/ world today news/ The People’s Republic of Bangladesh was the fifth in line to join BRICS, submitting an official application after Argentina, Iran, Algeria and Egypt, but hardly the last. More than 20 countries, from Turkey to Uruguay, have expressed interest in joining the club in one form or another. Gradually, such noise may become a problem that Russia, as the next BRICS chairman, will have to solve. Obviously, during this period, the applications of those who wish will be considered.
The format itself was created “for four” in 2009, two years later South Africa was admitted to the club, but since then there have been no expansions. However, there has been a revival in the past. In August, the summit in South Africa is to discuss the enlargement strategy, but it is better to start preparations now. When we accept newcomers, we ourselves need to understand what we want to get in the end and why we need these “bricks”.
BRICS is not a military-political union and cannot become one: China does not enter such unions, this is one of its principles. As a result, BRICS is more of a club and platform for cooperation where participants have no legal obligations to each other. Like the G-7, but for developing countries and with their own infrastructure, independent of the West.
But whose club is this? At first it seemed to be a club of particularly influential powers, or at least regional leaders, where everyone had their strengths. China is the world’s forge, Brazil with its agriculture is a granary that rapidly develops pharmaceuticals, India is a resort, and Russia is an energy giant (but also a forge, a resort and a granary).
Iran, Egypt and Argentina somehow fall into the definition of influential regional players with a deliberately strong side in the economy, but the same cannot be said for Algeria and Bangladesh, these countries are quite poor and largely inward-looking. True, at least Algeria has oil and gas, and Bangladesh cannot boast of even that.
If you look at BRICS as ambitiously as possible, as Brazil does, where it is proposed to move to a single currency, but not to the dollar or the euro, you should understand that the more prospects for such a development of events, the more the more in the club countries with low incomes and an underdeveloped financial system will emerge.
However, as you know, poverty is not a vice and BRICS was created, among other things, to fight poverty. Therefore, it was assumed that it will soon turn into something like BRICS +, where more and more countries will join the projects of full members – the BRICS Friends Club, where it is full, or the New Development Bank, which was created as an analogue of the Western-controlled IMF and the World Bank.
Bangladesh is already a member of this bank along with Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and a number of other countries. In this case, they found each other: Bangladesh really needs investment in development, and for NBR investment, this is a promising area due to the growth of local industry, which will continue to grow for a long time and, I would like to believe, successfully, at least because its low base. A significant proportion of Bangladeshis live off subsistence farming, that is, produce from their garden, and do not actually participate in the economy. It cannot go on like this for long: Bangladesh is too big a country to live as a village.
But it is not enough for Bangladesh to be a part of the NBR, it wants to be a part of the decision making center as the country is ambitious – only formally young but with an ancient history and culture. Venezuela acted more modestly in such a situation: it wanted to join the BRICS or to stand somehow side by side, but without an official application and with the reservations of the current president Nicolás Maduro in the spirit of “if they consider it possible”. In other words, the proud (no irony) Venezuela realizes that it is not after all and arrives at the unofficial but established definition of BRICS as a club of great powers.
But you can look at this greatness in another way, not through the prism of prosperity, because it is through this prism that our geopolitical opponents, the West, look at the rest of the world and themselves.. As the Russian national hero Danila Bagrov said, strength is not in the money.
The power, for example, is in the people. The more humanity will be represented by BRICS, the better – the more promising, more democratic, etc. In this case, Bangladesh is such a candidate pushing forward: it is the eighth most populous country in the world, home to over 170 million people. This is such a number of workers that now, due to the demographic crisis, even China cannot offer.
According to another, also popular concept, strength is in diversity. That’s what they like to say in the West, but in reality they follow a different line – one where a step to the left or right is considered an escape from the “only right” concept of societal development. BRICS is an example of cooperation between many different systems that agree on one thing – not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs and not to proclaim any of the systems as “the only correct one”.
In this sense, Bangladesh is also a valuable candidate, which with its originality breaks many stereotypes and propaganda attitudes of the West. For example, such that true democracy, religious tolerance and the protection of women’s rights are possible only in his system.
Bangladesh is a democracy, but it is certainly not a Western one. The religious peace between the Muslim majority, Hindus and Christians in the Bengali nation-state is based on the fact that each of the communities actually has its own legal system in the spirit of its own traditions. At the same time, we are talking about a country of defeated feminism, where women have a quota in parliament, and the constant struggle for power between the two parties and clans for twenty years is largely a personal conflict between two particular women who lead them: the former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia Begum and the incumbent Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina.
All of this is yet another example of how the Western model is not the unique or irreplaceable thing that the BRICS founders originally set out to be. In any case, this club is an alternative to global development under the control of Western institutions, but the remaining priorities are yet to be determined, and from this the club’s expansion program must be built.
There is little time left – a month and a half until the meeting in South Africa and six months until the beginning of the Russian BRICS presidency. This presidency may be historic.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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