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The annual meeting of the BRICS held a few days ago in Russia should be interpreted as a threat to democracy in the world. The reason is clear: this club, led by China, intends to be the platform from which to challenge the liberal international order based on rules and democratic principles. China, Russia and other authoritarian allies of the BRICS reject this institutionality because it questions its essence: its lack of respect for the rule of law, the absence of democracy, the abuse of human rights.
Beijing is uneasy with the current order. It has been accused of genocide for its repression in Xinjiang; criticized for having subjugated Hong Kong through a draconian security law; and reproached for its intimidation and continuous threats to Taiwan to recover the island’s sovereignty. The discomfort arising from all this, or from the resistance to its behavior in international organizations, not only affects its international image. Beijing is also convinced that the current order implies the exclusion of China. And, therefore, it sees its development threatened.
This situation leads Chinese leaders to assume that, if the current rules and principles that delineate the liberal international order remain, it will be very difficult for them to consolidate their ambition to become the top world power. Renowned academics, such as Yan Xuetong, professor at Tsinghua University, have argued that Beijing needs to create a global ideological environment favorable to its rise. Putin’s Russia, which is interested in promoting a new world, also joins in this effort.
This explains Moscow’s insistence on moving towards the so-called de-dollarization of the world economy; the outcome is uncertain but logical from its perspective, since it would help to reduce the scope of US economic sanctions and break out of its isolation. Moscow and Beijing are partners in this anti-Western crusade, hence at the recent summit their intention to strengthen and expand the BRICS with a number of new illiberal partners was perfectly clear.
We just need to look at the list of the new members. On the one hand, the full members, with the right to speak and vote: Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, all of them questionable in terms of human rights and respect for the rule of law. And, on the other, the “partner countries”, similar to the observer category in other alliances, to which the BRICS have issued invitations: Algeria, Belarus, Cuba, Turkey, Nigeria, Bolivia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Uganda. The plan is that these 13 countries can join as full members in the near future.
As if that were not enough, the BRICS also opened a space for international recognition of Nicolás Maduro, who was invited to the Kazan meeting despite the almost unanimous international condemnation for not having shown irrefutable proof of his alleged victory in the last presidential elections. Maduro is accused of carrying out a fierce repression against his political opponents and has been internationally denounced for possible crimes against humanity. Although Brazil vetoed Venezuela’s entry as a partner country, none of the above was an obstacle for the BRICS to provide the Maduro regime with a source of legitimacy to advance its domestic anti-democratic agenda.
In any case, the democratic pedigree of the 22 emerging countries that are formally members of the alliance now, or could become members in the future, is reflected in The Economist’s Democracy Index 2023. According to it, six countries (Brazil, India, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia) are “flawed democracies”, and another four (Turkey, Bolivia, Uganda and Nigeria) are “hybrid regimes”, combining democratic and authoritarian characteristics. The other 12, i.e. more than half, are considered “authoritarian regimes”.
It seems clear, therefore, that the BRICS annual meeting confirmed that this alliance is no longer just a group of emerging economies whose purpose was to have a greater say in global economic governance. Now, driven by Beijing’s economic power and Russia’s expansionism, it is trying to use the BRICS platform to add mostly authoritarian allies and thus consolidate an international alliance against the most industrialized and democratic countries in the world.
Because of its internal divergences, the BRICS alliance won’t find it easy to become a global geopolitical actor, but for the moment it seems to be awakening from the irrelevance of the past. Therefore, in the midst of this offensive, the democratic bloc must make itself more attractive, including through reforms in global governance, in order to include in it some of the future members that the BRICS will try to seduce.
Failure to do so will only strengthen the revisionist tendency shown at the Kazan summit, leading many countries considered peripheral to face the dilemma of choosing between a liberal democratic system, the attractiveness of which is not always obvious, and an international order based on authoritarianism.
