BRICS: An economic club or a G7 challenger? - BBC Newsnight

Summary:

• BRICS, a group of developing countries including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is expanding and gaining influence on the global stage.
• The organization faces challenges in balancing its economic goals with geopolitical considerations and maintaining relations with Western powers.
• China's role in BRICS raises questions about the organization's direction and potential anti-Western stance.
• BRICS seeks to share global power with other middle powers and redefine the global order.

A greeting fit for the future leaders of the world. Or at least those not wanted for arrest. President Putin was invited to Brics, but saved host South Africa from deciding whether to detain him or disobey the International Criminal Court. Sending instead his top emissary and joining by video link. Can this party be more than just a safe space for potential war criminals? To put Putin in handcuffs or not is a bind that gets to the heart of one of the challenges faced by the developing countries that would like to join Brics, pulled between disruptors and powerful new markets on the one hand and maintaining good relations with the West, the old order, to take over the world but not upset its masters.

Brazil, Russia, India, China. BRICS expanded with the accession of South Africa in 2010. It represents nearly half the world's population and over a quarter of its economy. More than 40 further countries have applied or expressed an interest in joining, according to South African officials, though the full list hasn't been released. China says it wants the body to grow to become a rival to the powerful G7. It was imagined first as an economic club. Can BRICS become a new centre of gravity in a multi-polar world of governments willing to defy an order written by the victors of 20th-century wars? To meet and make big pronouncements in their own club that doesn't involve the US or the West is hugely powerful and that's probably the main reason why so many other countries would like to join. India and Brazilian officials in particular and to some degree South African ones go out of the way to say no, this is not an anti-Western group. This is us as being part of the emerging world wanting to have a bigger say.

Worthy rivals to the old order but our internal divisions already holding them back. A platform that started off as a geo-economic platform is morphing into a geopolitical platform and I think many in India would be worried about it because a geopolitical platform would have a distinct frame which would be an anti-Western frame. And that for India is a no-go area. The idea of China actually brings in a lot of countries inside the tent which all look at the world through a single lens which is this anti-Western lens. Then I think that makes India an outsider into this very organization of which it had been part of from the very beginning. Do you think India has fair concerns about China leading BRICS towards an anti-Western Chinese-led direction? Well, naturally India would consider it in that way given the very uneasy relationship between the two countries and long-running border disputes between the two countries. But I think on the other hand what China really wants out of BRICS or the G7 or whatever other initiative is really to brand itself as being a leader of the so-called global souths.

But what might that look like in practice? In practice, less of a hegemony of the United States but more of sharing the global power supremacy alongside not just China and the United States but alongside other middle powers as well. We don't really have a very clear criterion which countries would consider as being BRICS and which countries are not. So I think until we reach that moment of deciding the criteria of candidacy, we can't really pass any judgment on what this organization is really for. Clearly, being anti-Western alone isn't enough to rally the developing world and now as a queue of would-be members forms, these masters of the future face an identity crisis to define not just the negative what they're against but what a new truly multi-polar world can be.

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