Difficult for BRICS to stay united, says expert

Free Malaysia Today

2 days ago

BRICS founding members India and China have clashed over a border dispute, while other members have similar issues. (EPA Images pic)
ASTANA : An expert on foreign policy believes that the BRICS group of emerging economies would find it difficult to stay united with tensions expected to surface as the US-China trade war escalates.
Michel Duclos, a special advisor and resident senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne in Paris, said that while the bloc's members shared common worldviews, cracks were likely to appear in the grouping.
Michel Duclos.
'BRICS will continue because they have a lot of common interests in their views about the world.
'But the organisation will be less and less cohesive, and some tensions will start appearing between some of the members of the club,' he told FMT during the Astana International Forum, an international platform for dialogue on climate change, geopolitics, as well as food and energy security.
When asked which BRICS members were likely to clash, Duclos declined to name them but doubled down on his view.
'With issues like the trade war or various geopolitical issues, it's difficult to see BRICS remaining as united as it used to be.'
The term BRICS was coined for the economic grouping formed in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa joined in 2010 and the bloc later expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia.
Malaysia became a BRICS partner country on Jan 1 and could become a full member.
India and China, among the founding members of BRICS, have seen tensions in the past over border disputes, including a deadly clash between their soldiers in the Himalayan frontier in 2020.
Iran and the UAE also have territorial disputes in the Persian Gulf, while Egypt and Ethiopia have locked horns over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project on the Nile River.
Thomas Greminger, executive director of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, said one of the reasons for the differences within BRICS was the way its own members had differing perspectives on the bloc and its purpose.
'There are those that use it clearly as an anti-Western platform, and that is definitely the case for China and Russia, but you have others that wouldn't see it like that at all,' he told FMT.
For instance, he said, India and Brazil saw the grouping more as a platform to establish a global economic order that was more in their favour than that of the US.
'It's partly political, but it's not an anti-Western agenda. It's an agenda of being more assertive, to be taken more seriously as middle powers or as rising powers.'
Nonetheless, Greminger believed the bloc would remain cohesive at least in the medium term, due to frustrations with a world order perceived to be constructed by the West.
He cited the failure of the United Nations to reform the Security Council as one reason several countries were turning to BRICS. 'I think it's basically the fruit of a growing frustration with the traditional multilateral institutions.'
Because of that, BRCIS is likely to remain relevant in the medium term unless other regional and global organisations reform themselves to become more inclusive, he said.