Image Credit: Phill Magakoe/AFP
The likes of Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have all been invited to join the cluster of top emerging economies effective January 1, 2024.
BRICS which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China was created in 2009. The bloc was later in 2010 extended to take in South Africa.
Now, it is says it is trying to grow a deeper strength and collaboration with developing countries who can in a more effective way place the needs of the every nation to deepen sustainable growth.
Before the commencement of its annual summit in South Africa this week, over 40 countries had place in their desire to join BRICS, out of which 23 applied formally to partake.
The bloc said in the Johannesburg II declaration it adopted on when the summit ended on Thursday.“We appreciate the considerable interest shown by countries of the Global South in membership of BRICS,” It also added that only six were selected after “BRICS countries reached consensus on the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures of the BRICS expansion process”.
It did not however provide much details on the criteria of selecting the six countries.
Danny Bradlow, a professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, according to Al Jazeera, said “It is hard to find commonalities among the six countries invited to join BRICS other than that they are each significant states in their region.”
With the involvement of Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE and Egypt, “you could argue it’s very Middle East centric”, according to Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South African think tank focusing on China and Africa.
“This has geo-economic, geostrategic and geopolitical implications,” Naidu contended, saying the latest additions will push some BRICS nations to think more about their Middle East policies, and for China and India to beef the existing policies.
“Besides Russia, all of [the core BRICS countries] are non-energy producing countries. They need to be able to make their economies function, but they don’t want to get caught in the secondary collateral damage of sanctions,” she explained.
Image Source: Aljazeera
World’s Top Oil Producers
- USA – G7
- Saudi Arabia – BRICS+
- Russia – BRICS+
- Canada – G7
- China – BRICS+
- UAE – BRICS+
- Iran – BRICS+
- Brazil – BRICS+
Naidu noted that “having Iran in the BRICS sends a massive powerful message to the G7, to the Global North, to Washington”.
“It says, ‘You can have a problem with them, we’ll keep them here.’ And it also says, ‘Your problems are not our problems.’”
She remarked that South Africa, which has important ties with the US, may have to deal with the “fallout” and navigate some of these tensions. But she also wondered whether the country could use the fact that it is in the bloc to its advantage.
“Yes, they don’t have the economic muscle to do what they want to do, but they have the strategic muscle to say ‘I have the BRICS behind me now, I have a wall of BRICS.’”
Jeenah said, “We must be careful about attributing more importance to this expansion development than it actually has … it certainly does not make BRICS into a Global South front. It’s just a club of 11 members.”
Source: Al Jazeera
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