GLOBAL SOUTH VS GLOBAL NORTH

Undoubtedly, the recent BRICS summit held in Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, was the most important event of the global scale. The key outcome of the BRICS summit was probably the decision to admit six new members to the organisation on January 1, 2024: Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia.

Challenging the West?

Many leading media outlets in the West define the results of the BRICS summit, primarily its expected expansion, as a challenge to the West's global dominance posed by the countries of the so-called Global South amid the critical global geopolitical rivalry due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and the West in Ukraine. Previously, the main criterion for membership in the organisation was the nominee's position in the global economy. The current approach to BRICS expansion is based on the geographical principle, as well as common approaches in the vision of the future world order.

Judging by the candidate member states of the organisation, almost all of them are the leading economies in their respective regions. All except Ethiopia. Its candidacy was apparently lobbied for by the host of the summit, South Africa.  But even Ethiopia is one of the fastest growing economies on the continent, with an annual GDP growth rate of more than 6 per cent.

Four of the six BRICS newcomers are Middle Eastern states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt are among the top five economies in the Middle East. Iran is the most diversified of all regional economies. Overall, the combined nominal GDP of all new BRICS members will exceed $2.9 trillion by the end of 2022. Undoubtedly, this will have an unambiguous impact on the potential of the structure and its weight in international affairs.

The BRICS expansion is an obvious signal to the countries of the so-called Global North—the Global South is willing to act and shape the emerging new world order in line with its own agenda and independently defined interests. At the same time, it is important to understand that BRICS is not a club of like-minded countries. Neither China and India, nor Iran and Saudi Arabia are close in spirit. But they all want to play an independent role in international affairs and to defend their own positions, which is different from the ones sometimes imposed from the outside. The Western media dubbed the BRICS summit "a collective challenge to the West and its rules of the game". But the same approach can also be interpreted as "he who is not with us is against us".

Not against the West, but not for it either

Needless to say, for the majority of BRICS members the Western countries, including the US and the EU member states, are the main trade and economic partners, key markets for their products. But many of the new and old BRICS members have often expressed dissatisfaction with their unequal position in trade and economic contacts with Western partners. At the last Latin America summit, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte admitted that, "we, Europeans, have been arrogant." He also noted that Europe had demanded help from other countries in isolating Russia, but had not responded sufficiently to the problems and concerns of other states, putting its own interests above their.

Critics argue that the BRICS is not a full-fledged organisation and therefore cannot have a decisive influence on political and economic trends. But neither are the G7 or G20, yet their summits always raise intense interest throughout the world. Moreover, if BRICS is such an unnecessary organisation, why are a number of major economies in the developing world so eager to become members of the club?

Leading international tabloids have been following the BRICS summits quite closely, analysing their outcomes. In particular, according to a number of Western publications, the addition of new members is part of Beijing and Moscow's long-standing—and often unsuccessful—attempts to turn the largely symbolic group into a tool of restructuring international trade and financial structures to protect their interests from future sanctions by the US and its allies.

Remarkably, the Russian president did not attend the Johannesburg summit. The decision of the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Russian president was the main reason for his absence in South Africa. Pretoria is a party to the ICC statute and, in the case of Putin's arrival, should have obeyed the decision. So even the influential members of the BRICS find it difficult to avoid the realities, including those formed under the influence of the West.

Meanwhile, in their keynote addresses, the leaders of Russia and China have argued the system of alliances created with the participation of the US. There were arguments demonstrating attempts to create alternative systems and mechanisms regulating trade and economic relations between the participating countries.

Sanctions against Russia, as well as the threat of sanctions against China, urge the efforts to create alternative global financial bodies and supply chains resilient to sensitive strikes from the West.

But not all members of the alliance fully support the geopolitical position of China and Russia. Some provisions of the BRICS long-term development strategy, such as the radical reduction of dependence on the US dollar in trade or the introduction of a single currency, remain unrealistic.

India and Brazil: strangers and friends?

But that's the way it is today. In the long term, a number of states, in particular Russia and China, will be modelling a situation in which relations with the West may deteriorate. In this case, the future of relations with the rest of the world will depend on communications with the developing world. So the degree of institutionalisation and strengthening of sustainable ties may determine the degree of survival of these states.

This is an extreme scenario, however, and even China is keen to avoid it, calling for a fight against economic coercion and division leading to disruption of global supply chains.

Echoing Vladimir Putin at the summit, the Chinese leader slightly criticised the US for its "hegemonic" behaviour. "It cannot be that the one with the strongest hand or the loudest voice has the last word," President Xi said. Though such a stance was hardly shared by India and Brazil, both of which have put their relations with the US on the upswing trend. This once again shows how complex the current BRICS agenda is.

This can be illustrated by the successful landing of the Indian space module Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon. It is well known that in recent years India has been working closely with the US on its own space research programme. Suffice it to recall India's intention to join the US proposals on norms of behaviour in space and lunar exploration called the Artemis Accord.

Brazil is also working very closely with the West, especially after the election of President Lula da Silva. For example, both India and Brazil have been invited to participate in the last G7 summit. By the way, despite the unrealistic nature of this proposal, it was the Brazilian president who proposed the idea of holding a meeting between the BRICS member states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the developed countries within the Group of Seven (G7). He believes that after the expansion, the total GDP of the BRICS member states will grow to 35 per cent of the global GDP, while its population will be 46 per cent of the world's population. This should be an indicator of the credibility of this association in the international arena.

According to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as part of India's presidency in G20, his country is giving top priority to issues relevant to the countries of the Global South. In particular, New Delhi has offered to grant permanent G20 membership to the African Union at the summit slated for September 2023, and is anticipating the support of all BRICS member states also invited to the summit.

Either way, the summit sent a clear message to the US and its allies that the BRICS is not just pretending to try to shape the global economic and even political agenda. It is already shaping it.

Outcomes of the summit amid the war

In addition to inviting six new members, the final declaration of the summit, called Johannesburg II, also outlined the principles of expansion. The BRICS foreign ministers were instructed compile a list of possible partner countries to propose at the next summit.

A total of 23 countries have already submitted official applications to join BRICS. It is possible that at this rate of expansion, the organisation can become a full-fledged body in the future.

The current chairman of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Kazakh President K. J. Tokayev, also made a guest appearance at the summit. Remarkably, the SCO once represented an initiative group of participants convening for summits with varying degrees of frequency. Before its transformation into a full-fledged organisation in 2021, it was called the Shanghai Five. Today, the SCO includes three of the five leading BRICS members (China, Russia and India), as well as one new member, Iran. The juxtaposition of their agendas raises a serious practical interest. By the way, among the new candidates for BRICS membership there are also existing SCO members, such as Pakistan.

The next enlarged BRICS summit will be held in Kazan in 2024 under the Russian chairmanship. Only time can tell what it will be like amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, and what kind of results both the new and old participants will bring to the event.

In terms of the Ukrainian war, the summit was a litmus test for the countries of the Global South willing to create a world order where their voice would be fully heard amid the ongoing global confrontation. This does not mean that they want to join it on the side of Russia. Suffice it to recall that none of the current and new participants questioned the territorial integrity of Ukraine or openly supported Russia. On the last day of the summit, which coincided with Ukraine's independence day, the Burj al-Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, UAE, which is one of the new BRICS members, was painted in the colours of the Ukrainian flag as a sign of respect. 

However, it is more complicated than that. After all, given their uneasy relations with Western countries, many of the BRICS member states also do not share the West's global agenda. It is one of the reasons why most of them have recently proposed to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, which seems increasingly intractable.

Today Kiev is promoting its own peace plan. But it is possible that it will include the elements from the proposals already made by some of the BRICS countries, which have much more influence on Russia.