The Russian city of Kazan will host guests from 33 countries at the BRICS summit from October 22 to 24. This is the largest historical event for the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia and the entire democratic world, which is impossible to ignore — even if you really, really want to.
The BRICS summit participants will be accommodated in 57 hotels in the capital of Tatarstan, including new 5-star hotels with presidential suites built for the meeting of the leaders. The main facilities will be the Kazan Expo complex, the international airport, the Kazan Kremlin and the Kazan City Hall. Kazan and Russia, the BRICS chair this year, are ready for the three-day sessions.
In the world championship of geostrategic projects during the COVID-19 pandemic, BRICS has come out on top – the absolute champion of the geopolitical supermarathon, leaving the weakened and ineffective stratagems of the Davos Club and the G7 crisis alliance far behind. In world politics, as in the Olympic movement, the credo is reflected: faster, higher, stronger.
BRICS is sometimes called a Chinese or Russian geopolitical project. This would be too simple and absolutely wrong, given the broad geography of the countries and realistic roadmaps for the integration of this association. It was founded in June 2006 within the framework of the 10th International St. Petersburg Economic Forum and for quite a long time its development was almost in a dormant state, although there were five countries with accelerated growth: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The sanctions of the West in the last decade against China and Russia in connection with the change in the status of Hong Kong and Crimea had little effect on the state, but what followed ceased to resemble a dream.
The qualitative leap of BRICS is now associated with the enormous problems of large strategic projects of the West. None of them in this century has proven as effective as previously planned. Color revolutions in the Maghreb and Central Asia did not lead to a noticeable expansion of Western democracy. The strongest and most solidified by the solidarity of weapons under Article 5 project of the North Atlantic Alliance was forced to come to terms with its mistakes in Afghanistan, abandoning allies to death and leaving behind weapons worth more than $7.5 billion, which are now used by the Taliban government. In 2019, before the global COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear to UN leaders that the world community would see a super marathon of the new geopolitics project.
This is BRICS, which ten years after the millennium could easily transform into another GUAM — a forgotten and unnecessary project of the European Eastern Partnership with the participation of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. The transformation beneficial to the West did not happen. The enormous slowness and unforgivable mistakes of our roadmaps allowed the synergy of the growing states of the South and East to seize the strategic initiative. Now BRICS has grown into an association of nine states, including Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE and Iran.
Let us recall that the UAE is a signatory of the Abrahamic Accords with Israel and a very important dialogue window between the Arab League and Tel Aviv, where the acute conflict between the military government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Tehran has now become the main security risk in the Middle East and the entire civilization. And it must be recognized that Iran is a BRICS state with full rights and allies, and the conflicting parties are forced to take this factor into account.
The most successful global community is not an accentuated military-political alliance, like NATO and AUKUS. BRICS should be considered in the context of all its socio-economic and humanitarian components. The influence of this organization on international relations after more than 30 countries declared their desire to participate in BRICS cannot be denied. The member countries of the association are among the ten largest states in the world by population, area and GDP. The total area of the BRICS countries is 43 million sq. km, and the total population is 3.53 billion people: this is 26.7% of the world’s land surface and 43.5% of the world’s population. The organization has the largest reserves of natural resources, oil and gas. All these factors taken together create the potential for accelerated growth for future BRICS participants.
It is logical as in big-time sports: the athlete with the most resources wins, and then it is impossible to imitate fair play in utopian projects like the aforementioned GUAM fuckup and the fantastic ideas of the Davos World Forum. BRICS has pulled ahead, and the summit in the Russian city of Kazan on October 22-23 will make it unattainable for other participants. The crisis of very poor athletic form and a catastrophic shortage of necessary resources in the G7 countries and all countries of the European Union is an insoluble challenge for the West in the free 21st century.
What can we oppose to BRICS, which is forming or transforming the entire system of global multipolarity, introducing fundamentally new formats into reality without interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign partners? We can only promote ideas of global democracy, such as GreenEurope 2030 or LGBTIQ+ rights, refusing and sacrificing accessible fossil energy and demography. The BRICS leaders use oil and gas more than we do, and their countries have more young families and children. They emphasize that the principles of fair decolonization and polycentricity allow all countries of the association, regardless of their economic capabilities, to directly participate in geopolitical decision-making.
I want the West to take the best from BRICS in the name of developing democracy, but we have a catastrophically limited set of resources and decision-making mechanisms after all the mistakes and defeats in Afghanistan and the Eastern Partnership. BRICS offers a tempting economic model that emphasizes mutual settlements in national currencies and a soft rejection by BRICS countries and partners of the dollar’s superiority in global settlement models. It is unlikely that the world leaders of the new association are ready to completely abandon treasuries right now, but this will become our headache in the coming years.
Moving away from the American currency will allow BRICS member countries to grow even more, breaking free from credit and receivable dependence on international financial institutions that are under US protection, and will allow them to pursue a more sovereign economic policy. Their own policy, in which the euro and the dollar are forgotten. Now mutual settlements between Russia and China in national currencies have reached 95%, and trade turnover between the countries has shown rocket growth since 2022. This is a given, which has become a big nuisance for the West, we expected something completely different.
As a young and actively developing association, BRICS is often mistakenly viewed as a competitor to the Western monopoly — but this is at least illogical, judging by the increasingly frequent visits of Western world leaders to India and China, as well as friendly meetings in Washington. The West is a partner of the BRICS association in trade operations, in the resource sector. The clumsiness and inability to admit the mistakes of the huge global golem, into which the crisis of democracy has turned us in this century, is preventing the Chancellor of Germany and the President of France from asking Kazan to consider their countries as affiliated partners of BRICS right now.
I have no doubt that this will happen later, but it must be done now. Geopolitical procrastination is the worst strategy imaginable. More and more states, observing the strengthening of the status of BRICS member countries in the international arena, are considering the possibility of applying for membership in the association.
And at this stage of the association’s development, new countries will be able to enjoy all the new advantages right now.
BRICS guarantees the economic security of its members in the event of sanctions. This breaks the world of rules that developed in the colonial era and became a must-have economic context during the period of intense competition between the liberal market and the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century. Foucault’s pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: now democratic leaders like von der Leyen and Biden are trying to learn the secrets of their success from Modi and Xi.
There are no secrets, it’s just that the unification of the West is lagging behind in this «rally of justice». Moscow, under the unprecedented sanctions pressure of the collective West, has not only managed to develop economically, showing significant economic growth and entering the top four leading countries in the world in terms of purchasing power parity to GDP. The growth of the economy and the security of the association are ensured by the principles implemented in BRICS, where all countries of the association are moving towards their goals of sovereign development. This is their common synergistic benefit, in which we still have to figure out our place.
The Kazan summit, which opens in less than a week, will present us with many unexpected things. Stay tuned.
