The BRICS+: rebels without a common cause

‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes’, writes Walt Whitman towards the end of his ‘Song of Myself’. Truer words could not be said about the BRICS+ forum. For a forum with so sticky a name, the group is a listless fête that has gone on for 20 years. This year’s annual summit, held in Delhi, has just come to a close.

The concept for the forum came from the pen of Jim O’Neill, a British economist. In 2001, he clubbed the emerging economies of ‘BRICs’ – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – as prospective drivers of global growth. The moniker stuck. In 2006, initial trilateral foreign-minister-level meetings between Russia, India and China formed the institutional basis of the new organisation. Three years later, the forum reached the summit level in Russia and soon welcomed South Africa.

By then, the Global Financial Crisis had struck the international economy, and non-Western states were looking for a stable economic anchor. The turmoil in global financial markets dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the economic order. In such turbulence, political elites in Brazil, India, and China secretly chafed at the reigning major powers, sulky that the G8, including Canada and Italy, were setting rules for others to follow. Moreover, for the emerging economies, invitations to G8 meetings as observers were seen as symbolic, and rather condescending, tokens. The President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, said the quiet part out loud when he remarked, ‘What is the use of being invited for dessert at the banquet of the powerful? We do not want to participate only to eat the dessert; we want to eat the main course, dessert and then coffee’.

So, in fits and starts, the BRICS forum grew. Apart from building a development bank with a modest currency-swap fund, initial outcomes remained sparse. Collective suspicion of the reigning major powers, rather than substantial common ground, propelled the forum forward. In 2023, the forum expanded as six new members were invited to join: Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While Buenos Aires under President Javier Milei backed out, Riyadh continued to participate without formally committing to membership.

In theory, the new BRICS+ forum looks formidable. It covers around 45 per cent of the global population, marshals about 35 per cent of global GDP, and accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s oil. And yet, theory is best left to textbooks.

In the last two decades, China’s continuing rise has fractured the BRICS. From considering itself a member of the ‘emerging economies’ peer group in 2006, Beijing now styles itself as a peer power to Washington. On a purchasing power parity basis, the Chinese economy is larger than all the other nine members combined. Given China’s colossal presence, the other BRICS members pale in comparison. Naturally, China’s expectations from the forum have also changed. With its internal party rhetoric about ‘great changes unseen in a century’, the Chinese leadership believes in inexorable Western decline and its own consolidation as the top gun.

Forums like BRICS+ allow Beijing to position itself as a ‘benevolent’ actor guiding the developing world. Projecting an image of stability and statesmanship against a backdrop of American unpredictability helps. Internationalising the renminbi, de-dollarisation, and influencing the rules of the road in emerging technologies are further attractions of the BRICS+ from Beijing’s perspective. The positive collective show in Delhi will strengthen Xi’s negotiating hand when he meets President Trump later this month.

As far as India is concerned, the BRICS+ forum offers much ‘potential’, but little substance. On substantial matters of security, politics, and economic resilience, Delhi is deeply bound to the United States and other like-minded partners, including the European Union, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Japan and Australia. The remaining bandwidth is filled with pious paeans about shared culture, reforms in the United Nations and multilateral economic institutions. From Delhi’s point of view, the presence of its long-term challenger, China, presents an obvious difficulty for the forum.

Yet, it is also precisely because of China that Delhi continues to dabble in the BRICS+. Sitting outside the group would merely concede it as a vehicle for Beijing to pursue its influence operations in the developing world. The Trump administration’s somewhat erratic approach to India over the last two years has certainly not helped. Facing the onslaught of Trump’s ‘Tax-Americana’, Indian industry has lobbied hard to cautiously open up economic engagement with China. BRICS+, in this case, provides New Delhi with an added multilateral economic hedge against an unpredictable Washington.

From a Western perspective, India’s involvement in the BRICS+ offers the best chance to steer the forum away from anti-Western ideas like a common BRICS+ currency, de-dollarisation and technological alignment. In recent months, irrespective of its energy dependence on Russia, New Delhi has actively cultivated European relationships it had previously neglected. India’s newfound trust in Germany and nimble-footed engagement with Poland stand out. Worth mentioning here is the role of Radosław Sikorski, the Polish Deputy Prime Minister, who has craftily pursued India, seeking to encourage the Indian government to take a favourable view of Ukraine.

Russia’s view of the BRICS+ has undergone significant changes since its inception. From focusing on international economic stabilisation earlier, Moscow now envisions the BRICS+ as an anti-Western coalition. In New Delhi this week, Russian President Putin remarked, ‘The unipolar system of international relations, which served the interests of a narrow group of countries, is gradually becoming a thing of the past’. Irrespective of the accuracy of the statement, we clearly get a sense of Moscow’s expectations from the group.

Apart from striving to create an alternative to the Western order, the group also provides Russia with a platform to engage partners like Iran and Egypt bilaterally – at a time when Western sanctions have restricted the global movement of the Russian political leadership. Moreover, an underappreciated aspect of all this is that the BRICS+ also gives Putin other options to manoeuvre with China. Complete dependence on Beijing would leave Moscow estranged from the West and yet dwarfed by China. Too tight an embrace would be suffocating. Yet BRICS+ allows Putin to balance Russia’s dependency on Beijing somewhat.

While the major players in the BRICS+ have differing expectations, the other members have squabbles of their own. Saudi Arabia and the UAE no longer see eye to eye. Meanwhile, the Gulf states are locked in a semi-open conflict with Iran, and Egypt and Ethiopia have long-standing tensions over the Nile. In some ways, the expansion in 2023 has only worsened the lack of cohesion within the group.

Having said all that, some spectators might ask: why is there such a scramble among non-Western powers to be a part of a group that is largely perfunctory, and whose guiding purpose is unclear? As of now, players like Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Nigeria are ‘partner’ countries that are eyeing membership. Even Turkey and Azerbaijan have reportedly applied. Rather than any grand explanation grounded in a profound strategic insight, the reason might be simple: it is a form of diplomatic sociability. Think of a private members’ club on the verge of closing its doors.

In short, the BRICS+ means different things to different members. In Whitman’s words, it contains multitudes. But the organisation’s very capacious nature also makes it inherently contradictory.