Expanded BRICS: strength or weakness under Chinese leadership?

Matías Mongan, Gate Center contributor, journalist and doctoral student

The 16th BRICS Summit, from 22 to 24 October 2024 in Kazan, was attended by 24 heads of state, including the five countries that officially became part of the group on 1 January: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia. Argentina finally withdrew from the forum after Javier Milei’s government took office in 2023.

In the end, it was not decided to move forward with the incorporation of new full members, but it was decided to add a large group of 13 countries under the figure of ‘associated country’: two from Latin America (Bolivia and Cuba), three from Africa (Algeria, Nigeria, Uganda) and eight from Asia (Belarus, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam). This confirms the expansionary cycle of the BRICS, initiated last year and driven above all by China, which seeks to turn the group into a relevant multilateral forum, with a more political than economic profile, which will serve its interests in the framework of the geopolitical dispute with the United States, starting in January 2025 under Donald Trump’s second term in office.

The aim of the article is to take stock of the BRICS and analyse to what extent enlargement is an advantage and for whom, or whether it damages the already weak internal cohesion and restricts the international scope for action of Latin American countries under the orbit of the US, such as Argentina (which did not join in the end) and Brazil, which has traditionally used the BRICS as a tool to strengthen its national development model and diversify its trade and political alliances.

Taking stock of the BRIC(S): from financial crisis to Chinese leadership

The acronym BRIC was created from a study by Jim O’Neill (2001), then a senior executive at the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, in which he analysed the economic impact of emerging powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, comparing them with the G7. In 2009, the group held its first summit in Russia and a year later it was decided to incorporate South Africa as a full member. The group’s initial objective was to expand its capacity to influence the international financial system. From then on, BRICS decided to adopt a collaborative stance aimed at guaranteeing the functioning of the status quo and even to play a ‘stabilising’ role (Gratius 2008) during the 2008 international financial crisis.

One example was the BRICS’ decision – at the G-20 Summit held in Los Cabos, Mexico, on 18-19 June 2012 – to contribute 75 billion dollars to the International Monetary Fund (China 43 billion, Brazil, Russia and India 10 billion each, and South Africa 2 billion), which allowed for the adoption of new “counter-cyclical” economic measures to put the crisis in the Eurozone behind them (Gambina 2012).

Despite their growing economic power – by 2022 the group, according to the World Bank, was responsible for 26 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) – the BRICS have barely managed to expand their influence in international organisations, as evidenced by the IMF’s quota review. At its meeting on 15 December 2023, the Fund’s Board of Governors approved a 50 per cent increase in member countries’ quotas that will raise IMF funds to $960 billion (IMF, 2023). However, the issue of changes in the distribution of national quotas in favour of emerging and developing countries was left unresolved, a decision that was moved to June 2025 (Tran, 2024).

In this way, the IMF is once again ignoring one of the historical demands of the BRICS who, in the final declaration of their 15th Summit in Johannesburg in 2023, had stressed that ‘any changes in quota allocation should result in an increase in the share of emerging market and developing countries, while ensuring the role and representation of the poorest members, and should reflect the growing role of the BRICS countries in the global economy’ (Radio La Primerisima 2023).

Despite the socio-economic asymmetries between China and the rest of the member countries, representing 71 percent of BRICS GDP (García Fernández, 2023), since the first presidential summit in 2009 there has been a predisposition to act in a joint diplomatic manner and to prioritise the pursuit of ‘mutual interests’, especially on issues related to development. However, the Chinese government has always reserved the right to exercise a tacit right of veto on issues that affect its national interest.

Aware that the Western powers would not cede relevant decision-making spaces to it in international organisations, the Chinese government took advantage of the 2008 international financial crisis to put an end to the policy of ‘engagement’¹ (Nye, 2024) and begin to design its own power strategy in which the BRICS would play a leading role. At the same time as its foreign policy took on an increasingly revisionist slant, China continued to seek to expand its influence in the still existing international system of governance.

To generate more consensus, the Chinese government has placed development issues at the centre of its foreign policy and promoted a series of multilateral cooperation initiatives. The most recognised of these is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, which demonstrates its preference for ‘flexible diplomatic measures that eschew Western-style [fixed] alliances in favour of interest-based partnerships’ (Gratius and Mongan 2023), according to Xulio Ríos, emeritus advisor to the Observatory of Chinese Politics.

In the framework of the proactive and multi-level foreign policy promoted by China in recent years, the BRICS have shown a gradual process of institutionalisation (Stuenkel 2016) and sectoral diversification, including environmental, cultural and scientific issues, among others. This dynamic began to crystallise at the Fortaleza presidential summit (2014), where the foundations were laid for an incipient financial structure following the example of the World Bank and the IMF. The final declaration of that summit announced the creation of two institutions: ‘the New Development Bank (NDB) to facilitate transactions between members without political conditions, and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) with an institutional structure, endowed with a capitalisation of up to 100 billion dollars, raising the possibility of adding other countries to this new financial safety net’ (González del Miño, 2024: 68). The initial capital to found the NDB (50 billion dollars) was contributed equally by the five BRICS member countries in order to avoid criticism regarding the predominance of China, which nevertheless contributed 41% of the CRA’s funds (Optenhögel, 2024).

In short, this process of ‘soft institutionalisation’ (González del Miño, 2024) of the BRICS cannot be dissociated from China’s desire to turn the group into a ‘counterweight’ to Western-hegemonised institutions that contributes to consolidating a multipolar international order (Optenhögel 2024).

The pros and cons of an enlarged BRICS: the cases of Argentina and Brazil

The divergence of approaches in the BRICS is evident in many areas of cooperation. As their agenda diversified and Chinese prominence increased, the first critical voices began to appear regarding the group’s emerging profile, mainly from countries such as India and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and South Africa, which have historically acted as middle powers and have played a nexus role between North and South.

These countries have been critical of China’s enlargement of the BRICS, fearing that they will lose weight in the group and that enlargement will weaken already fragile internal cohesion. ‘While membership has contributed to raising the group’s international status, it also brings with it a difficult problem: admitting too many new members may contribute to diluting the internal dynamics of the BRICS, rendering it ineffective if it continues to function on the basis of consensus’ (Tran, 2023).

Stuenkel (2023) considers that the accession of the new full members in 2023 (Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Iran) contributes to increasing China’s leadership and accentuating the bloc’s ‘anti-Western’ discursive bias. Moreover, questions remain as to what kind of contribution these new members can make to the BRICS. At first glance, they strengthen its energy power and position it as an actor capable of imposing its designs on the international oil and gas market. But this will increase the international vulnerability of Europe, a net importer of both commodities, but not of the US, which in recent years has seen its reserves increase thanks to fracking.

Finally, enlargement has contributed to undermining the BRICS’ international power of attraction and to modifying the way the organisation is usually seen in the “Global South”, as analysed below, taking the example of internal debates in Latin American countries such as Argentina – which finally refused to join the bloc – and Brazil.

The Milei government rejected membership as ‘ill-timed at this stage’, as well as going against its objective of promoting automatic alignment with the US. This decision was initially criticised by a sector of academia (Zelicovich 2024, Frenkel 2024), which considered the stance to be based on ideological motives. Others argued that BRICS membership could bring more costs than benefits, given the growing dispute over spheres of influence between the US and China: ‘Joining the BRICS implies formalising unnecessary institutional commitments, which may entail contradictions that are difficult to overcome in a context of greater rigidity in alliance schemes’ (Actis, 2023:23).

Within this framework, the need for peripheral countries such as Argentina to promote a model of international insertion equidistant from both powers, also known as a ‘hedging strategy’, is highlighted. According to this scheme, developed by Yan Xuetong (2020) and which has similarities with the model of ‘autonomy in dependence’ developed by Gerson Moura (1980), semi-peripheral countries should try to avoid issues that do not benefit them economically, and try to focus the bilateral agenda on a development approach that is more in line with their interests.

For the hedging strategy to work, Xuetong warns, decision-makers must have decision-making autonomy and avoid openly committing themselves to one of the opposing sides, in this case China and the US. Thus, Argentina’s accession to the BRICS, which is under the orbit of the Chinese leadership with a growing ‘anti-Western’ bias (Optenhögel 2024) could be seen as a political declaration of intent that damages the bilateral relationship with the US, and also not entailing any tangible economic benefits for the time being. ‘If the intention is to shore up the financial dimension, joining the BRICS as a full member is unnecessary, it would be enough just to join the BRICS Bank (Uruguay did so). This would imply less political exposure, which is advisable in a context of transition and global uncertainty’, adds Actis (2023:23-24).

The Milei government’s decision not to join the BRICS not only left Lula’s government without a clear partner to articulate diplomatic positions in the framework of an enlarged organisation, but also generated an internal debate on whether or not the BRICS continue to be a functional tool for Brazil’s foreign policy.

In this context, Gomes de Saraiva(2023) considers that the enlargement of the BRICS is detrimental to the country, as it dilutes its capacity to generate an agenda, as well as limiting its scope for international action, as in some issues it is too closely linked to the revisionist diplomatic positions promoted by the Chinese and Russian governments. ‘The BRICS countries cease to be the great powers of each region to form a group of countries that are neither in the North nor in the South. At the end of the day, they end up creating more room for China to act. The more the BRICS expand, the more China’s leadership stands out’ (Gomes de Saraiva 2023).

The PT’s Brazilian foreign policy has considered autonomy as a tool aimed at strengthening its national development model or, alternatively, at widening its room for international action. For many years, BRICS effectively fulfilled the latter requirement, to such an extent that Brazil’s participation in this forum became one of the paradigmatic examples of the search for ‘autonomy through diversification’ (Vigevani and Cepaluni 2007), a model of international insertion used by President Lula da Silva.

According to Realism, the shift from a multipolar international system to a growing bipolarism (Creus, Actis 2020) puts this approach in crisis, as the international role of the BRICS has also mutated as a result of changes in the global power system. For a sector of academia, this has led to the BRICS no longer being seen as an entity that promotes greater democratisation in the decision-making system of international organisations.

By way of conclusion

The main challenge for the BRICS is to continue generating ‘mutual interests’ and cooperation between states and private actors for the benefit of all. This task will fall to China, as it positions itself as the main political and economic reference point of the bloc, which in recent years has been able to promote various multilateral development initiatives that have allowed it to expand its level of soft power.

China has to contend with a growing number of countries pursuing different diplomatic interests, which therefore threatens to undermine the internal cohesion of the BRICS+ and increase criticism of Beijing’s leadership. It therefore needs to build internal consensus. At the same time, it should avoid radicalising the discourse against the West so as not to damage the diplomatic interests of countries such as India and Brazil that view with scepticism the direction the BRICS have taken and that have historically acted as a nexus between North and South. All this against the backdrop of slower growth in their economies and the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2025, which will intensify the rivalry with China.

Since its creation almost twenty years ago, the BRICS has gone through different stages. They have gone from being a ‘convention’, marked by informality and focused on financial issues, to becoming an intergovernmental entity that intervenes in different sectors of the international system. In this framework, it seeks to present itself as an alternative model of governance to that proposed by the West, while at the same time it continues to try to expand its capacity to influence traditional multilateral organisations. Enlargement, however, opens up a new scenario and reconfigures the correlation of forces within the group, generating growing tensions.

[1]According to the author, this diplomatic strategy of ‘containment’ would come to an end after the rise to power of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016, who intensified the geopolitical dispute against China and gave it a global scope.