The BRICS 16th Annual Meeting in Kazan, Russia – 22-24 October 2024, is history.
Was the summit successful?
Depending on what one looks at and what is considered a success.
At the outset, it was a success, if only because it put issues and differences openly on the table to be disputed and eventually resolved.
The meeting itself did not produce much novelties. For example, many remarkable happenings, dispute resolutions and agreements happened at the margin of the summit or before. Most notably, what did not happen was another expansion of the BRICS alliance.
Since the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) joined the five original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, no new members have joined. However, two more nations that were invited in Johannesburg in 2023 to become members – Argentina and Saudi Arabia – have either declined (Argentina), or, so far, not acted on becoming a member (Saudi Arabia). In fact, Saudi’s acting ruler, crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, was among the notable absentees in Kazan.
Could it be western pressure – by Saudi’s western hydrocarbon clients and military supporters?
BRICS internal rifts or disagreements concern accession conditions for new members. Missing is also a common set of internal rules that would lend the alliance stability and credibility vis-à-vis the outside world.
The BRICS also lack a common Secretariat and common guiding principles on policies of trade, economic and military cooperation.
For a new member to be accepted, it needs the unanimous support of the existing members – currently nine.
For example, Venezuela is an eager candidate to join the Club, but was vetoed by Brazil, for reasons that have more to do with the two countries’ bilateral relationship than with the enlargement of BRICS.
Such bilateral conflicts do not help the group’s coherence and credibility, the so far most important Global South organization.
Already in September 2024, Turkey had expressed her interest in joining the BRICS and did, indeed, apply for membership. Turkey would be the first NATO member to join the BRICS; yet, so far, her accession has been stalled.
Although, Mark Rutte, the new NATO chief, when recently questioned, did not object at all, saying that Turkey was a sovereign country and could join the BRICS alliance on her own free will. He added that Turkey would nevertheless remain one of the most important NATO members.
Perhaps Turkey’s NATO membership was a thorn in the eyes of some Global South states. However, India, not a de jure NATO member, has close relations with NATO and the US. Yet, India is a founding member of the BRICS. Perhaps the perceptions have changed since the 2006 formation of the alliance.
Image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin, right, and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, left, during the official reception of the 16th BRICS Summit. (Alexey Nikolskiy / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)
Mr. Putin said that there are some 30 countries that wanted to join the BRICS, among them most notably Azerbaijan, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Venezuela, Palestine, DR Congo, Gabon, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Kuwait, Senegal, and Bolivia.
On the other hand, Kazakhstan, Russia’s largest neighbor in Central Asia, was invited by Russia to join the BRICS, but in a last-minute decision opted not to join. Russia was not only surprised, but not pleased at all for this abrupt decision, and promptly banned imports of a range of agricultural products from Kazakhstan in retaliation.
According to the Oil & Gas Journal (OGJ), Kazakhstan has proven crude oil reserves of 30 billion barrels, 2nd largest endowment in Eurasia after Russia, and the 12th largest in the world, just behind the United States. With 172 oil fields, Kazakhstan possesses 3% of global oil reserves, putting it among the world’s top dozen countries in terms of oil deposits.
Could it be that Kazakhstan reacted to some pressure, possibly blackmail, from western oil customers?
Perhaps one of the most important conflict resolutions at the margins of the meeting happened during a face-to-face dialogue between PM Narendra Modi of India and China’s President Xi Jinping, the first in five years.
Just a few months ago, tensions between New Delhi and Beijing were intense enough for Mr. Modi to decline participation in the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana, Kazakhstan. Yet, the two countries have now reached a deal over their longstanding border dispute.
The two most populous and, in terms of GDP, economically most powerful members of the BRICS coalition have not only an opportunity to rebuild their relations, but also to create a building block to help overcome BRICS disagreements.
If one mentions BRICS internal disagreements, it may be important to notice that external, meaning western interference in terms of threats and coercions to say the least, may have played an important role in the organization’s disarray that prevented – for now – a further expansion.
Improved relations between China and India could generate a momentum for BRICS to deliver on its ambitious agenda to develop, and ultimately implement, a vision for a new multi-polar global order.
It would lead into the direction of what Mr. Putin said in his opening address during the BRICS summit, that the BRICS alliance was not anti-west but merely a movement for independence, or potentially a shift from an anti-western to a non-western agenda.
Strangely but also remarkably, one of the west’s most feared “threats” of the BRICS summit was the summit’s talk and potentially resolution on the alliance’s dedollarization. It appears that none of that has happened.
Many of the BRICS countries are not interested in dedollarizing their economies, such as Brazil, India, the Emirates, and others. Let alone potential candidates like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Instead, Mr. Putin put forward the idea of a new BRICS lending platform for a collective, coercion-free economic advancement and investment agenda, for infrastructure, industrial as well as social services development. Mr. Putin noted that the IMF and the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Institutions created at the end of WWII, were heavily influenced by the west, especially the United States.
He did mention the BRICS bank, but not necessarily as a lending platform, as it is also fully dollarized, hence, not free from western coercive interferences.
However, China’s creation, the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), already involved with some of the BRICS, could become a more important development investment instrument in the future.
Image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin, right, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during their meeting on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia. (By Ekaterina Chesnokova / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)
In an open conversation with Mr. Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General who also attended the Kazan summit, Mr. Putin mentioned that it was time for the UN to “adapt to the realities of the 21st century” to be effective. This meant foremost reconfiguring the Security Council to give the emerging Global South, for which BRICS might be representative, a more prominent role.
Citing the UN Chief, saying
“You’ve mentioned we all should represent one big family,”
the Russian president responded,
“and that is how we live. Families, unfortunately, have disagreements, scandals, division of property. They even fight at times.”
Mr. Putin is right. Implicit in this statement is often outside, speak western, meddling to foster disagreements and rifts within groups of countries, who want to go their own way, like the BRICS.
The Kazan summit may have been a precursor for things to come. But western interference will not be able to stop the BRICS alliance and cooperation towards a new multi-polar world order.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin addresses the official reception of the 16th BRICS Summit. (By Alexey Nikolskiy / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)
