BRICS summit: Is the bloc truly challenging a Western-dominated world?

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A BRICS member has been under attack for months – and has subsequently wielded attacks of its own against fellow members.

This coming weekend, those countries will all be in the same room, making a third attempt to find consensus on a war that has dominated global attention – and battered economies – this year.

Born to challenge the West

While BRICS was built to challenge the US-led Western order – it was never meant to replace it, the analysts said.

The bloc emerged after the 2008 financial collapse and the failures of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha Round – trade negotiations that aimed to reform the international trading system in favour of Global South countries.

“Countries that were spearheaded to become the next ‘developed’ nations understood that their voice would be best heard if they organised themselves as a group,” said Oliveira and Godinho.

BRICS emerged from these countries’ efforts to pursue a common development agenda outside traditional international organisations and the United Nations – and, in that sense, its very origins challenged the Western-led order, the Brazilian scholars said.

Emerging powers wanted greater influence over institutions they felt were dominated by the West. And that’s a major priority still uniting the group today, says Sean Burges, an associate professor of international studies at Canada’s Carleton University.

“The two priorities uniting the BRICS countries are largely a desire to make lots of money through international trade and to see an end to the preachiness of the ‘West’ about where they are failing in terms of rights and democracy,” Burges told Al Jazeera.

The analysts agreed that reform and greater autonomy have been far greater concerns for the BRICS bloc rather than overthrowing the unravelling liberal international order.

“Why would the BRICS want to take on the global governance responsibilities of the G7 members?” asked Burges.

BRICS has offered its member countries alternative pathways for channelling trade and investment that serve the interests of the member countries – largely national development and poverty alleviation, he explained.

“Chinese concentration on development assistance without conditionality and Brazilian discussions of direct central bank currency swaps are two of the most obvious examples,” said Burges.

This has resulted in a surge of economic exchange not only within the BRICS, but within the Global South in general, he added.

Meanwhile, pressures on rights and democracy are disappearing as aid conditions – evidence of how institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are already changing – Burges argued.

Concurrently, the very idea of the so-called West has changed dramatically since the early 2000s, when BRICS was conceived and formalised, operating in an entirely different global environment, points out Guy Burton, a geopolitical and policy analyst.

The notion of the West is “breaking down now, with the transatlantic relationship between the US and Europe fracturing – so it’s unclear what BRICS would even be challenging, or whom, America or Europe,” Burton told Al Jazeera.

Big economic weight, limited collective power

While BRICS’s economic weight is enormous – its ability to wield it collectively is not, the analysts agreed.

The bloc accounts for nearly half the world’s population, 40 percent of global output in purchasing power terms, 44 percent of oil production, and about a quarter of world trade, points out Imran Khalid, a geostrategic analyst and senior fellow at Foreign Policy in Focus.

The 11-member grouping is growing at about 3.7 percent this year compared with 1 percent for the G7, according to IMF figures, he added.

Still, its “leverage is weaker than the [BRICS group] size suggests,” Khalid told Al Jazeera.

“The New Development Bank (NDB) had approved about $39bn in total by the end of 2024, which is a few months of World Bank commitments, and it still raises most of its money in dollars,” he said, referring to the global financial institution created by the bloc.

Brazilian scholars Oliveira and Godinho also said the NDB has introduced no significant innovations to challenge the West, with many of its features mirroring those of existing multilateral development banks.

And its contribution to global GDP still lags behind the G7, with China and India primarily driving the group’s economic expansion, said Oliveira and Godinho.

Perhaps the most significant limitation on BRICS’s ability to challenge Western economic power is its continued structural reliance on the US dollar, the analysts agreed.

“Despite extensive rhetoric about de-dollarisation initiatives, the vast majority of BRICS trade is still denominated in US dollars, while most BRICS nations maintain significant dollar reserves, reflecting the dollar’s continued status as the world’s primary reserve currency and creating a structural dependency that limits the bloc’s policy independence,” said the Brazilian academics.

While China has pushed use of the renminbi and Saudi Arabia has floated trade in other currencies, the dollar faces no serious challenge – and it is unlikely to for the next decade, said Burton.

“The bloc as a whole is not moving off the dollar; individual members are reducing their own exposure, one relationship at a time,” said Khalid.

“That is slower, and it is also harder to reverse.”

Still, say Oliveira and Godinho, the BRICS group’s economic achievements should not be disregarded.

“[The NDB] is the first financial institution without Western countries, even though it still operates within the [liberal international order],” they said.

The bloc’s expansion in 2024, meanwhile, has enhanced its collective leverage, with the addition of major oil producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates strengthening its influence in global energy markets, said Oliveira and Godinho.

Chinese investment in other BRICS countries, including through its Belt and Road Initiative, and other bilateral flows are also “offering concrete alternatives for financing and development for emerging economies, operating outside the traditional framework of Bretton Woods institutions [World Bank and IMF],” they added.

United by ambition, divided by interests

The BRICS’s biggest strength – its ability to represent a large section of the global populace – may also be its biggest weakness: divisions persist among member states.

At a meeting of the grouping’s foreign ministers in May — also in India — the BRICS failed to form a consensus on the US-Israel war on Iran.

“May’s foreign ministers’ meeting ended without a statement because Iran wanted American and Israeli actions named and the UAE would not agree to it,” said Khalid.

Still, it is the Global South that has pushed all truce measures during the current war, he pointed out.

“None came out of Washington.”

Burton, however, said the bloc’s expansion has made BRICS’s internal divisions more confusing, not less.

“It widens Global South representation but dilutes whatever coherent positioning the group had,” he argued.

On Iran, he added, BRICS membership gave Tehran a platform, but that doesn’t mean the bloc’s members are aligning themselves with the country.

“There’s no ‘one for all, all for one’ logic in BRICS – members deliberately preserve their freedom to act independently, which is the opposite of a coordinated bloc,” said Burton.

Burges agreed, saying that even while the grouping has had a shared ambition to have a larger voice in international affairs, dissent still exists there.

“All of the members want a greater say, but they absolutely do not agree on the message.”

Oliveira and Godinho pointed out that while initially, the limited number of members was an issue considering the diversity of the Global South, now its expansion risks undermining the collective achievements of the group.

Still, they see the bloc’s new members and a growing queue of countries seeking to be part of BRICS as a positive indicator of the grouping’s future: “The fact that countries with such divergent interests can sit together is itself evidence of a changing multipolar system.”

So, is BRICS really challenging the West?

Overall, the BRICs bloc is a platform for autonomy rather than a challenger to the Western-led order, says Khalid.

With no common currency, no common tariff and no defence commitment, he said, it’s hardly a conventional geopolitical bloc.

But it has created alternative development financing and facilitated trade outside Western institutions, he said. And it has given Global South countries more room to manoeuvre between Washington and Beijing.

Most significantly, said Khalid, BRICS has perhaps emerged as “a challenger to how cheaply the West can apply pressure to individual countries”.

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