Brics and the Bandung Effect

The 2024 Brics summit is now in the books. To better understand its significance, one should turn back the pages of history and reflect on the lessons of the past. The 1955 Bandung Conference stands out in this regard, not only because it provides the proper historical foundation for the modern-day Brics phenomenon, but also because the underlying principles of that gathering never went away.

From Oct. 22-24, leaders from 35 nations gathered in the Russian city of Kazan to participate in the 16th Brics summit. Following the 2023 meeting in Johannesburg, which saw Brics expand from its five core members (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to nine (adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates), expectations for the event were high. Geopolitical tensions placed even greater emphasis on the challenges that Brics posed to the deeply entrenched US-dominated rules-based international order, which has been the centerpiece of global economic and political dynamics since the end of World War II.

Maintaining Currency

In the digital age, where results are often judged on whether they manifest themselves in near-instantaneous fashion, some observers might have been disappointed in the Kazan summit for failing to meet expectations. This is very much the case for anyone who expected the birth of a new currency that would challenge the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. While the idea of such a currency was floated (indeed, a mock-up Brics banknote was presented in Kazan as a visual manifestation of the concept), Brics members were united in their belief that much work still needed to be done before a new monetary system would be ready. The takeaway, however, is not that Brics failed to issue a new currency, but that it unanimously agreed that there is a legitimate need for such a currency to offset the dominance of the dollar.

The mainstream Western media also placed an emphasis on the political implications of the failure of the collective West to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin — a reality that was driven home by the presence in Kazan of so many world leaders, including UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. As is the case with the new Brics currency, any effort to judge the summit based on whether it gave birth to an organization capable of mounting a direct challenge to the G7, EU, Nato or even the UN misses the point.

If the 2023 Brics summit was the courtship phase of the organization, then the 2024 event in Kazan represented its consummation. The gestation period for the union is unknown — it could be measured in years, even decades. The expanded vision of Brics that emerged from Kazan is not expected to compete in a modern-day version of Game of Thrones, jostling with the G7, EU, Nato or UN for a chance to claim the equivalent of the “iron throne.” Such a competition would be for the right to rule a world defined by the architecture and systems associated with the sustainment of neocolonialism. The Brics community has no desire to play that game — its vision is of how to lead the world in a post-neocolonial period.

Back to Bandung

In this, it is helpful to reflect on the Bandung Conference of 1955, where a gathering of 29 Asian and African nations set in motion geopolitical changes that hastened the end of the colonial era — a process that ended up taking more than 20 years to accomplish.

The Bandung Conference built on what was known as the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” an agreement between India and China in 1954 that was intended to serve as the foundation for solidarity between newly independent nations. As most of the participants had only recently emerged from the yoke of colonial rule, the core principles of the Bandung Conference — political self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in internal affairs and equality — resonated strongly.

Bandung laid the foundations for what became known as the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. The conference’s final communique promoted economic and cultural cooperation, the protection of human rights and an end to racial discrimination. By focusing on the potential for collaboration, the organizers of the Bandung Conference hoped to create a mechanism that would reduce the participants’ reliance on Europe and the US.

However, the Cold War era of superpower conflict meant that the policies that underpinned colonialism, including the outside domination of states’ economic, political, military and societal development, were never fully eradicated. Rather, they were replaced by a new system of neocolonial domination reflected by post-colonial arrangements such as France Afrique, the British Commonwealth and the US-dominated, rules-based international order. The vision of the Bandung Conference became muddied in the swirling waters of Cold War competition, and, as a result, many developing nations, rather than asserting their independence, fell into the trap of neocolonial relationships with the very nations they were trying to liberate themselves from.

Principled Approach

Just as the Bandung Conference was formed from the Five Principles agreement between India and China, the Brics summit in Kazan built off the joint statement issued by Russia and China on Feb. 4, 2022, on “International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” This 5,000-word document served as a declaration of independence from the neocolonial constraints imposed by the US-dominated order, and as the foundation for the expansion of Brics and the creation of new structures and mechanics of global interaction. It is the latter function that defines the progress at Kazan.

The Russian government conducted more than 200 events, many in the form of ministerial meetings, in the lead-up to the summit. These helped institutionalize the processes of consensus-driven multilateral interaction that serves as the guiding principle behind the Brics concept. The Bandung Conference produced a vision but lacked the corresponding structure to sustain it. The Kazan summit took a similar vision but built the institutional infrastructure necessary to allow it to be nurtured and grow going forward.

While the Bandung Conference fulfilled its goal of ushering out the age of colonialism, its shortcomings enabled the emergence of neocolonial mechanisms that continued to shackle the independence and potential of the Third World, now known as the Global South. The “spirit of Bandung,” however, is alive and well in the form of Brics. The success of the Kazan summit will be measured by the extent to which this spirit can be developed into a post-neocolonial reality that ushers in a new era of multilateralism. From this perspective, the Kazan summit gets a passing grade.

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