Leaders of the BRICS nations--Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa-- converged on Johannesburg on Tuesday for BRICS summit 2023 where they will weigh expanding the bloc as some members push to forge it into a counterweight to the West.
Reports say, heightened global tensions provoked by the Ukraine war and a growing rivalry between China and the United States have added urgency to a drive to strengthen the bloc, which has at times suffered from internal divisions and a lack of coherent vision.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa expressed support for an expansion of the BRICS group of emerging market powers. Chinese President Xi Jinping is the leading proponent of enlarging BRICS.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the two countries had "similar views" regarding expansion.
"We share your view President Xi that BRICS is a vitally important forum which plays an important role in the reform of global governance and in the promotion of multilateralism and cooperation throughout the world," he said.
As reported in several media, when asked about the BRICS expansion, External Affairs Minister
of India, S. Jaishankar said, “This is still a work in progress. We are approaching this with positive intent, with an open mind. There are many aspects to it. One part of it is to consolidate how the existing BRICS members are working with each other.
The second part of it is how the BRICS engages non-BRICS countries. And the third part is how we look at possible BRICS expansion-- what will be the appropriate format; for that is also something we need to work on.”
Brazil has been more forthright in opposition of BRICS expansion. A Brazilian official said that “an expansion could transform the bloc into something else.”
Therefore, India is not the only country that has chosen to view the expansion bid--supported by China--through the prism of altruism. Brazil too wants to ensure that the expansion is based on “rules’’.
“Possibly, in this meeting, we can already consensually decide which new countries can join BRICS,” President Lula has been quoted as saying while clarifying his country’s position.
“I am of the opinion that as many countries want to enter, if they are in compliance with the rules we are establishing, we will accept the countries’ entrance.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will keep away from the summit because of the threat of prosecution for ‘war crimes’ in Ukraine. But Putin’s shadow will loom over the meeting, as Chinese President Xi Jinping, a crucial Putin ally in his war against Ukraine, seeks to push for an expansion of the BRICS alliance to include a slate of other non-Western nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia.
It is said that Russia is supportive of the Chinese push as part of a project to create a more powerful geopolitical counterweight to the G-7 group of advanced economies that is dominated by the U.S.
Analysts are saying that the expansion debate is set to dominate the agenda at the summit, with host South Africa trying to walk a tightrope between the competing interests of China and Russia on one side, and India and Brazil on the other.
In this regards, Dr. Yaroslav Lissovolik, the Founder of BRICS, Analytics said that, attention is mostly focused on the expansion of the BRICS core and hardly any attention is accorded to the possible modalities of the BRICS format.
With respect to the core, the BRICS are likely to unveil the main criteria for the expansion of the core, which may include among other things the economic weight of the candidate countries in their respective regions. There may be several additions to the core, such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, in the coming years. But a sizeable expansion in the core has its limitations and more weight in the expansion process will likely be channeled into the BRICS+ track.
He further stated that, as regards the BRICS+ format, apart from the formation of a group of partner countries that have either applied or shown interest in cooperating with the block, there is a need to create a platform for regional integration arrangements led by the BRICS economies. Each BRICS core member is a key player in their respective regional trade blocks – India in BIMSTEC, Russia in the Eurasian Economic Union, South Africa in the African Union and the AfCFTA, Brazil in MERCOSUR, and China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
All these regional blocks have already featured in the outreach activities of BRICS, with a common platform for these arrangements being named BEAMS (from the first letters of the respective regional blocks). Such a platform would be capable of coordinating large-scale initiatives in the sphere of trade and investment.
The world is looking ahead to this BRICS Summit 2023 as a strategically expanded BRICS would be seismic for the world order, principally in economic terms.
