/ world today news/ Chinese Foreign Minister Qing Gan on Thursday, during a meeting with his Saudi counterpart Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, spoke in support of the recent entry of Saudi Arabia into BRICS.
„Congratulations on Saudi Arabia becoming a dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We support your country’s early accession to BRICS“, stated Qing Gang.
The process of active accession of new candidates, such as Saudi Arabia, to the BRICS and the SCO shows that the current world order and its structures, including those formed under the dominant role of the USA, are increasingly subject to erosion.
This is also indicated by the inability of the organizations created within its framework, aimed at ensuring global and regional cooperation, to find ways to resolve conflicts, solve the problem of poverty and counter the emergencies and food crises that many face countries around the world.
BRICS and the SCO seek to become an alternative to the global “control center” of an already multipolar world, attracting more and more new members, and their expansion can be considered a challenge to the existing world order.
A New World Order Architecture
BRICS is an organization made up of five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Founded in 2006 by the first four countries, it was called BRIC until South Africa joined in 2010. Members hold annual summits and take turns hosting. In June 2022, Iran and Argentina applied to join BRICS. In November 2022, Algeria officially applied to join this association.
Finally, Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, announced their willingness to join BRICS. But the list of potential candidates is much wider.
In 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a guest at the 10th BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, during which he said: “I would like the BRICS members to take the necessary steps to let us go and we accept our place in BRICS”.
He noted that Turkey views the meeting as an opportunity to develop economic, investment and development cooperation, and also intends to strengthen cooperation with the BRICS countries in the energy sector.
During the 14th meeting of BRICS leaders at the end of June 2022 in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the need to speed up the organization’s expansion process. In May 2022, the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, the UAE, Thailand and others took part in the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting for the first time.
It was China that spearheaded talks for a massive expansion of the organization when it was chairman last year, prompting fears among other members, particularly India, that their influence would be eroded, especially if close associates of Beijing were admitted to the organization. China’s GDP is more than twice that of all four other BRICS members combined.
BRICS expansion will certainly benefit Beijing as the world’s second-largest economy tries to build diplomatic clout to counter Western dominance of the UN, IMF, World Bank and other institutions.
And China’s approval of Saudi Arabia’s bid to join BRICS immediately after the normalization of relations between Riyadh and Tehran, which it brokered, suggests that Beijing will transform its peacekeeping efforts in the Middle East into the creation of its own networks of influence.
In turn, the new architecture of the multipolar world, where an important role will be assigned to the BRICS, but already at the regional, Eurasian level, can be supplemented by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose activities are gradually being harmonized with the BRICS, and even the composition of the participants and applicants for participation is very similar, but with regional specifics taken into account.
Thus, the high-level meeting of the SCO on September 15-16, 2022 in Samarkand turned into a global Eurasian forum, which was attended not only by the heads of the member states of the organization, but also by the leaders of the partner countries in the SCO dialogue, the president of Turkey.
The SCO definitely has strategic potential, so participation in the structure in one form or another is considered by such important regional players as Turkey, the UAE or Qatar, as well as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
In general, the SCO can attract most of the countries of South and Central Asia, the Middle and the Far East into the orbit of its activity. And if everything goes well, the SCO gradually has a chance to become a large-scale Eurasian integration project.
Beijing’s leadership and Moscow’s impulses
But despite China’s strong position, the impetus for BRICS and SCO expansion has intensified precisely against the background of the ongoing conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine.
That is, Moscow was the locomotive or “icebreaker” whose challenge to the Western system paved the way for the possible large-scale expansion of both the BRICS and the SCO. Most potential candidates expressed a desire to join these structures after the start of the Russian SVO in Ukraine.
Thus, if Beijing is the undisputed commercial and economic leader of these organizations, the leading military and political role still remains for Moscow. Although the organizations themselves are not military-political blocs, without this direction they could hardly be realized in their current form and continue their development.
Western media also highlight this trend. For example, the US magazine Newsweek reported that due to NATO’s “biggest expansion in decades”, “Beijing and Moscow have been looking for new members” in their blocs such as the SCO and BRICS.
Both the East and the West seek to consolidate their camps by expanding the networks of their allies and partners, while the BRICS and the SCO try to attract into their ranks “nodal” countries occupying key strategic positions and developing economies. In fact, the goals of the potential candidates themselves are consonant with the activities of these organizations to form a new world system and a new multipolar world.
These projects, be it BRICS or the SCO, take into account all the differences in the approaches of their participants, but at the same time allow them to move in one direction on the basis of already formulated tasks, as, for example, it is declared in the program of the SCO – “encouragement to the creation of a democratic, just and rational new international political and economic order’.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – the new economic and military-political “tigers of the East” – are interested in membership in these structures, and the SCO and BRICS themselves would like to see them in their ranks.
Among these three countries, I would like to pay special attention to Saudi Arabia. It is one of the largest exporters of crude oil in the world, owning 15% of world reserves and a founding member of OPEC.
That is, through the participation of Saudi Arabia in BRICS and the SCO, closer ties are formed between these structures and OPEC, and opportunities for coordinating their activities are discovered. And here it is important to note that Russia is also a member of OPEC+. It is a larger group that includes 13 OPEC members and 10 other oil-producing countries, led by Russia.
In addition, Saudi Arabia is one of the leaders in economic growth in the world. Last November, the World Bank reported that Saudi Arabia was the fastest-growing economy among the G20 countries, adding that the kingdom had a moderate inflation rate of 2.9 percent, the lowest rate among the G20 countries.
Egypt is the largest of the three potential BRICS members in terms of population (about 102 million people), while Turkey, with a population of over 85 million, is a member of NATO and therefore occupies a unique position in the East-West confrontation. .
Over the past decade, the trend in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s relations with Russia, China and India has been positive, and they are increasingly intertwined in terms of trade and defence.
The actual expansion of the BRICS and the SCO through, first of all, the countries of the Islamic and Arab world demonstrates their ever-growing importance, the ability to make independent decisions without regard to Washington and to conduct a multi-vector foreign policy.
In particular, many Arab countries in the last 30 years have achieved technological progress and a breakthrough in economic development, in many ways ahead of the recognized leaders. This is proven by the participation of their representatives in the G-20. They will be able to seriously strengthen the potential of organizations such as BRICS and the SCO.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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