Editorial | CARICOM and new BRICS

It is lazy, as too much of the early analysis has done, to frame the expansion of the BRICS group as an emerging East-West contest in which the new entrants are essentially lining up behind China and Russia and twisting the tails of the United States and its allies.

Such thinking can only be grounded in a supposition that the six countries – Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which will become full-fledged BRICS members in January 2024 – as well as the scores of others that are interested in joining, are either without agency or are incapable of determining what is in their best interest.

That can’t be the assumption of the countries of the Caribbean. In that regard, leaders of the regional economic group, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), should commission an urgent, and robust, assessment of the implications of the BRICS expansion, and other initiatives proposed by the group, for this region. CARICOM as a group should, perhaps, seek observer status within BRICS.

On the face of it, a larger, rejuvenated, and more assertive BRICS is positive for the Caribbean, potentially providing the region with greater space and leverage when advocating for programmes and policies that are important to its development. Among these are Barbados’ prime minister, Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative for the overhaul of the global financial system to make it more equitable for developing countries.

In that sense, the new BRICS has vestiges of the old Non-Aligned Movement but with greater economic and technological heft and with less of the ideological stresses that shaped Bandung nearly seven decades ago. The new BRICS, therefore, starts with greater confidence.

When it was formally launched in 2009, BRICS – originally Brazil, Russia, China, and later South Africa – was an informal alliance of rapidly emerging economies, seeking to cooperate in trade and development without the constraints of the existing global economic order.

ASPIRATIONS

Even if they mightn’t have shared the politics and/or ideology of some of its members, the aspirations of BRICS resonated with many developing countries that believed themselves shut out of international decision-making and with limited access to developmental capital in the context of the post-war global order.

Indeed, this perception of an unfairness that perpetuates underdevelopment and the need for transformative action to enhance access to financial resources underpins much of Ms Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative as well as a growing insistence by many that developed countries, which have been the main perpetrators and beneficiaries of the crisis, have an obligation to help developing nations finance their adaptation to global warming and climate change.

Unfortunately, China’s economic advance, and its growth as a technological competitor to the United States, is too often used as a distraction in these debates. Economic and other relations between China and developing countries are likely to be cast in terms of geopolitical competition between Beijing and Washington. China’s strategic partnership with Russia, which faces sanctions from the United States and the West, is another point of tension in US-Sino relations.

In that context, the expansion of BRICS may indeed strengthen, or appear to strengthen, China’s geopolitical hand and provide insulation for Russia against the efforts of the US and the West to isolate Moscow for its war in Ukraine. Similarly, Iran’s membership in the group may liberate it from some of the effects of America’s sanctions.

LARGER PRINCIPLES

The fact, however, is that BRICS isn’t founded solely on these geopolitical contestations. Indeed, the larger principles of having a strong platform from which to pursue global equity is far more profound. It is why India, which maintains strong relations with the United States and has been involved in border skirmishes in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir with China, could be a founding member of BRICS.

India’s recent rapid economic advance and growing technological prowess (it launched a lunar rover on the south pole of the moon last week) haven’t only elevated New Delhi’s confidence in the global sphere, but further undergirded BRICS.

Before the expansion announced last week, BRICS accounted for around 40 per cent of the world’s population and over 26 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP). With the new members, its share of the global economy will be just shy of 30 per cent, and it will have 46 per cent of the world’s population. Critically, too, its share of world oil production will more than double, to an estimated 43 per cent.

These figures suggest that if their common cause of global reform is sustained, the new BRICS can speak from an economic platform undreamt of by the old Non-Aligned movement. And it has the possibility to grow even stronger.

Moreover, as Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, said, the message of the expansion was that “all institutions in the world need to mould themselves according to changing times”.

That is part of the context in which BRICS is attempting to promote other global payment systems as alternatives to the existing arrangement that gives the United States great leverage imposing economic sanctions on other countries. BRICS is also promoting trading between its members in each other’s currencies.

Some of these proposals will unsettle US policymakers but cause no harm to the Caribbean.

In any event, finding areas of common ground with BRICS isn’t inconsistent with strong, neighbourly relations with the United States.