This month’s Brics Summit should indicate the club’s future direction, which could see the three original democracies distancing themselves.

Is Brics a broadly useful association to reduce much of the world’s dependence on the West? Or is it becoming an instrument to help Russia – and to an extent China – counter their own growing tensions with the West? Russia, in particular, has an incentive to overcome its isolation because of its invasion of Ukraine.

The answer to these questions may become clearer after the 2024 Summit, which Russia will chair from 22-24 October. The summit will be held in Kazan, south west Russia.

It is clear that Russia – and China – are trying to fashion Brics to help serve their geopolitical strategies, including by expanding its membership. They drove the admission of new members at last year’s summit in Johannesburg. The five original bloc leaders offered membership to Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Argentina’s newly elected populist anti-government President Javier Milei flatly declined membership. Saudi Arabia has simply not replied to the invitation – perhaps to avoid antagonising the United States. That leaves nine members in ‘Brics Plus’.

Iran’s inclusion was obviously a concern to the West, given Tehran’s active military support for Russia’s war against Ukraine. In Kazan, these nine leaders will discuss possible further expansion of the bloc.

At a preparatory meeting of foreign ministers in Nizhny Novgorod in June, the presence of countries like Belarus and Venezuela prompted further Western concerns about who might join next. As did recent announcements by Cuba and Azerbaijan – both aligned to Moscow – that they were applying for membership. Decisions about which countries should be admitted will influence whether or not Brics becomes more of a Russian support group.

Russia’s rhetoric as current Brics chair is perceptibly more aggressive than that of previous chairs. At the Nizhny Novgorod meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the bloc’s expansion was proof of the formation of a multipolar and more equitable international order. The US and its allies were trying to block this multipolarity, ‘weaponising economic tools and using sanctions pressure and financial blackmail to force sovereign states into choosing specific development models and trade partners,’ he said.

That is not the sort of directly confrontational position that Brazil and India, or even China and South Africa, would take.

Lavrov added that major efforts were underway to implement decisions of the 2023 summit, particularly in terms of improving the international monetary system and developing a platform for making bilateral trade payments in national currencies.

And at a New Development Bank (NDB) governors’ meeting in August, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov told Russian news agency TASS that one of the NDB’s main tasks was creating an independent international payment and settlement system. ‘We are discriminated against. The entire financial infrastructure is owned by Western countries. They use this infrastructure, earn from it and employ [it] as a geopolitical pressure lever.’

The NDB governors discussed the possibility of creating a new mechanism of financial payments which could, for instance, bypass the SWIFT payment system, which Russia has been barred from under Western sanctions. Brics officials told ISS Today that this also became necessary for the NDB itself, as it could not disburse loans to Russia because of the sanctions.

There may well be some truth in Chebeskov’s observation that the West owns the financial infrastructure and uses it to apply geopolitical pressure. And a broad range of countries, including Brazil, India and South Africa, would like to see a more equitable global financial system. This includes trade and other transactions being conducted in local currencies to avoid being impacted by the vagaries of the US economy by being forced to transact in the dollar.

But Brics members Brazil, India and South Africa believe this more equitable order can be attained by complementing rather than confronting the Western international economic order. Alexander Gabuev and Oliver Stuenkel recently made this argument in Foreign Affairs.

‘Decision-makers in Brasília and New Delhi are keen to take a nonaligned stance and find a middle ground between the West, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other,’ they said.

Arina Muresan, a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Pretoria, says: ‘One of the major questions about the Brics Summit is whether geopolitics takes precedence over the association’s efforts to rebalance the global economic order.’

She says new payment systems would genuinely benefit South Africa but would not be easy, as dominant systems are Western-oriented, and South Africa tentatively balances its interests regarding its relationships with both the East and West.

The other Brics members – particularly democratic ones – should ask themselves: are they participating in creating a new world order that is genuinely more equitable and beneficial to them? Or being asked to align with China and Russia to help pay the price of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine? South Africa, for example, has had to rush to maintain economic relations, including trade privileges, with America because of its perceived alignment with Moscow.

There are now signs that the three Brics democracies are trying to distance themselves from the others. Sources from those quarters say that because of concerns about the direction of the bloc’s expansion, they proposed a new category of ‘partners’ rather than full members, to dilute the impact of expansion.

South Africa’s International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola told ISS Today that this was the option his government favoured, though it was open to others. This proposal will be discussed in Kazan.

And significantly, India, Brazil and South Africa are making efforts to revive their own club, IBSA, which preceded Brics – in order to underscore the point that they are liberal democracies, diplomatic sources say. The timing is not coincidental.

Written by Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria