Why Are Latin American Dictators Seeking Membership in BRICS+?
From October 22–24, 2024, BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—met in the Russian city of Kazan for their highly anticipated yearly summit.
While BRICS summits rarely produce groundbreaking final documents, a product of their internal diversity, this summit was notable for several developments. It saw the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their first summit. Second, dozens of countries have applied to join BRICS, including Latin America’s dictatorships. Yet, major questions persist about the future of the grouping and how it will present itself as an alternative to the status quo.
Q1: What is the BRICS grouping?
A1: Originally identified by Goldman Sachs’ economist Jim O’Neill as experiencing the most rapid growth until 2001, BRIC—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—formed as a group of emerging market economies seeking to represent those interests on the global stage. In 2009, Russian president Vladimir Putin hosted the first official BRIC summit, and China (PRC) invited South Africa to join a year later. Besides their projected growth, the five countries that comprised BRICS until this year have very little in common—each finding their own reason for attending BRICS summits. In fact, after numerous meetings, the bloc made little progress toward building a cohesive identity. Part of this rests in the starkly divided ways each country approaches BRICS. Brazil, India, and to a lesser extent South Africa, see the BRICS as a non-Western institution amplifying their claims to “nonalignment” or “multi-alignment” in international affairs. China and Russia, on the other hand, increasingly view the BRICS as an institution meant to signal the decline of the West and the rise of an alternative global order based around multipolarity, with greater gravitational pull toward Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow. Despite his war of aggression in Ukraine, Putin has touted the BRICS, complicating matters for other BRICS countries.
The BRICS remains primarily an economic bloc. The goal of the bloc is to counterbalance Western power as represented by the G7, mainly through an agglomeration of emerging economic powers. The main avenues for this have been two new multilateral institutions, the New Development Bank (NDB, known as the “BRICS Bank”) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which seeks to rival the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to lessen the dominance of the dollar.
Q2: Why is the BRICS group expanding?
A2: The BRICS has several fissures among its member countries, but a key divergence is over the question of expansion. While Russia and China favor expansion, Brazil, India, and South Africa resist the idea out of fear of diluting their influence with the other two. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine significantly altered the calculus for expansion, as many Western nations sought to distance themselves from Moscow. For Russia, expanding BRICS sends the message that Russia is by no means a “pariah,” with many countries rejecting sanctions on Russia and attempts to isolate it. For China, increasing the attraction of BRICS is a crown jewel in its long-term project of courting countries in the Global South in order to sow a more Beijing-centric global order.
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