Brics officially adds 13 new countries to the union as partner countries (not yet full members). Four of these are from Asean –   Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. These form 31% of partner countries.

African countries and the Caucasus come in second at 23% each with Algeria, Nigeria, and Uganda as partner countries from Africa and Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan from the Caucasus (Central Asia).

Bolivia, and Cuba are two South American (Latin America) partner countries (15%).

While the biggest surprise is Turkiye coming from the North Atlantic alliance, Nato.

Let’s briefly analyse what this means.

As chair (presidency) of the current 16^th Brics Summit, Russia is hosting the first summit since Brics expanded to nine members in January, with the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia joining Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in the organization.

More than 30 nations ranging from Thailand to Algeria and Nato-member Turkey has expressed interest in joining Brics, though existing members are split over the wisdom of further expansion for now.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has said the newly expanded Brics group showed that a “multipolar world” is being created, in a challenge to the US-dominated global order.

Brics “meets the aspirations of the main part of the international community, the so-called world majority,” Putin said Wednesday at the formal opening of the leaders’ summit in Russia’s Kazan.

It’s “especially in demand in the current conditions, when truly dramatic changes are taking place in the world, and the process of forming a multipolar world is underway.” 

“It would be wrong to ignore the unprecedented interest of the countries of the Global South and East in strengthening contacts with Brics,” Putin told his fellow leaders. At the same time, it is necessary to maintain a balance.”

This balance takes the form of creating a special category of membership called partner countries, as a first step to become a full fledged members.  

This shows how careful Putin and leaders of the original Brics five member countries are in preventing an enlargement that is hardly compatible with full-fledged institutionalisation because it would be too complicated.

Just look at how Türkiye and Serbia have to wait for donkey years to be a member of EU when a newcomer applicant Ukraine which is the darling of the west and despite being well known as a country with rampant corruption seemed to have been given a priority in the accession process.

Putin has said many times last year that the new global engine of economic growth and development are in Africa and the Caucasus.

This year he talks about an emergence of multipolar models of development that are triggering a new wave of global growth for the entirety of the 21st century.

The global economic growth in the 21st century will be concentrated in Brics countries and in those states that want to join Brics, not in Europe or North America which are gradually losing their positions in the global economy.

The leaders in terms of economic growth rates, he stressed, will be the states of the so-called Global South, where the GDP per capita is still low, the urbanization rate is quite low and the birth rate is high.

These are primarily the countries of South and Southeast Asia, as well as Africa.

He matched words with deeds when the biggest group to be accepted as partner countries all came from Southeast Asia (31% of partner countries) followed by Africa and the Caucasus and finally the South Americans.

Putin emphatically rejected the notion of a single Brics currency as the reserve currency of the world, as the time for it has not come yet, and by drawing attention to the initial difficult experience of the European in creating a single currency, the Euro, where due to the imbalance in the economies of member countries, economic crises like Brexit and Grexit occurred.

This is precisely what he meant when he said “it is necessary to maintain a balance” in the expansion of Brics’ membership, and hence, a partner countries membership is created