Two international summits opened yesterday, with leaders of the Commonwealth heading to Samoa, while Russia hosted the Brics – also including Brazil, India, China and South Africa – in Kazan. The decisions by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to skip the Commonwealth gathering in favour of the one in Russia says much about the shifting sands of global power dynamics, the eclipse of empire, and the emergence of new forums in which giant emerging economies are finding common cause.
In the name of inclusiveness the 56-country, 2.7 billion-people, Commonwealth is being rebranded the “Commonwealth of Nations”, the British now just one of equals, and will focus on social mobility, inclusion, economic development, good governance and environmental protection. But the legacy of its association with colonialism will not go away – reparations for slavery by colonial power Britain are pushing their way on to the agenda to the embarrassment of King Charles III., who faced protests on the issue as he passed through Australia.
The Brics group is a sometimes uncomfortable alliance of some major economies that has expanded this year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. It represents almost half the world’s population and more than 35 percent of global economic output, although China is responsible for the bulk of this.
Very much driven by Russia and China, the Brics aspires to be a global counterweight to western power, both economic and political, and – among other things – to upgrade their representation and influence in the multinational institutions like the UN and IMF.
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Russia will not have it all its own way – it might hope to get support for its Ukrainian war, but will have difficulty persuading India, Brazil and South Africa, the group’s major democracies, to take a more adversarial stance towards the US. To those countries, the Brics group is a way to strike a balance between Beijing and Washington in a world of shifting alliances.