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developing markets can have their interests better represented on the international geopolitical stage.
Currently emerging markets complain that while they make up nearly half the world’s population and a larger part of its productive power, the countries are under represented in the infrastructure of geopolitics, in institutions like the IMF and World Bank and particularly on the UN Security Council where there are no permanent members from Africa or the Middle East.
China and Russia have been leading the process of creating a BRICS bloc as both nations are in conflict with the West and have been calling for a transition from the unipolar world led by the US to a multipolar world based on the principle of the equality of all countries.
Both Moscow and Beijing see the UN as the proper forum for overseeing this multipolar world, but they are also actively promoting other organisations such as the G20, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Eurasian Economic Union (EUU) and other multilateral organisations not dominated by the West.
However, the BRICS members are divided on the nature of what an expanded BRICS+ group should do. Russia and China see the BRICS+ as a political entity that will actively challenge groups like the G7, whereas India and South America see the group as a way to promote commercial ties and accelerate their economic development in cooperation with the West. Brazil remains the most sceptical when it comes to expanding the group. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says it would undermine BRICS authority.
After the expansion announcement, South Africa sought to play down fears of an aggressive BRICS+, especially in the light of the inclusion of Iran, emphasising the grouping was not hostile to the West.
Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s BRICS sherpa, told reporters the group needs to change with the times. “This is what BRICS is saying, let’s be more inclusive. BRICS is not anti-West,” he said.
At the summit, the five BRICS leaders thrashed out a middle group and emphasised that the group wants to bring “diversity” to the world’s power structure “amid increasing polarisation.” That polarisation existed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, as was seen in the trade war between the US under former president Donald Trump and Beijing, but the war in Ukraine has catalysed a fracture between the West and the Global South. China’s growing assertiveness in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea has also rubbed relations between East and West raw.
While Brazil, South Africa and India would like to stay in the middle ground, Russia and China are attempting to bind them into a group that can oppose
RUSSIA Country Report September 2023 www.intellinews.com