The complicated relationship of the Brics with the West

The group of emerging countries is growing and increasingly becoming the voice of the Global South. Analysts believe the West should cooperate, not fight, with the Brics, but this is a setback the Brics will overcome: Argentina will not join the alliance in January. Nonetheless, from 2024 onwards the group will have five new countries: the three oil powers Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, as well as Egypt and Ethiopia.

The expansion consolidates BRICS as the voice of the so-called Global South and gives the group more weight in international politics. The expansion will take place during the bloc’s Russian presidency, and at the October summit, when President Vladimir Putin receives other leaders in the city of Kazan, the official photo will have double the number of participants.

The evolution that the Brics group of countries has undergone since the economist Jim O’Neill, of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, created the acronym in 2001 to indicate a group of rapidly growing emerging countries that would have a growing weight on the world economy.

In 2009 the four countries of the original Bric acronym – Brazil, Russia, India and China – met for the first time. In 2011, South Africa became the first African country to join the group, renamed Brics.

The evolution is even more impressive if we consider that, within the Brics, democracies such as India, Brazil and South Africa cooperate pragmatically with authoritarian regimes, such as China and Russia, regardless of ideological differences.

Even deadly clashes between the Indian and Chinese armies on the two countries’ disputed border in 2020 did not implode the BRICS.

Neither Western nor anti-Western

The new members also bring with them enormous potential for conflict: Egypt and Ethiopia disagree over Nile water; Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran are bitter enemies and have been fighting for hegemony in the Persian Gulf for decades.

What all these countries have in common, in the summary made by political scientist Johannes Plagemann of the German think tank Giga, is the desire for a world order less dominated by the West.

This does not imply rejection of the West. Since Brics members can only make decisions unanimously, neither China nor Russia and, in the future, not even Iran will be able to impose their positions. And, for most countries in the bloc, what India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said should be true: “India is neither Western nor anti-Western.”

Sign of independence

Joining the BRICS, as the German political scientist Günther Maihold explains, not only offers a new status in international politics, but also the opportunity to escape the schematized vision of a growing geostrategic competition that places China and Russia on one side and the West on the other. ‘other.

“With joining the BRICS it is clear that we do not want to join this project and instead want to adopt an independent position,” says Maihold, who teaches at the Free University of Berlin.

It is as a sign of this independence that the pompous welcome given to Putin, at the beginning of December, by the future BRICS members, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, must be interpreted, despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an international arrest warrant towards Putin. Criminal Court (ICC).

In Abu Dhabi, the hosts not only let the Kremlin leader’s entourage stroll along the avenues decorated with Russian flags, but fighter planes painted the colors of the Russian flag in the sky. Such hospitality almost made us forget that the United Arab Emirates are allies of the USA, which maintains three military bases in the country.

Advantages for Russia

The Brics presidency and the possibility of thematically leading the 2024 summit offer advantages to Russia, Plagemann analyses. The first is to be able to demonstrate, within Russia, that the country is not as isolated as the West would like. It is another to be able to circumvent the West and its economic sanctions and sell raw materials at good prices.

Already today the allies of the Western countries that are part of the BRICS practically ignore the sanctions against Russia. In part they are even intended as an alarm signal: the sanctions imposed on Russia and Iran, the freezing of liquidity reserves and the exclusion from the international Swift payments system have given strength to the search for alternatives to the financial system dominated by the United States.

A real alternative is difficult to build and takes time, but the United Arab Emirates, for example, allows India and China to leave aside the dollar and pay for their gas and oil acquisitions with their own currency.

And there is also the New Development Bank, also known as the Brics development bank, based in Shanghai, China, and chaired by former president Dilma Rousseff.

The accession of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could mean a capital increase for the bank. The institution allows member countries to obtain loans for national development projects or even in the case of public debt “without being tied to the typical conditions imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF),” explains Maihold.

Interests instead of values

Plagemann predicts an international rise of the Global South and the consequent loss of influence of the West. “This means that less importance will be given to ideological agreements, democracy promotion, human rights and so on and, instead, all involved will focus more on wanting to achieve their own interests.”

Maihold agrees. “What the German Foreign Minister says all over the world, that shared values ​​are the basis of cooperation, is not seen as a basis,” he says. “What the West tries to present as a rules-based order is an order about which the BRICS members say: ‘We didn’t make those rules. And there’s no reason for us to join or be subject to that ‘set of rules.'”

Plagemann says it is necessary to see BRICS as partners in areas where cooperation is possible. “If large international institutions, such as the United Nations, become less and less capable of acting, then groups and institutions must at least be able to have the potential to cooperate. There is no point in building an opposition,” she argues.

Maihold recently made a suggestion on how the West and the Brics can talk: through the G7 and Brics negotiators’ forums. These would not even have to be public and could concern sectors less affected by geopolitical competition, such as the environment and global health policy.

Source: Terra

Rose

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