Will BRICS expansion set a new agenda for the Global South?

Although a setback, it's one the BRICS nations will be able to overcome: Argentina will not be joining the alliance of states in early January after all, after the new government recently canceled its plans in a statement posted on the X, formerly Twitter. However, BRICS will gain five other new member countries in 2024: Egypt and Ethiopia will join together with the energy heavyweights Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (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: It started in 2001 when Goldman Sachs bankers coined the acronym BRIC for an investment fund. In 2009, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met for the first time. Finally, in 2011, 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 the bloc.

Overcoming differences, finding common ground

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, said 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 toward the West, he said. In September, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's foreign minister, 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," said Maihold, who teaches at the Free University of Berlin.

Russia benefits from BRICS leadership

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 heading up 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," he said.

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 doesn't 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," explained Maihold.

Values vs. interests

Plagemann expects to see further changes as a result of the rise of the Global South and the West's relative loss of power. "In many areas of international politics, the world will become more transactional," he said. "There will be less emphasis on ideological agreement, promoting democracy, human rights, and so on, and that all parties involved will focus more on achieving their own core interests."

"What the German foreign minister is promoting worldwide, namely that the basis for cooperation is based on shared values, is not regarded as fundamental," stressed Maihold. "What the BRICS members would say about the rules-based order we are trying to sell is: 'We didn't make the rules. And there is no reason why we should subscribe to or comply with them.'"

As Julian Barnes-Dacey and Jeremy Shapiro argued recently in the US magazine Foreign Policy: "For the less powerful countries, the rules-based order was always little more than hypocrisy on a global scale."

Plagemann called for adopting a calm approach to BRICS, and advised viewing the alliance of states as a partner for cooperation where that makes sense.

"If major international institutions such as the United Nations are becoming less and less capable of acting, then the remaining groups, factions and institutions must at least be able to potentially cooperate. There is no point in creating an opposition," he said.

This article was originally written in German.