now, has been stymied by the inability of current members to forge consensus over the next round of expansion and the reluctance on the part of invitees to be associated with the organization.
Bilaterals on the margins
While the summit declaration may offer little of substance, there were a number of bilateral meetings before and in the margins of the gathering in Kazan that are more indicative of the direction of BRICS. Perhaps most importantly, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and Chinese president Xi Jinping held their first face-to-face discussions in five years.
This is a remarkable change from just a few months ago, when tensions between New Delhi and Beijing were intense enough for Modi to cancel his participation in the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on July 3-4 in Astana, Kazakhstan, and for Xi not to attend the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023. Yet, with a deal reached over their countries’ long-standing border dispute, the two most populous and, in terms of GDP, economically most powerful members of the BRICS have an opportunity to rebuild their fraught relations.
A warming of relations between China and India could generate more momentum for the BRICS to deliver on its ambitious agenda to develop, and ultimately implement, a vision for a new global order. Implicit in this would be a shift of leadership in BRICS from China and Russia to China and India, and with it, potentially, a change from an anti-western to a non-western agenda driving the development of BRICS in the future.
This is, of course, something that exercises Putin in particular, who acknowledged as much when he referred to the global south and global east in his opening remarks at the so-called restricted-format meeting of the BRICS summit and emphasised that it was important “to maintain balance and ensure that the effectiveness of BRICS mechanisms is not diminished”.
In his own bilateral meetings before and during the summit in Kazan, Putin drove home the point that, despite western efforts, Russia was far from isolated on the world stage. Beyond the relevant photo opportunities, one-to-one meetings with, respectively, Xi, Modi, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, and the president of the UAE Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan gave Putin the chance to push his own vision of BRICS as a counter-point to the US-led west.
This may be a view shared in the global east—Russia China and Iran, as well as non-BRICS members North Korea, Cuba and Venzuela—but many in the global south, including in particular India and Brazil, are unlikely to go all in with this agenda and will focus on benefiting from their BRICS membership as much as possible while maintaining close ties with the west.
Lacking a coherent agenda
With India the most significant player when it comes to balancing between east and west. Nato member Türkiye is the equivalent on the outside. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, travelled to Kazan and did not shy away from an hour-long one-to-one meeting with his “dear friend” Vladimir Putin. The relationship between Moscow and Ankara is fractious and complex across a wide range of crises from the South Caucasus, to Syria, Libya, and Sudan to name but a few flashpoints in which Turkey and Russia have, at times, opposing factions in local conflicts. Yet, on the perhaps most divisive issue of all, the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Turkey has consistently maintained opened channels of communication with Russia and remains the only Nato power to be able to do so.
The fact that there has been relatively little public pressure from official sources in the west on Erdogan to stop is likely a reflection of the fact that such communication channels are still valued in the west. This and the continued cooperation with India, for example in the Quad and through a political dialogue with Nato since 2019, also point to a hedging strategy by the west. Turkey and India may not see eye-to-eye with the west on all issues, but neither do they with the global east camp inside the BRICS, and especially not with Russia. If nothing else, this limits the ability of the BRICS to forge a coherent agenda, deepen integration and ultimately mount a credible challenge to the existing order.
Relying on India and Turkey to the west’s bidding in undermining the BRICS, however, is not a credible long-term strategy. While it is true that the BRICS have achieved little as an organization, the Kazan summit declaration, nonetheless, indicates that its key players continue to harbour aspirations for more. As the flailing expansion drive of the organisation indicates, there is also an internal battle in BRICS over its future direction.
This, in turn, creates space and time for the west to exercise more positive and constructive influence in the ongoing process of re-shaping of the international order: the global east may be beyond redemption, but there is still a massive opportunity to (re-) engage with the global south.
An earlier version of this commentary was published by The Conversation on October 25, 2024.
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