Opidata #8: The BRICS Summit, China, and the Emerging Illiberal Counter-Order

Dr. R. Evan Ellis[1]

The 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan solidified an anti-liberal «counter-order,» challenging the rules-based international system. With its expansion to 23 members, the bloc, financially led by China, seeks to evade global restrictions and advance its agendas, though it faces coordination challenges and diverse objectives among its members.

Introduction

The October 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in which the body expanded its membership from 10 to 23, is the most concrete expression of an emerging, if nebulous illiberal resistance to the rules-based international order that has created the basis for international economic and technological progress and democracy since the second World War. 

Behind their rhetoric about alternative models for democracy and development, the regimes comprising the expanded BRICS and the global “counter-order” more broadly, are diverse in their objectives, united principally by the desire to escape from the constraints that legacy multilateral political, economic, and military institutions  have imposed on their actions.  These include contractual and constitutional commitments, accountability to the will of their own people, and in some cases, institutionalized involvement in criminal activities. 

The new order is fundamentally financially underwritten by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which maintains cautious distance from the diverse pursuits of the other members, while profiting from their agendas and vulnerabilities, and strategically benefitting from their attacks on its principal rival, the U.S., as the latter struggles to uphold the crumbling rules-based order.

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The 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan highlighted its key role as an anti-liberal bloc, expanding to 23 members and proposing alternatives to the Western financial system, such as trade in local currencies and a new payment mechanism. Though diverse, it aims to reduce the impact of sanctions and dependence on the dollar.

The BRICS summit in Kazan demonstrated the emerging potential of the organization to serve as a key vehicle to advance the interest of illiberal states in undermining the rules-based order for their own benefit, albeit with significant hurdles in coordination and implementation still to be addressed. 

The ability of Vladimir Putin to convoke a successful BRICS summit in Russia, with senior officials from 36 countries, including 20 heads of state and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierres, despite the arrest warrant against Putin from the International Criminal Court of the same United Nations, was symbolically significant.

Finally, BRICS arguably established itself as the primary voice of the new illiberal counter-order, with positions on Ukraine and the wars in Lebanon.  Even if the “multilateralism for just development” position of the final Kazan declaration was ambiguous, the BRICS voice effectively supplanted that of the G-77, which has become to broad, and the G-20, which is paralyzed by including regimes more wedded to the legacy liberal order.

In its expansion, the BRICS successfully reasserted the geographic diversity of its membership.  In its prior 2024 expansion, the Argentine government’s decision not to accept an invitation to join left four of the group’s five new members from the Middle East and North Africa (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE), with no Asian, European or Latin American members.  The additional 13 Associate Members named in Kazan partially restored the balance, bringing in Belarus and Turkey from Europe, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan from Central Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam from Asia, and Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda from Africa.

Beyond geographic diversity, the ability of the organization to significantly expand its size, despite having just expanded from 5 to 10 members in January 2024, while keeping a common denominator of members discontent with the existing international order, was an important step.  Most importantly, however, it made progress in constructing alternatives to the SWIFT system for clearing financial transactions, Western commodity markets, and dollar-based trade transactions.  The new BRICS mechanisms include a Russia-proposed system for cross-border trade between members in local currencies, a Russia-hosted BRICS grain exchange, and a new payments-clearing mechanism independent of the dollar.  All are designed to make member states less vulnerable to Western sanctions.  The new mechanisms compliment the largely China-funded BRICS New Development Bank, which already has 96 loans approved (not all implemented) totaling $32.8 billion. 

Even if the disparate agendas of the expanded group of BRICS states make reaching consensus difficult, the financial and trading volume that the members collectively bring–especially the large oil producing states–will allow them to minimize the economic and financial damage the West can impose on them, increasing their autonomy of action, while also undercutting the role of the dollar in the international financial system.  Indeed, the expanded BRICS membership collectively represents 25% of the world’s GDP, 40% of its oil production, as well as half of its population.  The move away from a dollar-based financial system by a group with such weight, even if only partially successful, also benefits the PRC, the economic engine at the center of the BRICS, in its long-term objective in moving the world away from a dollar-denominated trading and financial system.  The collective move away from the dollar that their cooperation advances increases the strategic financial risk for its rival the US, whose ability to borrow beyond its already monumental $36 trillion debt, and thus support its defense spending and other governmental functions, depends on the rest of the world’s interest in wanting to hold dollar-denominated US Treasury debt.

Conclusion

The club of Western liberal democracies should not be reassured by the ambiguity of the Kazan declaration, the time required to implement its alternative trade and financing mechanisms, or even the dissent demonstrated when Brazil vetoed Venezuela’s membership.  The expanded BRICS is the manifestation of progress by the illiberal counter-order in collaborating to free themselves from accountability to both their own people and the international system. The fissures their efforts are making in the rules-based international order, upon which the global system of trade, finance and law enforcement depends, cannot be met by mere hand-wringing in the name of the un-knowability of moral truth about democracy and human rights.  Too much is at stake. The West must use its own economic and institutional vehicles to impose real cost on those seeking to dismantle the rules-based system under the false banner of sovereignty before that leverage slips away.  Yet it cannot presume that the value of democracy, protection of individual rights, market-based economies, and a framework of common rules are self-evident or can be imposed.  In the new era of the BRICS, the West must redouble its efforts to show why such principles are in the self-interest of the states and peoples of the international system.  If not, it will lose a new generation to the deceptive, and self-destructive libertinism of a new generation of swindlers, criminals, and tyrants.

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[1] The author is Latin America Research Professor with the U.S. Army War College.  The views expressed herein are strictly his own.