The Brics bloc of developing nations likes to boast that it represents nearly half the world’s population, but its annual summit this weekend in Brazil highlighted a drawback of its fast expansion: the complexity of reaching agreement.
The bloc — comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa until 2023 — has more than doubled in size, as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and others swelled its ranks. Some new members have injected fresh divisions into the Brics, which was already struggling for coherence and split between democracies and autocracies.
Brics leaders focused their declaration on Sunday on long-standing demands for reforms of global governance, including fairer geographical representation on the UN security council, the IMF and the World Bank to reflect the increased weight of emerging markets in the global economy.
In a 31-page declaration covering everything from outer space to artificial intelligence and the return of cultural artefacts to countries of origin, the Brics expressed serious concern about unilateral trade tariffs and condemned military attacks on Iran, without mentioning the US by name.
Six of the group’s 11 heads of state skipped the Rio de Janeiro summit, including two of the most prominent: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The latter addressed the meeting via video link on Sunday, maintaining that liberal globalisation was “obsolete”.
While Putin was busy with the invasion of Ukraine, China gave no explanation for Xi’s absence, throwing a question mark over the event’s ability to make meaningful agreements. His number two, Premier Li Qiang, attended in his stead.
Heightened Middle East tensions meant that the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran did not come.
The Brics acronym was coined by Lord Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, in a 2001 paper about the power of the world’s emerging economies. Brazil, Russia, India and China later created a forum for co-operation, leading to a summit in 2009. South Africa joined in 2011.
Concerns over the bloc’s unwieldy new membership surfaced at a Brics foreign ministers meeting in April. Attendees failed to agree a statement, as tensions flared over who should hold a putative future African UN security council seat.
The first five Brics had previously edged towards suggesting it should go to South Africa. But new members Ethiopia and Egypt disliked that idea.
“You import tensions into Brics by adding these new members,” said Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor at the School of International Relations at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas think-tank in São Paulo.
Some Brics nations, meanwhile, are pursuing other foreign policy paths. India is bolstering defence and trade ties with western democracies. It has recently agreed trade pacts with the UK and Australia, and is in talks with the EU and the US, the latter in an attempt to fend off President Donald Trump’s threat of a 26 per cent tariff on Indian goods.
India and the US have also stepped up their ties on defence, technology and science in recent years as an anti-China bulwark.
“For India, Brics is the plan B when there are questions about the reliability of partners elsewhere,” said Constantino Xavier, a senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, a think-tank in New Delhi. “The Chinese and particularly the Russians are taking the Brics over, and India knows it has lost influence.”
Host nation Brazil steered the annual gathering towards less controversial areas. These included initiatives on infectious diseases affecting the poor, discussions on artificial intelligence and — with one eye on Brazil’s hosting of the annual UN climate summit in November — funding for green energy.
Opening the summit, host President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva bemoaned what he called the “unparalleled collapse of multilateralism” and said the world could not be indifferent to what he called the “genocide practised by Israel in Gaza . . . and the use of hunger as a weapon of war”.
Lula has previously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to the Holocaust, something which led Israel to declare him persona non grata.
Yet mindful of the need to avoid provoking an unpredictable US president, the long Brics statement avoided mentioning the United States anywhere by name.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the Rio summit but Xi’s absence hung over the meeting. In Beijing, Xi’s non-attendance has sparked speculation over whether his health is up to the long trip or whether he has other undisclosed commitments.
Filling the room in Rio instead were 10 new Brics “partner nations”, a category created last year in part to allay Indian and Brazilian concerns about accepting new members too quickly. They included Belarus, Cuba and Bolivia, as well as Asean nations: Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
For China, whose struggling economy is heavily dependent on exports for growth, the main goal was to win support for the rules-based multilateral trading system in the face of growing US protectionism.
But another Chinese scholar, who did not wish to be named discussing sensitive issues, pointed out that “rather than working together to beat America,” the Brics members had all in practice “accepted US unilateralism” and were engaged in one-to-one talks with Washington. In some cases, such as Vietnam, this was at China’s expense.
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