Leaders of the five original member countries of the rising BRICS bloc were joined this week by leaders of the five new members who joined the block at the start of this year in the city of Kazan, Russia. The occasion is the first summit of the enlarged block, now dubbed BRICS+, and Kazan holds the rotating presidency of the group. It hosted a business forum of member states days before the summit itself.

The forum was attended by around a thousand business leaders from the ten member states and hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin who emphasised the growing clout of the group. Putin highlighted the significant role of BRICS+ group in global economic growth, noting that the group’s total GDP exceeds 60 trillion dollars, surpassing that of the G7, and continues to grow. He pointed out that in 1992, the G7 accounted for 45.5 per cent of global GDP while the BRICS countries accounted for 16.7 per cent. By 2023, BRICS countries had grown to account for 37.4 per cent of global GDP while the G7 had fallen to 29.3 per cent. Putin added, “the gap is widening and will continue to grow; this is inevitable.”

Some leaders addressed the forum, including Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, who stressed the importance of more cooperation and investments among member countries. The Business Council of the group is presenting its report on the forum’s outcomes at the summit in Kazan.

The group established in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China added South Africa in 2010, forming the BRICS. Now it also formally includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. This week’s 16th summit of the group will be the first of BRICS+. Two main issues dominate the agenda of the summit: adding more members, as there are two dozen countries applying or interested in joining, and taking further steps on the road to establish an alternative payment system to the one dominated by the US dollar.

Ahead of the summit, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Secretary for Asia and the Pacific Eduardo Paes Saboia, told reporters he hopes to see an increased use of national currencies by BRICS member countries in global trade, and less use of the dollar. He added that the issue of reducing the reliance on the US dollar “has already been considered at meetings of finance ministers and heads of central banks (of BRICS) … I hope that those discussions will be reflected in a certain way in the declaration in Kazan. They will obviously continue during Brazil’s chairmanship [of BRICS in 2025]”.

The enlargement of the group might not be as easy as the quest for de-dollarisation, as some analysts note the different views among founding members. Russia and China want to expand BRICS+ to include many countries of the global south in opposition to Western hegemony. Others, like India, prefer to keep the group as a geo-economic and geopolitical cooperation group rather than an anti-G7 or a substitute G20.

The way many Western commentators perceive the BRICS is as a group that aims to confront the rich Western countries’ economic and political hegemony. Director of Global Order and Institutions Program at Carnegie Endowment Stewart Patrick, wrote a long paper last week regarding this challenge. He acknowledged that BRICS, more than the group of 77 and other “south” groupings, is a challenge to the unipolar world order. He noted that it manifests a world that is fragmenting into competing blocs, thanks to the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between East and West and the growing mutual alienation between North and South.

Especially after the war in Ukraine and Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon, many of the bloc’s countries are not in line with the American and Western positions, even if they don’t fully align with the Russian and Chinese positions either. Yet Beijing and Moscow have attempted to exploit resentment of the United States and its wealthy world allies to consolidate an anti-Western counterweight to the venerable G7. Patrick sees this as “a process that is likely to paralyse global cooperation within other multilateral venues. Of particular concern is the future of G20.” He concludes that “these risks are real, but they should be kept in perspective. No doubt, BRICS expansion evinces a growing global dissatisfaction and a determination to challenge the structural advantages that advanced market democracies continue to enjoy in a global order that was in many respects made by the West, for the West.”

Some other commentators proposed that the US should work on accommodating the aspirations of emerging regional powers to defuse attempts by Russia and China to start “a new cold war.” Others are optimistic that rivalries within an enlarged BRICS+ can be exploited by the West to keep the group off its ultimate goal of ending American and Western hegemony. India is considered an important element in that anticipated manipulation. The possible joining of Turkey, which is also a NATO member, could be another diluting factor to galvanising the anti-G7 attitude.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly