Geoffrey York
Africa Bureau Chief
Johannesburg
Published August 24, 2023

The BRICS bloc of countries has agreed to add six new members in a major expansion drive that strengthens the hand of China and Russia in their battle against the power of Western sanctions.

The six new countries – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates – will bolster the economic and political power of the BRICS group when they formally join in January. It is the first expansion of the bloc since 2010, when South Africa was added to the original four members: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The expansion was announced on Thursday morning at the end of the three-day BRICS summit in Johannesburg. It means that the bloc will represent 47 per cent of the world’s population and 36 per cent of the global economy, according to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

BRICS leaders have been careful to insist that the bloc is not an anti-Western organization. But its countries are united by a hostility to Western sanction measures, which have been recently targeted at Moscow since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

“We express concern about the use of unilateral coercive measures, which are incompatible with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and produce negative effects notably in the developing world,” the BRICS leaders said in their final declaration at the end of the summit.

The BRICS members are also united by a desire to reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar for global trade, although they are still considering how to do that. They agreed to ask their finance ministers and central bank governors to study the issue, which could eventually lead to a BRICS currency for internal trade.

The bloc, dominated economically by China, is emerging as a major rival to the Western-dominated Group of Seven advanced economies. While the G7 will continue to boast a larger share of global GDP, the new expanded BRICS bloc will significantly surpass the G7 when economies are measured on a purchasing power parity basis.

“This membership expansion is historic,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said after the announcement.

“It shows the determination of BRICS countries for unity and co-operation with the broader developing countries,” he said.

In future, BRICS could expand again. More than 20 countries had applied for membership before the latest summit, and as many as 40 had expressed some level of interest in joining. “We have consensus on the first phase of this expansion process and other phases will follow,” said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who hosted the summit.

The announcement was something of a surprise, since the summit was expected to decide only on the criteria for new members, rather than a formal decision to expand the bloc. China has been strongly pushing for expansion, but India and Brazil had reportedly been reluctant to support the scheme, partly because they feared a dilution of their influence in the group.

After extensive backroom talks, however, BRICS leaders came out in support of expansion in their public comments on Wednesday. But until Thursday morning, it was unclear whether specific new members would be added immediately.

The BRICS statement gave no hint of the reasons for choosing the six new members. Most of the new members are authoritarian states with regional ambitions to expand their influence in the Middle East or the Horn of Africa. One conspicuous absence from the new membership group is Indonesia, which had reportedly applied to join.

“BRICS is a diverse group of nations,” Mr. Ramaphosa said. “It is an equal partnership of countries that have differing views, but a shared vision for a better world.”

Despite its diversity, however, BRICS has given a platform to Mr. Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch verbal attacks on the West. In a speech to the BRICS summit on Wednesday, for example, Mr. Putin accused the West of “neo-colonialism” and claimed that the Ukraine war had been “unleashed by the West.”

In addition to opposing Western sanctions, BRICS is also providing another boost to Russia: it is seeking alternatives to the SWIFT international payments system. The West blocked several Russian banks from access to the SWIFT system last year, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – a move that made Russian trade more difficult. In their final declaration on Thursday, the BRICS leaders said they had agreed to co-operate on payments instruments to facilitate trade and investment among the BRICS countries and other developing countries.

“We are concerned that global financial and payments systems are increasingly being used as instruments of geopolitical contestation,” Mr. Ramaphosa said in a speech to the BRICS summit on Wednesday, in a clear reference to the Russian banks being cut off from the SWIFT system.

UN Secretary General António Guterres, in a speech to the BRICS summit on Thursday, did not directly address the BRICS expansion announcement, but voiced concern at the “fragmentation” of the world. He called for greater global co-operation to reform and strengthen multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN Security Council.

“We cannot afford a world with a divided global economy and financial system; with diverging strategies on technology including artificial intelligence; and with conflicting security frameworks,” Mr. Guterres said. “In a fracturing world with overwhelming crises, there is simply no alternative to co-operation.”