China-led BRICS group aims to counter Western democracies | DW News

China-led BRICS group aims to counter Western democracies | DW News

For more than a decade the brics group has been comprised of five countries dominated by China especially since member Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine the group has positioned itself as a counterweight to Western democracies that dominate the world economy now its membership has doubled welcoming five new members

Including oil rich countries in the Middle East there’s no shortage of heavy weights in the bricks club china the world’s second largest economy holds the top position within the group The Asian superpower openly demands to be seen as a leader within this Alliance during a bricks Summit in Johannesburg last August Chinese

President shiing ping welcomed the decision to expand the group stating that we must use the bricks plus cooperation and accelerate expansion more countries should join the bricks family pull their knowledge and unite their efforts to make Global governance more fair and reasonable however critics argue that the current expansion plans further

Transforms the group into a club of non-democratic nations in addition to China existing bricks members include Brazil Russia India and South Africa bricks was established in 2009 on January 1st five new members have joined oil countries like Saudi Arabia the United Arab Emirates and Iran along with

Egypt and Ethiopia two key players in Africa Argentina was initially part of the expansion plans but withdrew after recent elections the brics alliance is described as highly diverse its primary goal is to establish a counterbalance to the West especially the United States and the European Union and potentially

Introduce its own currency as an alternate to the US dollar the new new bricks group represents about a third of global economic power and just under half of the world’s population let’s discuss the expansion of bricks further with Rob wats from DW business so um just walk us through the

Backstory why the newcomers yeah well it really does come down to that stated aim of bricks which is to be a counterweight to the West it feels like the European Union and the United States for far too long have had far too much sway when it

Comes to things like the World Bank the international monetary fund so it wants to set itself up as the representative of the global South as it’s sometimes called but also the the global majority and so by adding these five extra countries it’s bolstering that argument and you only have to look at the

Countries that it’s invited to join to see how that tactic is supposed to work it’s added these three countries in the Middle East it’s first countries in the Middle East so we’ve got Iran Saudi Arabia and the UAE and then we’ve also got it strengthening its foothold in

Africa as well with Ethiopia and Egypt being added and Argentina was supposed to join it didn’t we can perhaps talk about that in a second but you can see the intention there was to also strengthen its position in South America so that’s one of the key tactics here

And I mean that’s a big blow that Argentina is now not joining it’s a pretty Curious Case isn’t it it’s a really strange one and they only pulled out of the plan to join 10 days before they were supposed to on December the 22nd which in geopolitical terms is is

Last minute really but at the same time it won’t necessarily have come as a surprise to the existing members of bricks because if you’ve been following the campaign of javay the new president of Argentina you’d know that his eyes are not looking towards Beijing they’re more looking towards Brussels and

Particularly towards Washington he has a very different foreign policy to that of his predecessor and so this is less of a surprise there the interesting thing is though if Javier mle and Argentina are looking towards Washington are they going to get the response from there that they want

Because he is quite the character as people will have already noticed and his ideology doesn’t necessarily align with that of a lot of governments in Europe and in the United States so they might not be rubbing their hands about uh Argentina’s decision not to join bricks

In the way that you might think what does the overall expansion mean for the West well it’s difficult to spin it as positive news for the West obviously because bricks exists almost entire to to rival them but at the same time I do think you can overstate the impact of

This brics is not a particularly cohesive group at the moment you have to think that China’s objectives are very different to those of Russia they’re very different to those of India and South Africa so they’re not necessarily all pulling in the same direction in a

Way that could be a real threat to the Western order of things but at the same time Europe and the US does have to keep an eye on this because 40 countries expressed an interest in joining bricks ahead of these six being invited 25 formerly applied to join bricks and that

Does rather suggest that the West is losing its sway in parts of the world particularly in the South and that though we’ve just added five members to Bricks there could be more added in the not to distant future Rob Watts thank you

For more than a decade, the BRICS group has comprised five countries, dominated by China. Especially since member Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the group has positioned itself as a counterweight to Western democracies that dominate the world economy. Now, its membership has doubled – welcoming five new members including oil-rich countries in the Middle East.

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