/ world today news/ From the editor: On August 22, the leaders of the “five” BRICS countries will gather at the annual summit of this largest interstate association of the non-Western world. The meeting will take place in the main business center of Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Sandton Exhibition Centre. Representatives of several dozen countries, most of which have applied for membership in this organization, have been invited to participate in the deliberations and discussions, which will last three days. The slogan of the 15th summit – “BRICS and Africa: a partnership for mutual acceleration of growth, sustainable development and an inclusive multilateral approach” – reflects the content of the recent Russia-Africa forum in St. Petersburg.
The persistent and inappropriate attempts of Emmanuel Macron to appear at a meeting in South Africa, which we wrote about earlier, did not meet with understanding and this is a sign of the times. On the eve of the meeting, designed to promote the formation of a new, fairer and more balanced world order on the way to liberation from the colonial dictates of the collective West, we begin a series of posts on the current BRICS agenda and prospects for the expansion of this interstate association.
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The loss of planetary hegemony in the military-political, financial, economic and cultural spheres has become a geopolitical constant of this century. The interstate association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) is becoming an alternative center of power in the multipolar world order. The attractiveness of BRICS for other countries is due to the foreign policy authority of its members and their impressive geopolitical potential.
Brazil is projected to top the South American continent. The Argentine philosopher and geopolitician Prof. Alberto Buela points out the presence of several geopolitical vectors here: Brazil – to Santiago and Bogotá, Argentina – to Lima and Caracas, crossing the Brazilian “vector”.
Buela presented the “diamond theory” with conditionals Brazil – Buenos Aires – Lima – Caracas. This would create a large geopolitical space with access to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This space will have large human resources and will be culturally and linguistically homogeneous (with the accession of Argentina and Venezuela to BRICS).
This alignment would allow Brazil to free itself from the obsessive tutelage of its former metropolis, Portugal. From the point of view of Portuguese geopolitics, Brazil is one of the “peaks” of the so-called strategic triangle Mozambique – Angola – Brazil. Its presence makes Portugal an important player in the international arena.
If Lisbon does not maintain its presence within this triangle, it will have to fall back into second-order positions and strategically settle for a smaller figure – a small strategic triangle: mainland Portugal – Azores – Madeira, which will mean weakening Lisbon’s position on the world stage.
This will automatically lead to a weakening of the influence of Lisbon’s NATO allies – Spain, France, Great Britain, who own or have owned colonies in the region, as well as the United States, to whom Lisbon has traditionally focused its foreign policy in order to balance the continentalist tendencies in the European geopolitics, which are in contradiction with the Euro-Atlantic and Anglo-Saxon direction.
On December 21, 1998, during a visit to Delhi, the then head of the Russian government Yevgeny Primakov expressed the unofficial idea of creating a Russia-India-China strategic triangle, noting that “in the form of a three-party partnership, it can to bring greater stability to the state of affairs in the world and the region.”
This statement was made a day after the start of the US and British bombing of Iraq, bypassing the UN Security Council, and it would not be a great exaggeration to say that this event became significant in its own way not only in the Russian, but also in world politics. In fact, it was de facto the first major signal in favor of the urgent task of reformatting the unipolar world, which managed to impose itself in the form of US policy after the collapse of the USSR, which was fully confirmed by subsequent events, including the institutionalization of BRICS in June 2006, within the framework of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.
Currently, India and China are recognized players in the Asia-Pacific (ATP) region, which has for some time been renamed the Indo-Pacific (ITP) in the West. New Delhi and Beijing are actively developing contacts with the island countries of the ITR (Maldives, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands).
The presence of Russia as a key BRICS country in the India-China duo as a third, balancing country reduces the degree of India-China rivalry. As BRICS members, New Delhi and Beijing prefer to seek additional points of interaction, avoiding unnecessary escalation.
Beijing is not interested in India’s rapprochement with the US, while New Delhi is not interested in a confrontation with the Russo-Chinese alliance. The tripartite India-China-Russia political platform serves as a factor of stability in the region, provided all parties agree on an appropriate format of interaction.
The South African Republic, due to its strategic advantageous position, geopolitically significantly strengthens the positions of the BRICS, causing the displeasure of the former colonizers – Great Britain and the Netherlands. Located at the crossroads of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, refusing to follow American policy, Pretoria became the sovereign political center of the Black Continent and is one of the links in the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) dialogue forum.
Geographically, the “axis” of IBSA runs in a semicircle from the South American Atlantic coast through South Africa to India’s borders in the Indian Ocean. IBSA was created for trilateral sectoral cooperation on the South-South vector, the points of this cooperation can be included in the common agenda of BRICS.
Currently, forty-five countries are ready to join the BRICS, of which twenty-three countries have sent formal requests. Most of them are attracted by the possibility of conducting cross-border trade operations in national currencies as part of the BRICS policy of de-dollarization of regional economies.
Such a large number of applicants requires greater coordination between the BRICS founding countries. The success of the multilateral cooperation with the candidates depends on the extent to which it will be possible to iron out the contradictions between them and bring to the fore the themes of mutually beneficial partnership.
Thus, India fears that BRICS will become “anti-US” and “anti-NATO” and is therefore reserved about accepting the newcomers to avoid a numerical superiority within the BRICS countries with which Washington and Brussels are in conflict (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba). South Africa pursues a multi-vector policy, rejecting both pro-Western and anti-Western orientations.
Initially, BRICS tried by trial and error to create an infrastructure of economic stability, independence from the “Washington Consensus economy”, and the continuation of this joint work is clearly the command of our difficult time when “the mutual fund for your own”as some researchers characterize the BRICS financial institutions, is heavily influenced by external, in terms of interstate association, states and structures.
A few years ago, Moscow and Beijing seriously thought about the creation of a new payment system – an alternative to the existing SWIFT system and the transition to settlements in national currencies. The Bank of Russia has begun a series of consultations with BRICS members, and China has announced the creation of its own cross-border interbank payment system (CIPS – China International Payments System).
Today, the BRICS collectively exceed the G-7 countries in terms of population, and from 2021 also in terms of purchasing power parity ($48.7 trillion vs. $45 trillion). BRICS produces 74% more energy than the G7, has twice the area of arable land, which is extremely important in the context of attempts by destructive forces to reduce cross-border food supplies.
The economic and geopolitical potential of the interstate union is obvious, and it is assumed that the upcoming high-level talks in Johannesburg on August 22-24, as well as the discussions to which representatives of more than 60 countries have been invited, will give the organization an additional impetus and discover new perspectives.
Translation: ES
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