Africa-Press – Ghana. Representatives from 35 countries and six international organizations participated on Thursday in the latest BRICS summit, which took place from October 22 to 24 in Russia, and discussed criteria for the association of other countries with the bloc as partners, a different modality from that exercised by full members.
This was the first summit of the so-called BRICS+, with Ethiopia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iran – in addition to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
During the three-day meeting, BRICS decided to include 13 countries to participate in the organization as associate members, namely Cuba, Bolivia, Turkey, Nigeria, Indonesia, Algeria, Belarus, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Vietnam and Uganda. The bloc currently has Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa as full members, in addition to the recently incorporated Iran, United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Egypt. although they have not yet been officially announced.
When questioned this Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that it is still necessary to confirm whether these governments remain interested in joining the bloc.
“We will send an invitation and a proposal to future partner countries to participate in our work in this capacity [as associate partners], and upon receiving a positive response, we will announce who is on the list. It would be simply inappropriate to do this now, before we receive a response, although practically all these countries have made requests at one time or another,” Putin said at a press conference.
The end of Western hegemony and the World Order based on the rules defined by the United States in the post-World War II period is one of the objectives of the BRICS.
And the first step, when almost all Western media talk about the creation of an alternative currency to the dollar and the euro, could well be something very different, such as clearing the road of internal obstacles, immediately highlighting the bilateral relations of some of the members.
If Iran and Saudi Arabia, before joining the BRICS, cast off their diplomatic ties to end decades of silence, fears and suspicions, resuming bilateral relations with Russian and Chinese mediation, it was already on board that China and India untied the tight knot over their common borders in the Himalayas.
This has just been consolidated with a meeting in Kazan between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has just been announced, after Beijing and New Delhi reached an agreement in principle on the flaming dispute, which had kept the world on the edge of anticipation of a war between the two Asian giants, on the Himalayan border.
With the house in order, even though some points of contention remain, such as between Egypt and Ethiopia, although there are already signs that a peaceful push could also take place in Kazan regarding the dispute over the waters of the Blue Nile River that will be dammed by the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (see links below), the BRICS should announce relevant measures on the future of their internal functioning this Wednesday, the most important of the three days of this Summit.
The BRICS are considered an economic “tsunami” created in an unorthodox way at the beginning of this century, and “coined” by some financial analysts to designate economies experiencing rapid growth outside the Western or Westernized map.
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