Around 20,000 delegates from over 30 countries, including senior officials and heads of state, attended the three-day international forum in Kazan. The West cannot control this bloc, and that is hard for Western leaders to accept.

The leaders of Russia, India, China, South Africa, the UAE, and Egypt, as well as the UN secretary-general, gathered in the Russian city of Kazan for the 16th annual BRICS Summit. The event, which has also welcomed a host of potential BRICS partner countries, has been widely seen as a snub to the West and a signal that Russia has not been isolated by Ukraine-related sanctions.

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Of all the efforts and initiatives that are rightly seen as driving the new world order, BRICS, the now nine-nation bloc – originally formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China – is arguably the most important. From the outset, it included states that had the potential to embody, in theory and in practice, fundamental changes in the balance of power. Therefore, the BRICS were not inherently inapplicable to the criteria of effectiveness developed by Western political science to assess the success of international organizations.

The creation of such an association was in itself a major achievement.

Firstly, because it included countries with very different foreign policy interests. That is, their desire to act together was underpinned by sufficiently reliable objective circumstances to make cooperation between such different powers meaningful.

Secondly, because the emergence of BRICS signaled from the outset the West’s inability to control the evolution of international governance. The last major achievement of the US and Europe in this area was the creation of the G20 in 2009, a group of countries chosen by the West to share responsibility with Washington for the damage caused to the global economy by the US financial crisis of 2008. But as none of the other G20 countries wanted to do so, the impact of the group’s activities was rather insignificant. At the same time, even though the G20 has almost completely lost its relevance, it is still used by large developing countries as a way to increase their international presence.

In the case of BRICS, for the first time, Western countries did not initiate or lead the process.

Full story at: RT International

Header image by Islamic Republic News Agency, cropped and slightly enhanced by me.