by Siddharth Khatri
Recently, there has been a flurry of countries seeking membership of the group of five fast-growing economies of the world- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa- collectively called the BRICS. The grouping, conceptualised and formed at the sidelines of the 61st session of the General Assembly in September 2006, is headquartered in the BRICS Tower at Shanghai China.
BRICS started out as an informal grouping originally recognised as such for underscoring investment opportunities. However, they have progressively grouped into a more cohesive, formal, geopolitical entity with regular annual summits and regular coordination on multilateral policies. Today BRICS is widely considered to be the foremost rival to the intergovernmental forum, International Group of 7, or the G-7, having announced initiatives such as the New Development Bank, Contingent Reserve Arrangement, BRICS payment system, and BRICS basket reserve currency. Though not a formal alliance, and in spite of significant geopolitical friction between the two largest economies of the group, the common interest of member states in bolstering economic and trade mechanisms largely independent from the Western framework has garnered enough traction to lure more membership into it.
China has left no stone unturned in pushing forth the idea of a BRICS expansion. In fact, the 14th BRICS Summit held in Beijing in 2022 was the second time that China has vehemently expressed its interest in expanding the grouping, the first time being the Xiamen Summit of 2017. Since 2022, more than two dozen countries from Asia, Africa, and the Middle-East have shown keen interest in joining the grouping. China’s interest, however, has to be assessed geopolitically, and can under no circumstances be taken at face value.
There is a strong belief amongst the Chinese that BRICS is already in decline, lacks coherence in action, and hence greatly weakened. In their opinion, the economic distress in member countries has caused domestic political changes, which in turn has hampered the BRICS countries’ common identity, position, and enthusiasm to continue promoting the cooperation mechanism.
Many scholars in the academic world opine that the expansion debate reveals more about China’s foreign-policy interests than those of the BRICS group itself. Moreover, even a layperson would agree that group cohesion is easier to achieve when the group is smaller. That China seeks to improve coherence in action by paratrooping many of its African subjects (how the Chinese have managed to colonize Africa in the 21st Century through such sugar-coated talks is for everyone to see) flies in the face of sanity.
China’s main motive behind the expansion of BRICS is to promote its agenda and grand strategy in a ferociously vociferous manner through the BRICS mechanism and to try and gain strategic one-upmanship against the US, both diplomatically and monetarily. Thus an expanded BRICS will serve as a flexing ground for the most influential members to push through its own foreign policy objectives not necessarily in tune with the internationally accepted global world order. Thus, including more member nations would only entrench this sad reality, and hence expanding BRICS will do it no good, and will not, in any case, revive its mandate. An expansion of BRICS at this time will be rather suicidal for the grouping in letter and spirit.
About the Author:
Siddharth Khatri holds a Masters Degree in Politics with specialisation in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He loves to write on a variety of issues, ranging from societal issues to domestic and international policymaking.