Did The Latest BRICS Summit Achieve Anything Of Tangible Significance At All?
The Alt-Media Community went overboard hyping up BRICS and the latest Kazan Summit.
Over a week has passed since the latest BRICS Summit in Kazan so it’s possible to assess what exactly it achieved now that the dust has settled. The primary takeaway is the Kazan Declaration, which Director General of the prestigious Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) Andrey Kortunov described as “a manifesto for the new world order”. His praise shouldn’t be taken lightly since he’s an archetypical realist who also earlier tempered expectations about what BRICS was capable of agreeing to.
Titled “What BRICS Cannot and What It Can Deliver”, Kortunov explained that: “BRICS cannot become a global economic integration project”; BRICS will not turn into a multilateral political or security alliance of an anti-Western nature”; BRICS is not likely to contribute a lot to resolving disputes between its members or disputes between its members and third parties”; and “BRICS will never become an analogue to G7.”
He then juxtaposed these assessments with his expectations that “BRICS can promote trade and investments among its members, as well as contribute to economic and social development of these members”; “BRICS could help to shape common non-Western approaches to global problems”; “BRICS is capable of contributing to the dialogue of civilizations”; and “BRICS can become an important source of ideas and proposals for UN, G20 and other universal bodies.”
This background places his description from the introduction into context, which will now be elaborated on. According to Kortunov, “For the first time in BRICS’ history, the Declaration sets out in detail the group’s shared vision of the current state of the international system, the common or overlapping approaches to the fundamental global problems of our time and to acute regional crises, and the contours of a desirable and achievable world order as the members of the group currently see it.”
He then immediately added that “While the document does not provide specific timetables for individual tasks or roadmaps for specific areas of work, it does cover a number of key objectives that the group should or could pursue over the next few years.” In his assessment, “there is a clear balance between the security and development agendas”, which he considers to be a deliberate choice “to maintain its very broad mandate” instead of focusing on purely economic and financial affairs.
He thus surmised that “BRICS intends to position itself as a multitasking laboratory of global governance, where new algorithms of multilateral cooperation and innovative models for solving the world’s major economic and political problems can be tested, including trade, finance and strategic stability.” To that end, BRICS is balancing between reforming the Western-centric world order and creating alternative institutions, and it’s the latter which excites the group’s enthusiasts the most.
Before proceeding, however, it’s important to clarify a few matters. Putin declared prior to the summit that a common BRICS currency isn’t currently being considered and then he said during the event that Russia isn’t fighting against the dollar. Kremlin spokesman Peskov later added that BRICS as a whole isn’t trying to defeat the dollar either and that their financial messaging service won’t be an alternative to SWIFT. These policy reminders bring the analysis around to discussing the group’s three main initiatives.
Sputnik published a handy guide here about BRICS Bridge, BRICS Clear, and BRICS Pay, which are correspondingly a financial messaging service, an independent blockchain-based depository system, and a cashless payment service. As was earlier written, they don’t aim to replace their Western antecedents but simply to create alternatives for others to use in order to hedge against the risk of the West one day weaponizing these existing platforms against them like they did against Russia from 2022 onward.
None of them have yet to be rolled out, but progress was made on their creation and eventual implementation during the summit. The same goes for Russia’s proposals to set up grain and precious metals exchanges, which could in theory help form the foundatio