At BRICS summit, Global South not playing along

Dozens of Global South leaders dared to gather last week at a world summit meeting hosted by Voldemort Putin in the Tatar capital, Kazan. So hey, the world didn’t stop turning because we have an election next week, imagine that.

Apparently, they didn’t agree that Mr Putin is the new Hitler, as Hillary Clinton opined in 2014, i.e., long before the Ukraine war broke out. Whatever they might think of the battle raging in eastern Europe, 30 heads of state and top officials from BRICS member and observer countries came to the powwow.

They wanted to see whether they could collaborate on a new trade and development architecture, given that the record of the last 500 years of Western-led domination has left many of them in an unenviable state.

And these were not minor players. Aside from the five original BRICS states—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—there were the newly incorporated members such as oil giants Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, plus Ethiopia and Egypt, suggesting the door is open for more African countries.

And sure enough, the list of 11 new candidate members includes Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda. Southeast Asia is also heavily represented among the newcomers: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, that is, the four biggest and most prosperous countries of the region.

Only Latin America is largely on the sidelines. Cuba and Bolivia will be invited to join, but these are minor economic players to say the least. Venezuela was vetoed by Brazil after the glaring election theft by Maduro & Co.

News coverage has highlighted the fact that the ever-expanding BRICS far outdistances the G7 Masters of the Universe countries in real GDP, population, and geographic reach.

Less often mentioned is the fact that most of the BRICS countries aren’t keen on wars, unlike their erstwhile colonial powers, historically incapable of imagining a world that they don’t dominate. Could world trade be mutually beneficial and not inevitably exploitative? Let’s see.

The summit set itself the task of finding new ways to engage in trade without kowtowing to the interests of the Americans and the Europeans as they have had to do for centuries. That’s plenty complicated, but the meeting outlined ambitious ideas.

Western reaction has been twofold: ignore the whole thing as not worthy of our attention or mock it as Putin’s attempt to prove he’s not isolated.

News flash: he isn’t and neither is Russia.

The New York Times’ headline was typical: “BRICS Summit Offers a Glimpse Inside Putin’s Alternate Reality.” Yeah, a reality that the Times’ writers and their friends in Washington should explore, including side-to-side comparisons with their own. Narrative management—at which the U.S. is particularly expert—is no substitute for looking at facts and basing one’s actions on them.

The BBC put it this way: “Putin gathers allies toshow West’s pressure isn’t working.” Hey, Beeb, that was demonstrated 2 years ago, time to catch up! And the influential Associated Press insisted that the summit was “shadowed by Ukraine.” It certainly was for the western media, which are laser-focused on the war their countries are losing. No evidence that the rest of the world is “shadowed” by it.

Perhaps they’re less obsessed with Ukraine after having witnessed the U.S. and its allies illegally invade and destroy one disobedient country after another. Or it could be that seeing a U.S. ally slaughter defenseless civilians in Gaza for a year makes them less likely to sit up and salute at the demand that they “isolate” the Russian leadership.

The point of BRICS is that through joint cooperation they hope to carve out room to stay independent of the West’s demands and think and act for themselves. Maybe that’s why it’s proving so popular in this early stage.

Our mainstream reporters continue to whistle confidently that Russia’s economy—that they were shocked to discover was not crushed by the mighty sanctions regime imposed in 2022—still has “severe cracks beneath the surface” (BBC).

They also scoff at the idea that the diverse member states of the BRICS could ever reach agreement on important issues of trade, commerce, and finance, no doubt because they’re used to the western version where one country imposes the rules, and everyone else obeys. China and India overcoming their differences is simply “bonkers,” according to one quoted expert.

The lengthy Kazan Declaration issued at the end of the summit suggests that the BRICS countries can indeed find areas of considerable consensus, notwithstanding the ponderous turgidity of such documents. The signatories call for a reform of the outdated UN apparatus, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation, and an end to “unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions.”

The Declaration includes consensus language on climate change, biodiversity, species conservation, water scarcity, terrorism, money-laundering, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, and a bunch of other stuff.

It finally gets to the much-anticipated talk of new cross-border payments mechanisms, now that the U.S. has queered the dollar by stealing other countries’ cash. They “welcome the use of local currencies in financial transactions” and want to see interlinked banking networks free of American control.

Does all this add up to a New Bretton Woods, a reformulated UN, displacement of the dollar in international trade, a “South” bloc to oppose the West in a new stand-off? Yes, no, and maybe.

Turkey’s presence at the summit suggests NATO is in serious trouble, having demonstrated to the world that its expensive weapons don’t work. The UN Secretary General also attended, to howls of Atlanticist outrage.

BRICS has its own development bank and has started to lend money although the World Bank still dwarfs it. These alternatives will take years, perhaps decades, to evolve.

Reuters, to its credit, diverged from lamestream coverage by taking note of the attending countries’ serious grievances with the status quo. “People see institutions which are not really representative or democratic," it quoted one expert saying. "Infrastructure established in the 1940s after the world war, and nothing changes.” 

Net financial flows, Reuters continued, “turned negative for developing countries, meaning they paid more to service external debts than they received in new external finance.”

That is, the poor are now funding the rich. As a matter of fact, that feels a lot like how economics works here at home lately. No one should wonder at the world’s marginalized billions feeling rebellious, unrepresented, taken advantage of, and scolded. After all, so are we.