The dynamics of global governance are likely to shift significantly in favour of the emerging economies of the Global South as they engage forcefully with their affluent and more developed rivals from the Global North.
A cross-section of diplomats and analysts in New Delhi anticipate that the face-off between these two opposing blocs – the South led by the expanded and financially resurgent 10-nation Brics federation (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the industrialised North, epitomised by the G7 states – will precipitate a reworked multipolar, mutually equitable and sustainable world order.
The economically burgeoning Brics group, along with the Global South, comprising African, Asian and Latin-American states, is not only directly challenging the North’s dominance in financial, trade and technological sectors, but is also demanding comprehensive structural reforms of the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It has repeatedly claimed that, over decades, all three have jointly failed to represent their interests.
Additionally, Brics has presented its New Development Bank (NDB), founded in 2014, as an alternative to western-led financial organisations to bankroll infrastructure and sustainable developmental projects for its members and assorted Global South states, particularly across Africa.
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By the end of 2022, the NDB claimed to have disbursed $32 billion (€28.67 billion) in loans to developing countries to construct roads, bridges, railways, ports, water supply and energy projects, alongside digital infrastructure and environmental protection undertakings.
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Brics has also prioritised co-operation among developing countries through reduced trade and tariff agreements to augment local markets and commerce in a direct challenge to the Global North’s economic hegemony.
Such palpable South-North animosity was drolly highlighted recently in a quip by India’s foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the Global Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland, in which when he derided the G7′s opposition to and animosity towards Brics.
In a clip that went viral on social media on September 12th, he said the Brics “club” came into being after the established G7 club refused entry to anybody else, and expressed amazement over the Global North’s abiding insecurity over it once it was instituted. “Somehow, something seems to get under their [G7s] skin” he added.
India, along with Brazil, China and Russia were the original Brics founders in 2006. South Africa joined the grouping four years later. In January 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became members.
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A former Indian ambassador who had served with Brics, and later at the UN, said that in recent years Brics has accelerated the Global South’s economic rise at the expense of the G7 states comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US, as well as the EU.
The ambassador, who declined to be named, said Brics has provided the necessary “impetus and enablement” to rebalance the financial inequities in the “skewed” global order. He said this has facilitated a shift away from the unipolarity of the post-cold-war era dominated by the US and its allies to multipolarity, encompassing emerging economies.
The envoy said the collective economic heft of Brics, embodying 35-37 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, is firmly poised to “confront” western dominance in finance, trade and technology.
Elaborating on this, other retired diplomats said enhanced intra-collaboration among Brics members and many emerging Global South countries would divert investment flows away from G7/Global North economies. And, as Brics expanded financially, so would its bargaining power in leveraging commodity markets and trade in assorted natural resources, which its members and others from the Global South possess in abundance.
That being said, Brics and Global South states are amenable to collaborating with the Global North to address common challenges such as climate change, economic instability and health crises. In this potentially symbiotic relationship, the former aims to leverage the latter’s vastly superior technological and financial resources, offering innovative grassroots strategies in return.
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But despite broad consensus among Brics members, many relationships contain rivalries stemming from historical conflicts, territorial disputes, economic competition and differing political ideologies.
There is a major discord between China and India, two of Brics’ largest economies, whose armies have been locked in a standoff over an unresolved border in the Himalayas since May 2020.
India also views China’s foreign policy (the Belt and Road Initiative), striving to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe via land and sea routes, as a hegemonic ploy to encircle it and dominate South Asia.
And though China and Russia recently cultivated a strategic relationship, apprehension remains regarding the latter’s financial reliance on Beijing.
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Russia’s ambition to maintain its status as a global power rivals China’s analogous objectives, spawning uncertainty and a delicate balancing act.
Alongside this, Brazil’s internal economic and political instabilities have curtailed its capacity to exert adequate influence on the Brics group, while South Africa, the group’s smallest economy, often finds itself sidelined.
Meanwhile, analysts believe that the UN’s role in mentoring a potentially refurbished global governance paradigm is paramount. Likewise, they say that despite shortcomings, the UN structurally remains the solitary global forum to consensually formulate strategies to tackle transnational issues such as climate change, pandemics, economic justice and security threats.
Saturday: Daniel McLaughlin on how Russia plays champion of the Global South in battling the “collective West” in world affairs
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