Brics Expansion: Setting a new agenda for the Global South

Although a setback, it is one that the BRICS nations will be able to overcome: Argentina will not be joining the alliance of states in early January after all — the new government canceled its plans in a statement posted on the X social media platform. However, BRICS will gain five other new member countries: Egypt and Ethiopia will join together with the energy heavyweights Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran. With this expansion, BRICS is consolidating its status as the voice of the Global South and bringing more weight to bear on international politics. The expansion is taking place with Russia serving as chair — and when Russian President Vladimir Putin rolls out the red carpet for the October summit in Kazan, Russia, there will be twice as many heads of state in the family portrait as before.

The BRICS trajectory has been remarkable so far, starting in 2001 when Goldman Sachs bankers coined the acronym BRIC for an investment fund, then in 2009 when the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met for the first time, and finally in 2011 when South Africa became the first African country to join. This trajectory is all the more astonishing because democracies such as Brazil, India, and South Africa have been working pragmatically across ideological lines with autocracies like China and Russia. Even deadly clashes between Indian and Chinese troops on the disputed border in 2020 did not break up BRICS.

The newcomers will also bring with them considerable risk of conflict: Egypt and Ethiopia are fighting over water from the Nile, and Saudi Arabia and Iran have been battling for supremacy in the Persian Gulf for decades. BRICS can only make decisions unanimously, so neither China nor Russia, and soon Iran, will be able to easily implement their own agendas. Yet as different as the BRICS nations and their interests are, Johannes Plagemann, a political scientist at the Hamburg think tank GIGA, says there is a basic consensus: “They want an international world order that is less dominated by the West” — a stance that is not to be equated with hostility towards the West. In September, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s Minister of External Affairs, made a distinction for his country that is likely to apply to the majority of BRICS states: “India is not Western, it is not anti-Western.”

BRICS membership alone does not confer greater status in international politics, explains political scientist Günther Maihold. But it does offer a way to avoid taking sides in the growing geostrategic competition between China and Russia and the West. “With BRICS membership, they are making it clear that they don’t want to be drawn into this binary logic and instead aim to secure their independence,” says Maihold, who teaches at the Free University of Berlin.

Vladimir Putin’s grand reception by future BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in early December – despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an international arrest warrant – is a clear sign of this independence. According to GIGA expert Plagemann, Russia’s chairship of BRICS and its role in hosting the BRICS summit in 2024 has several advantages. First, it would demonstrate domestically that Russia is by no means as isolated as the West would like it to be. “And, of course, the bottom line for Russia is to be able to bypass the West economically, to be able to effectively circumvent sanctions and sell its own raw materials profitably.”

Even the West’s allies in BRICS are scarcely complying with the Western sanctions against Russia. Some even regard the sanctions as a warning sign. The punitive measures against Russia and Iran, such as freezing foreign exchange reserves and excluding them from the Swift international payment system, have fueled efforts to look for alternatives to the US-dominated financial system – just to be safe. Building a real alternative is difficult and takes time. But the United Arab Emirates, for example, is already using local currencies instead of US dollars to pay for gas and oil deliveries to India and China.

Although BRICS does not even have its own administrative office, it does have its own financial institution: the New Development Bank. The bank would be able to raise capital once the cash-rich oil monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates join. This would be an alternative source of funding for national development projects and could also be a means of dealing with sovereign debt “that would not be tied to the kinds of conditions that are typical of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” explains Maihold.