Making Brics count: Summit highlighted diminishing global relevance

The joint statement issued by the Brics summit, hosted by Brazil, may have attracted the ire of United States (US) President Donald Trump for its criticism of the bombing of Iran and tariff-based protectionism. But this unexpected attention from an erratic US President does not detract from doubts about the grouping’s relevance. The catchy acronym Bric was coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 to designate a group of prominent emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. This grouping first met in a formal summit in 2009; South Africa’s attendance at the second summit in 2010 rounded off the acronym to Brics. Since then, the group has evolved into a 11-country bloc with Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates admitted as full-member countries. It also has “partner countries”, a category created last year, having Belarus, Cuba, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Thailand, and Uganda. As a grouping of the Global South that complements the G20, Brics is said to represent almost half the world’s population, more than a third of global land area and over a quarter of global economic output. Yet, the question lingers: Is it cohesive or powerful enough to credibly represent the interests of the Global South against Western dominance?

 

For one, unlike the powerful G7 bloc, which comprises largely homogeneous polities in terms of their economies and political outlook, members of Brics are at widely differing stages of economic development and have divergent political ideologies and geopolitical priorities. Nothing signalled the diminishing importance of the grouping as a credible multilateral counter to Western hegemony more than the absence of the leader of the grouping’s largest and most consequential economy, China’s Xi Jinping (Premier Li Qiang attended in his place). Vladimir Putin’s inability to attend owing to an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine (he attended via a videoconference link) is another signal of diverging interests.

 

It is worth noting that just last year Mr Putin received a red-carpet welcome from ICC member-country Mongolia, which is heavily dependent on Russia and China for its energy security, to much Western condemnation but little lasting consequence. The lengthy, nearly 16,000-word Rio de Janeiro Declaration, which followed the summit, made all the right noises about “inclusive and sustainable” governance. The statement included all the politically correct terminology about “promoting a more just, equitable, agile, effective, efficient, responsive, representative, legitimate, democratic and accountable international and multilateral system in the spirit of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits”. The usual melange of digital cooperation, reforming multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund and so on, global health policies, open trading systems, artificial intelligence, and climate change found due mention. The statement also strongly condemned the Pahalgam terrorist attack.

 

However, the statement masks differences among members. For instance, although the grouping condemned the military strikes against Iran and described it as a violation of international law and the charter of the United Nations, some members called for a stronger statement on Israel’s war on Gaza and its attacks on Iran. The statement did not name the US either in its criticism of attacks on Iran or in its statement about the tariff wars and protectionism. India hosts the next Brics summit in 2026. Sustaining and increasing its relevance will be New Delhi’s major challenge.