Last week saw another three summits in quick succession: the foreign ministers of the BRICS countries met in Cape Town, South Africa; the European Political Community met at Mimi Castle in Bulboaca, Moldova, and the Heads of State of Central Asia and the President of the European Council came together in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan. None of the meetings produced much in terms of concrete outcomes, but even as mere talking shops they are indicative of geopolitical and geoeconomic flux and uncertainty.What it’s about: The foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — collectively also known as the BRICS — met in Cape Town. Their Joint Statement emphasised a common commitment to challenge what is, in the BRICS’ view, a western-dominated international order, often couched in calls to both strengthen and reform existing multilateral institutions like the UN and to promote “a more agile, effective, efficient, representative and accountable international and multilateral system.” The three stated pillars of the BRICS — political and security, economic and financial, and cultural and people-to people cooperation — are not very different from discussions at the second meeting of the European Political Community. Held in Moldova in a not-so-subtle endorsement of that country’s EU ambitions, the forty-five gathered leaders discussed peace and security, energy resilience, and connectivity and mobility in Europe. Intended as an informal policy coordination forum, there was no official communiqué and only a brief pre-meeting statement by the Head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as well as an even shorter statement by him following a separate discussion he chaired between the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, France, and Germany.The brevity of these two statements could be explained either with the secrecy (or vacuousness?) of the discussions in Moldova or with Michel’s busy schedule, as he headed straight to Cholpon-Ata to the second EU-Central Asia summit from there. While this meeting did produce a more fulsome joint press communiqué, it was perhaps the one most devoid of concrete results, reaffirming intentions that had already been reaffirmed in a similar communiqué after the first summit on 27 October last year. Why it matters: As we discussed in our earlier piece, Moving on from Ukraine? China-West relations between Xi'an and Hiroshima (On Our Radar, 22 May 2023), the war in Ukraine remains an important driver of the current flux and uncertainty in the international system, but not the only one, and it certainly gives rise to, and exacerbates, any number of other factors that add to the current conflagration of multiple crises. Last week’s three summits are no different. The BRICS statement did not mention Ukraine, but noted “concern about the use of unilateral coercive measures, which are incompatible with the principles of the Charter of the UN and produce negative effects notably in the developing world” before doubling down by recognising “the impact on the world economy from unilateral approaches in breach of international law and they also noted that the situation is complicated further by unilateral economic coercive measures, such as sanctions, boycotts, embargoes and blockades.” A charitable reading here might consider the reference to “unilateral approaches in breach of international law” as including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the key point that permeates these and other passages of the statement is the concern about the economic impact of the war in Ukraine and the intensifying economic conflict between China and the US. An impact that is primarily borne by the global south — of which the BRICS consider themselves the leading voices and which they also seek to shape more, including through a potential expansion of the format. This desire to remould the BRICS from an alternative to the G7 into to an alternative to a US-led global West that combines elements of the old Cold War Soviet block and the erstwhile non-aligned movement was particularly obvious in the “Friends of BRICS” gathering on the sidelines of the summit in Cape Town. Not exactly or exclusively great company — Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan were physically present with Egypt, Argentina, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, and Indonesia joining online — it indicates the potential attractiveness of an enlarging BRICS to a wide range of countries. Our take: The BRICS are still quite a bit off from being able to mount an effective challenge to the current international order. But that order is clearly in trouble and will change. Yet neither the US nor China, and their respective allies, have a clear vision of what it might look like, and above all none that would be credible in the sense of accommodating whatever individual visions might exist and how they could ensure a return ...
