https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-08-25/brics-identity-crisis
The identity crisis of BRICS+6 in my opinion will emerge sooner or later caused mainly by the following 6 reasons:
1. China and India are going to be competitors in world trade in the next 2 decades.
2. India’s membership of QUAD which is a formation to contain China will very soon be conflicted with its membership in BRICS+6 when the US Vs China geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific and Taiwan intensify as they are bound to. India cannot hunt with the hounds of the QUAD and go partying with the hares in BRICS+6 at the same time.
3. At first BRICS started off as a Trade bloc . But BRICS+6 seems now to have become a covert Asian alliance with aligned and common geopolitical interests. The group’s trade and military objectives will not often however converge or harmonise and that’s when India and China, Iran and Saudi Arabia , and UAE and Saudi Arabia will find they are unable to stand on the same page . The grouping’s internal consistency will start chafing.
3. For any multilateral trade or geopolitical grouping to succeed , there has to be at least one clear and predominant superpower at its very core around which the grouping more or less stays coalesced. Consensus is possible then when that core Superpower is able to wield unacknowledged veto-power sufficient to crack the whip to prevent and prevail upon members from pulling in different directions all at once. Take the instance of NATO, IMF or World Bank or any other Western multilateral institution or grouping…. the USA is the core superpower there. Europe, UK and the entire other membership falls in line eventually with the USA. In BRICS+6 though there is no one such equivalent predominant power. There are only competing middling powers — China, Russia and India, none of which can constitute or function as the clear and predominant core of the grouping.
4. In this new BRICS+6 formation, there are heavyweight global players of the world oil and gas industry — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and UAE. Together they account for nearly one-third or more of the total energy supplies consumed by the world. And on the flip side in this group there are heavyweight fuel-guzzling energy importers like China and India. There could be significant potential conflict of business interest between OPEC+ and BRICS+ which could severely complicate larger supplier-consumer trade relations and supply-chain networks and contracts on a broader worldwide scale. The opportunity for the USA — which is an energy self-reliant country today — to play the constant spoiler and mischief-maker with world energy markets would be too good for it to pass up.
5. The BRICS+6 countries represent an unholy assortment of political ideologies, systems of governance and culture. China and Russia are Communist autocracies. Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are societies founded on principles of political Islam which is a blend of absolute monarchy and militarism. They are not open free societies. India, Brazil and South Africa are popular democracies. Ethiopia and UAE are really neither here nor there… There is really nothing like an ideological Magna Carta to which all these countries can readily and willingly come forward to sign on … There is only one overbearing ideology that however binds all these countries together : naked Capitalism.
6. As Civilisations, these countries are also so far apart in nature and religious character. Hinduism, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Maoist Confucianism, Buddhism and a mishmash of other minor religions including atheism all happen to constitute the cocktail of cultures that these distinctive civilisational entities are truly. They have nothing really in common in terms of fundamental philosophical values and belief-systems. The BRICS+6 has really no enduring cultural centre that can hold the rest together through all weather conditions.
BRICS+6 to me seems to be no more than a bandwagon of fair-weather friends… or frenemies .. journeying along together for the short-term distance through the vast geopolitical jungle in which we all live today, where might is right always, and where if you don’t eat, you get eaten.
Sudarshan Madabushi