The city of Johannesburg will host the 15th meeting of heads of state from China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa, who will discuss the group’s future despite a notable decline in US power and the global advance of de-dollarization.
The BRICS leaders’ summit, the first to be held in person since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, is expected to be attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to participate in the BRICS summit by videoconference. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be present at the meeting in Johannesburg.
According to the Foreign Ministry of the organizing country, more than 60 leaders of Africa and the Global South were invited, as well as senior diplomatic officials such as the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Antonio Guterres, the Chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, and the President of the BRICS New Development Bank, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, among many others.
The meeting takes place at a time when countries such as Russia and China are promoting a new order based on multilateralism at a global level, far from the economic, military, and political hegemony dictated by Washington.
“The Johannesburg summit is significant and important for three purposes: first, to contribute to peace in the world; second, to design one of the economic bases of a new globalization; and third, to begin to build a different proposal of multilateralism, which really takes into account the countries not for their economic conditions but for their political identity,” former Colombian President Ernesto Samper (1994–1998) told Sputnik.
“The Non-Aligned Movement and other strategic alliances, such as the BRICS alliance, which are outside bipolarity or bipolarization, seem to me very important for world peace and to begin to build an alternative to the process in the face of the phenomenon of deglobalization that is taking place (at the global level),” the former South American president added.
“Due to the current polarization caused by the hostility of the US against countries such as China and Russia, which it perceives as enemies, it is more necessary than ever to bet on greater global cooperation,” Samper warned.
If we take into account that the last country to join was South Africa in 2010, this renewed interest in belonging to the trade bloc—which, in its current form, represents more than 31.5% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) and 42% of the world’s population—explains why the United States has tried to boycott the meeting in every possible way. planting numerous falsehoods in the Western press about alleged friction between member countries.
“The measures we’ve seen so far have been economic sanctions, so they could apply more and more effective sanctions to try to block Russia.” “They could explore the path of diplomatic pressure with South Africa or India,” Anbal Garca, an analyst at the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (Celag), told Sputnik.
Summit agenda
The summit is expected to discuss sensitive global issues such as geopolitics, security, finance, and economics.
Analysts agree that issues such as the addition of new members, the creation of a common currency for trade, and plans for the revitalized BRICS New Development Bank will undoubtedly be on the table.
“The introduction of a BRICS own currency—possibly digital—for intra-BRICS trade transactions is the most important strategic objective for its members,” says Alexei Gromov, Ph.D., head of the Energy Department of the Institute of Energy and Finance Foundation and an expert from the Russian National Research Committee on the trade bloc.
After all, the expert said, it is a bloc designed to promote the economic growth and prosperity of member countries, and the shortest way to achieve this is to increase trade and economic ties.
However, in an environment in which all business operations are conducted using Western financial infrastructure, Gromov explained, such ties are vulnerable to external influences, as the experience of Western sanctions against Russia has already shown.
Therefore, in his opinion, the BRICS should give priority to the development of countries independent of Western trade instruments, promoting trade and energy centers, an exchange or e-commerce platform, and a BRICS arbitration court to resolve trade disputes, in addition to the aforementioned currency for commercial transactions.
