Brics to admit six new countries to bloc in 2024 in bid to expand influence
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Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were unanimously allowed into the grouping.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
BEIJING - The Brics bloc of emerging economies will admit six new members in 2024 in a bid to expand the group’s international influence and offer an alternative to Western-led global institutions.
Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were unanimously allowed into the grouping by the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – known as the Brics countries – on Thursday, marking its first expansion since South Africa joined in 2010.
The decision was announced by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the end of an annual summit
Calling the expansion “historic”, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the move showed the determination of Brics countries to cooperate with other developing countries.
“The Brics countries have all along been advocates and practitioners of independent foreign policies... We have never traded principles, yielded to external pressure or become vassals of other countries,” he added on Wednesday in a speech at the summit, the first to be held in person since 2019.
Analysts believe China’s drive for the expansion, which it has advocated for years, is to seek friends on the world stage amid an intensifying rivalry with the United States and to project itself as a leader of the Global South.
Professor Zhu Feng, who specialises in international relations at Nanjing University, said the Brics expansion is an attempt to form a bloc centred on developing countries.
“The Brics is not yet a tight-knit international institution, so it remains to be seen how much a bigger grouping can help grow China’s influence. But Brics does present an alternative to other global institutions such as the G-7,” he told The Straits Times.
The Group of Seven (G-7) wealthy industrialised nations, which include the US, meet annually to discuss global economic, financial and political problems, but have been criticised for excluding emerging powers.
Assistant Professor Amrita Jash from the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India believes Brics has succeeded in representing itself as a grouping of the Global South.
“In this regard, the expansion further testifies to this logic,” she said.
For China, Brics has become all the more crucial given how it is facing backlash from issues such as rising tensions with the US and the Russia-Ukraine war, added Prof Jash, who is from the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations.
In a post on X, the site previously known as Twitter, China’s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Hua Chunying on Thursday welcomed the new countries and said: “A stronger Brics will have a bigger voice.”
The current Brics members represent more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and contribute a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP). In 2022, their combined GDP exceeded that of the G-7, although all of them still trail the G-7 countries in terms of GDP per capita.
On Thursday, the five Brics leaders agreed to a joint declaration that called for greater representation of emerging markets and developing countries in multilateral forums and international organisations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which have long been criticised for under-representation of the Global South.
Dr Edward Chan, a postdoctoral fellow of China studies at Australian National University, believes the expansion is a response from China and Russia, as well as other developing countries, to dissatisfaction over the existing “unfair” international order, such as in free trade and access to resources.
“Diplomatically, China does not seek to form an alliance – this has been the policy since the founding of the PRC and is likely to remain unchanged. But China is indeed looking for more supporters in the international sphere and to increase its discourse power against the Western world (and represent the ‘non-Western’ world).”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – who was seen having brief exchanges with Mr Xi at the event – said the bloc’s expansion should be an example for reforms in other global institutions that were established in the 20th century.
“The expansion and modernisation of Brics is a message that all institutions in the world need to mould themselves according to changing times.”
