JOHANNESBURG- Leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations have invited Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates to join, in a move aimed at growing the clout of a bloc that has pledged to champion the “Global South”.
Expansion could also pave the way for dozens of interested countries seeking admission to BRICS – currently Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – at a time when geopolitical polarization is spurring efforts by Beijing and Moscow to forge it into a viable counterweight to the West.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is hosting a summit of BRICS leaders, announced on Thursday that the new candidates would be admitted as members on Jan. 1, 2024.
The debate over enlargement has topped the agenda at the three-day summit taking place in Johannesburg. And while all BRICS members publicly expressed support for growing the bloc, there were divisions among the leaders over how much and how quickly.
Though home to about 40 percent of the world’s population and a quarter of global gross domestic product, BRICS members’ failure to settle on a coherent vision for the bloc has long left it punching below its weight as a global political and economic player.
More than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS, say South African officials, and 22 have formally asked to be admitted.
They represent a disparate pool of potential candidates motivated largely by a desire to level a global playing field many consider rigged against them and attracted by BRICS’ promise to rebalance the global order.
BRICS countries have economies vastly different in scale and governments with often divergent foreign policy goals, a complicating factor for a bloc whose consensus decision-making model gives each member a de facto veto.
Bloc heavyweight China has long called for an expansion of BRICS as a means of fostering a multipolar world order to challenge Western dominance.
“The world … has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation,” China’s President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday. “We, the BRICS countries, should always bear in mind our founding purpose of strengthening ourselves through unity.”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who is wanted under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Ukraine and is attending the summit remotely, is keen to show Western powers he still has friends.
Brazil and India, in contrast, have both been forging closer ties with the West.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday rejected the idea the bloc should seek to rival the US and Group of Seven wealthy economies.
The BRICS country official said that admission criteria India’s Modi proposed included requiring members not be the target of international sanctions, ruling out potential candidates Iran and Venezuela.
Modi was also pushing for a minimum per capital GDP requirement.
“These are the things Modi brought in today,” the official said. “So they are becoming a little bit of a spoiler.”
More than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS, say South African officials, and 22 have formally asked to be admitted.
They represent a disparate pool of potential candidates – from Iran to Argentina – motivated largely by a desire to level a global playing field many consider rigged against them and attracted by BRICS’ promise to rebalance the global order.
A number of prospective candidates are sending delegations to Johannesburg for meetings on Thursday – the last day of the summit – with the bloc’s leaders.
White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday that, due to the BRICS countries’ divergence of views on critical issues, he did not see the bloc turning into a geopolitical rival of the United States.
But moves to expand the bloc and push its New Development Bank as an alternative to established multilateral lenders are raising concern among some in the West.
Werner Hoyer, the head of European Investment Bank, warned Western governments on Wednesday that they were in danger of losing the confidence of the “Global South”, unless they urgently intensified their own support efforts for poorer countries.
