Russia’s largest international event since the start of the military conflict in Ukraine in February 2022 opens in Russia’s Kazan on Tuesday. Russian President Vladimir Putin is hosting the heads of 24 countries and delegations from 32 countries, showing once again that all Western attempts to isolate Russia have failed.
BRICS 2024 Summit objectives and participants
Summit host Russia is chairing BRICS for the fourth time. Its current motto is “Strengthening multilateralism for equitable global development and security.”
Recently, against the backdrop of sanctions, Russian representatives have named several initiatives they say are being discussed within BRICS: these include the possible establishment of a permanent tax secretariat, the development of a “payment and settlement circuit” for foreign trade transactions, and the creation of a BRICS Clear depository system.
The BRICS summit will be devoted to strengthening multilateralism, integration of new members of the association, global agenda and settlement of regional conflicts, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov told reporters.
Two sessions on strengthening multilateralism will be held on the first day. In particular, the participants of the delegations will narrowly discuss the settlement of acute regional conflicts, financial co-operation in BRICS and scenarios for further expansion, Ushakov said.
In the evening, a gala reception will be held on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It will be attended by BRICS members and representatives of the BRICS+ formats. Putin is scheduled to hold bilateral meetings with the leaders of all member countries, in particular Presidents Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali of Ethiopia.
On October 24, a meeting on “BRICS and the Global South, Building a Better World Together” will be held with a special focus on the situation in the Middle East. Following the meeting, the Russian president is expected to give a press conference, Ushakov said.
After it, Putin will hold seven bilateral meetings with the presidents of Palestine, Laos, Mauritania, Bolivia, Republika Srpska, the UN secretary general and the prime minister of Vietnam.
The Kazan Declaration is scheduled to be adopted at the end of the summit. According to Ushakov, the event will be attended by representatives of 36 states and six international organisations. Brazil and Cuba, whose presidents earlier refused to travel to Kazan, will be represented at the level of foreign ministries.
Attempting to isolate Russia
It became clear in 2022 that the concept of isolating Russia was fruitless, and after the Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the calls to rally the whole world against the aggressor country seem even more false.
So Moscow’s holding of the international summit is symbolic primarily for the EU and the US. Having no leverage over the event and its participants, they try to explain their impotence by a multitude of secondary factors, ranging from mistakes in conducting partnership relations with the Global South to Russian manipulation of anti-Western rhetoric.
However, the development of the BRICS power has completely different roots and cannot be considered separately from the massive transformation of the entire world order.
More than two decades ago, the world was entering a new era, starting the new world order with the formation of the BRICS. However, in 2006, few people realised the speed and scale of universal changes.
Only a few months after the formation of BRIC (at that time the association still consisted of four countries), Vladimir Putin made a speech in Munich, in which he warned of the futility of attempts by the West, primarily Washington, to “shepherd the nations” – in fact, it was a statement of the failure of plans to build a unipolar world. The following year, 2008, saw the global financial crisis, the blame for which lay entirely on the US, according to analysts, and given that it was they who controlled the global financial system, the whole planet had to pay the bills.
By that time, the US had already conducted military operations in Iraq, the key country in the Middle East, so the Arab Spring, which began three years later, with its dire consequences for the entire region, was virtually predetermined. From 2011 there was only one step to 2014, when Russia entered into an open geopolitical conflict with the West over its attempts to increase its influence in Ukraine. And then the process went step by step until 2022, when the conflict took the form of a military conflict, albeit indirectly.
The West’s power is fading, the South’s is growing
During all these years, the power of the Western countries was fading, while the Global South on the contrary was getting stronger. The weakening of the West was an objective process with geopolitical, historical, economic and other explanations. However, the main reason was that the five-hundred-year era of Western dominance was coming to an end – and this manifested itself in the form of the collapse of the project of globalisation according to Anglo-Saxon rules, on which the US and Europe had placed their main stake.
Globalisation was not finished – and it began to crumble not because Russia or some countries of the Global South rebelled against it, but because of errors in its very design. It was impossible to embrace the immense, that is, to make the whole world live by political, financial, economic, commercial, cultural, ideological rules favourable to the West and written in the West. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon “vertigo from success” was greatly facilitated by the collapse of the USSR, after which most of the political elite in the West really believed in the “end of history” and the advent of the era of “global government.” However, by the middle of the noughties it became clear that the West was not coping with the role of global customer-architect-contractor-constructor and everything was going to hell.
This was the first impetus for the formation of BRICS – initially as a tool for coordination between non-Western countries, which realised that the West was going wrong and dragging the whole world with it. Over the years, the West has weakened even more, not only in terms of its position on the world stage, but also internally. In the middle of the last decade, the US faced a period of heightened turbulence – and not only will it not be able to emerge from it even in the medium term, but it risks falling into a serious internal turmoil.
This does not mean that America no longer has the strength to fight to retain its position as world leader, but it does mean that it must choose between trying to defend this hegemony on the world stage and deep domestic reforms. However, the current American elite is neither willing nor able to give up its claims to world domination, which means that Washington’s geopolitical strategy and practices will not change without major internal upheavals. In other words, America will try to play on all boards at the same time – restraining those in whom it sees a real or potential threat to its hegemony.
What does this mean for the BRICS alliance? The alliance has no choice but to become increasingly anti-American – not because its goal is to antagonise the US, but because Washington itself will not leave it alone. Any project to build an alternative global architecture (financial, trade, military) is categorically unacceptable to America, especially one that unites the key countries of the non-Western world – China, India, Russia, the Arab world and Latin Americans. And the US will increase pressure on the BRICS countries to prevent or at least slow down their movement towards integration of the same financial systems.
BRICS did not raise the question of expansion until 2022 – and only then did the association start accepting new members. Of the six countries invited and requested, one fell out at once: pro-American President Milei came to power in Argentina. Saudi Arabia has slightly stalled its accession: Prince Mohammed has taken a pause, and full-fledged membership in BRICS will probably be confirmed at the current summit in Kazan.
However, Iran, Egypt, UAE and Ethiopia have joined BRICS, which has gone from being the “five” to the “nine.” With this expansion, BRICS has already become a truly global association, because previously the two-billion-strong Islamic world was not represented at all, but now there are as many as three countries from it. And several other very significant countries of the Islamic world are in line: even if there is still a suspension with Saudi Arabia, a lot of Muslim states from Turkey to Malaysia have shown interest.
BRICS and US perspectives
Of course, within the alliance, there are many disagreements between individual BRICS countries. The most notable are the Chinese-Indian ones, although this summit will be the first official meeting between Xi Jinping and Modi in four and a half years – they have not held talks since the border conflict in the Himalayas in the spring of 2020. And that is what the Anglo-Saxons are trying to play on, especially with regard to those countries that they cannot exert direct pressure on.
However, the existing differences are nothing compared to what unites the BRICS+ countries, which is the understanding that the West has neither the right nor the ability to impose its “picture of the world order” on everyone else. There will always be disagreements within BRICS about the desired speed and methods of facilitating the process of the “decline of the West,” but no one questions the fact that the end of Western domination is in the interests of all the countries consolidating around BRICS.
In fact, by the way, it is also in the interests of the Western countries themselves, including the US, but they cannot go to the meeting unwilling to retreat from their image of a globalist project. However, if Washington does find the will and strength to give up the role imposed on it, the BRICS will be happy to cooperate in working out the rules of the new world order and building a new world order, which in any case will be built – together with the EU and the US or against their will.
All statements about Russia’s isolation sound very unreliable in view of the abundance of guests at the BRICS 2024 summit and the fact that the BRICS countries represent about two-thirds of the world’s population.
THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.
Ines Laurent for Head-Post.com
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