By Yunus Soner, Kazan, Russia
Within the country, the city of Kazan is a symbol of East meeting the West: It harbors both churches and mosques and is located on the edge of Europe to Asia.
But the coming days, the Russian city will be a symbol of the South, as it will host a summit that is considered a gathering of the Global South: The BRICS Presidential Summit. The representatives of nine member countries of the Alliance will come together from 22nd to 24th of October, joined by politicians from up to 30 countries who are aspiring the alliance as well.
In a world of transition, from the unipolar system to a multipolar order, BRICS is considered one of the main actors of change. Its summit agenda is accordingly full.
Since the beginning of the year, the Russian Federation has the chairmanship of the alliance and has proposed a number of changes that would affect not only the members of BRICS, but also the global order itself.
In terms of political and security issues, Russia dealt above all with integrating the new members into the alliance – Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The membership of Saudi Arabia is still pending approval by Riyadh. In addition to that, the integration with new partners that are waiting at the doorstep to join the alliance, was another hot topic for Moscow. It’s worth mentioning that up to 30 countries declared their intention or interest to join the alliance, among them countries such as Pakistan, Türkiye, Thailand, Malaysia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria and Kenya.
In parallel to the enlargement of BRICS, promoting the institutional developments of the Alliance was an important task. BRICS still lacks a tight structure, a general secretariat, and clear rules of accession as well as decision-making inside the alliance.
In terms of economy, the Russian Chairmanship follows the task to enhance the role of the Alliance in the International Monetary and financial system, develop interbank cooperation, enable better coordination in international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank.
An important subcategory of Economic Cooperation is a new initiative to promote cross-border payments without using the US dollar. New ideas include proposals such as a new messaging system and a new network of national commercial banks connected to each other via blockchain and digital tokens. This would promote a direct exchange between countries, especially when these were denied access to the financial to the Western financial system.
Also, often described as the process of de-dollarization, this includes also the cross-border trade of national securities as well as the establishment of BRICS reassurance company to allow interrupted shipment when Western insurance companies refused to do so.
Proposals also included contingent reserve arrangements to enable countries to rely on when facing a financial crisis as an alternative to the IMF. And lastly, the Russian presidency also promoted the idea of establishing the BRICS grain exchange that is a trading platform for grain and other major commodities as an alternative to Western bourses where these commodities are usually traded.
In addition to the political, economic and economic sphere, BRICS also promotes the humanitarian and cultural integration between its members and aligned countries. Here the inter-parliamentary cooperation, scientific cooperation as well as reading the coordination between the regions and cities stands out among the priorities of the Russian Federation’s chairmanship.
In fact, global media shows interest when presidents attend, and this is now. But the current is just the peak of a number of meetings that were held within the BRICS during the year.
Framework that included summits among foreign ministers, ministers of education, agriculture, sports, transports, the meeting of the counterterrorism group, the gathering of the network university conferences of the BRICS youth, disaster management as well as customs reunions. It is worth mentioning that BRICS is already a far more detailed alliance than it might seem when only reduced to the presidential summits.
Several topics will call attention during the summit. Firstly, the attempts of the dollarization and their concretization will be a matter of interest. The integration of the recently included new members, as well as the positioning towards new applications, will be of great interest worldwide.
In parallel to that, the structural reform of the Alliance will call attention. These points together will indicate in how far the BRICS alliance establishes itself as a pole in the global international system.
Meanwhile, the participants will also have to deal with current conflicts, starting with the war in Ukraine not too far away from the city of Kazan, as well as the conflicts around Palestine. Here it is noteworthy that the Palestinian ambassador to Russia had already in the summer indicated in an interview that his country would consider joining the BRICS alliance.
Right now, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is visiting Moscow, coming together with the Russian President Vladimir Putin and is expected to attend the BRICS summit in Kazan after that. Palestine joining BRICS, both symbolically and important step, showing ever greater weight of the alliances in global politics.
From the Russian perspective, the summit is also important as it is the biggest international event since the start of the war in Ukraine, being for Moscow a good opportunity to show that, despite Western attempts, it’s far away from being diplomatically isolated. Quite the opposite. With its chairmanship, Russia has taken the lead during the past year in the most important Alliance of the Global South, that might even culminate in the participation of the UN Secretary General Gutierrez, who had not been travelling to Russia since 2022.
The BRICS alliance itself shows a membership of great variety, covering not only different continents and cultures, but also including members that among themselves have had historical conflicts, such as India and China. Thus, BRICS will again be on tests on how far it can find compromises within its members and advance their joint agenda of a global transition to a less Western dominated and more multipolar world in terms of economy, political, political representation and cultural framing.
In how far the BRICS members can succeed in their ambitions remains to be seen. But one cannot but approve the evaluation made by Russia’s Federation Council’s Speaker Valentina Matviyenko: She said that the BRICS summit, and not the US elections, will determine the course of history. How fast it advances will be on display in the coming three days in Kazan, Russia.