2023-08-26 10:30:02
Ewidening or deepening? The dilemma, well known to international organisations, has been troubling European Union strategists for a long time. Meeting in Johannesburg (South Africa) on August 22 and 24 for their fifteenth summit, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) resolutely chose enlargement by inviting six countries to join them by 2024.
This is unquestionably the easiest option. The BRICS are not an international organization, have no permanent structures and have so far created only one common institution, a development bank. The heterogeneity of their members, who have different political systems and share neither a single market nor the production of common standards, makes further study complicated. This no doubt explains the muting of ambitions on dedollarization in Johannesburg. Enlargement offers the BRICS the best opportunity to weigh on the world stage.
By integrating Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina, thus increasing from five to eleven members, the group will represent 46% of the population of the planet and a little more than a third of the world’s gross domestic product. It is enriched by Middle Eastern countries and oil producers, significantly strengthens its African pole and will include the two largest countries in Latin America. For a group that already relies on the two most populous Asian countries in the world, this is a considerable change of scale.
The issue of goals
The real question, of course, is that of the objectives sought by this enlargement. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has emphasized the potential economic benefits. It can indeed be assumed that economic and financial cooperation between the eleven countries will be increased, in particular thanks to the powerful investment capacities of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. It should also allow the BRICS to better collectively defend the concerns of the global South – if Russia is part of the global South – in the field of sustainable development and to have more influence in the reform of a global multilateral system still dominated by the Westerners.
The underlying political objectives in this coalition are, on the other hand, less realistic. The decision to enlarge is a victory for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was its most ardent supporter. If he intends to make the eleven-member BRICS an instrument of his rivalry with the United States, however, he will come up against India and Brazil, which are not in the same dynamic. Similarly, if his idea, supported by Vladimir Putin, is to create a group of countries capable of opposing the G7, or the network of alliances formed by Western countries around or alongside the United States, he will have to difficult to find the same coherence between political regimes as different as those of Iran, South Africa, Brazil or China.
The larger the number of members, the smaller the common denominator, warns Indian analyst Raja Mohan. And Johannesburg is not Bandung (Indonesia), where the non-aligned movement was born in 1955, the objective of which was to stay away from the two great rival blocs, the American bloc and the Soviet bloc, not to throw themselves into the competition between great powers. Stacking the BRICS is not enough to create a common home.
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