BRICS Keeps Adding Members. What the Expanding Club Can — and Cannot — Do
What began in 2009 as a summit of Brazil, Russia, India and China — South Africa joined a year later — has become the organizing club of the non-Western world. Expansion rounds from 2024 onward brought in major Middle Eastern, African and Asian economies, and a queue of partner states waits behind them.
The bloc's weight is real on paper: a substantial share of the world's population, energy production and, measured at purchasing-power parity, economic output. Its institutions are thinner. The New Development Bank lends, but at a fraction of World Bank scale; talk of common currencies remains talk; and summit declarations are consensus documents among members with divergent — sometimes conflicting — interests.
India and China share a bloc and a disputed border. Energy exporters and importers sit at the same table. That diversity is BRICS' recruiting strength and its operational ceiling: it can coordinate positions and build parallel plumbing — payment links, development finance, commodity trade in local currencies — but it does not act as one.
The sharper way to read expansion is as an option, not an alliance: members keep Western ties while acquiring alternatives, and the alternatives gain credibility with each new flag at the summit.
For the multilateral order, the message is less 'replacement' than 'competition'. The institutions of 1945 now have rivals for the same customers — and rivalry, historically, is what forces incumbents to reform.
