By: Tom O’Connor
As the United States struggles to maintain influence across vast parts of the Global South, the expanding BRICS bloc led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is receiving more applications than ever before, signaling a growing shift in the international economic order.
The top diplomats of the five core BRICS nations began their latest high-level meeting Thursday in Cape Town, South Africa, a prelude to the 15th annual leaders' summit scheduled to take place in Durban, on the country's eastern coast, in August. Long dismissed by Western analysts as a mere multilateral marriage of convenience, this year's BRICS gatherings serve as an opportunity to discuss how far the group has come and where its future lies amid growing calls to challenge the Western-led global financial system and the U.S. dollar.
But Anil Sooklal, a veteran diplomat who serves as South Africa's ambassador-at-large to BRICS, asserts that "BRICS is not a group of countries that is in opposition to any particular grouping."
"We would like to cooperate with all of our global partners both in the Global North and South to collectively address some of the challenges that we are facing," Sooklal told Newsweek, "in terms of reforming the global governance architecture, to make it more inclusive, more equitable, and more just and fair, which many of us continue to feel that it's not."
And while Sooklal identified a number of factors driving this inequality, including climate change, the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing global technology gap, he argued that deficiencies in the existing order led by the wealthiest nations was at the heart of why more countries were choosing BRICS.
"We see an erosion of the global multilateral architecture," Sooklal said, "unilateral measures, unilateral sanctions becoming the norm of the day, an uneven global architecture, and countries wanting to have a greater say in terms of how the new evolving global order pans out."
"So, I think these are some of the areas that finds attraction with countries from the Global South who increasingly want to identify with the BRICS group," he added.
The term "BRIC" was coined in 2001 by then-Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill to describe the emerging global economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Five years later, the vision became reality when the foreign ministers of the four nations met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly and launched a series of high-level meetings that led to the first BRIC summit in 2009. The following year, South Africa joined the group.
"When BRICS came together as a formation, it basically sought to address some of the key challenges that we have in terms of the global geopolitical, geo-financial economic architecture," Sooklal said, "and to try and create a more inclusive global community that seeks to address the continued marginalization of countries of the Global South in a very changed global environment."
"I think the attractiveness of BRICS is that it articulates the challenges that countries from the Global South continue to face in a very unequal world," he added, "a world that vastly changed over the last almost 80 years since the founding of the U.N. system."
http://infobrics.org/post/38531/